It is 10:30 on a Tuesday morning sometime in November 2019, and I am standing in line on Eleventh Avenue between Nineteenth and Twentieth Street in New York City with hundreds of strangers waiting for a glimpse of infinity. It is overcast, windy and bitterly cold. I wonder why I am here, subjecting myself to overheard conversations about personal assistants, last night’s dinner in Tribeca, parties in Chelsea and the chattering teeth of my line-mates as they huddle together, trying to keep warm before the rain sets in. This, mere months before a year of pandemic, lockdown, social distancing…

It was more than a decade ago that I first experienced an installation by contemporary Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. At that time, I was a music student at the conservatory in Brisbane, Australia, wandering the halls of the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art when I happened upon a large, quiet room devoid of lines. The room itself, a Droste effect, contained within it a smaller, quieter room guarded by a friendly gallery attendant whose lips parted into a smile. It was here that I first experienced infinity and here that my admiration for Kusama’s work took hold.

I stepped inside the small room and onto a small platform surrounded by a moat of still water. This was Soul Under The Moon, a Kusama “Infinity Room” dating from 2002. Once the automatic door sealed shut behind me and my eyes adjusted, I was alone in a space filled with ultraviolet lights that illuminated brightly painted spheres that seemed to float effortlessly in the air around me. Immersed in the silence of a room covered with mirrors and with no defining borders, I could see into infinity in every direction—and myself, lonely in the center. I stood there for what seemed like the better part of a Terrence Malick film, the incandescent visual field encasing me, bringing me closer to the impossible, the infinite. Eventually, I stumbled out of the experience, the gallery attendant once again smiling as I walked alone into a world changed forever by Kusama.

Back to 2019: standing in line outside David Zwirner gallery in New York to see Every Day I Pray For Love, Kusama’s most recent NYC exhibition, I begin to wonder if all the people waiting as patiently as I am have had similar experiences with the artist’s work. Did John and Kevin, the couple in front of me discussing redecorating their downtown Manhattan apartment, meet after experiencing the hallucination Kusama calls a self-obliterating moment, joined together in the endlessness of time and space and thus reduced to nothingness? Was Karen, who works in marketing, brought here by her experience with depersonalization syndrome, looking for inspiration in an artist whose work is driven by it? Perhaps Caitlin, the mid-thirties banker standing behind me, read Kusama’s autobiography and found inspiration in the artist’s description of her life: “a dot: that is, one of a million particles.”

Infinity, it turns out, doesn’t last forever. After forty-five minutes in line, I am ushered into Dancing Lights That Flew Up To The Universe, built to hold multiple viewers in the room at once. I recall the gallery press release, which stated that the room “offers an immersive and poetic experience of endless space. The continuous mirroring of the flickering lights ultimately underscores Kusama’s determination throughout her art to convey an ‘eternal unlimited universe [and] the eternity of interrelationships.’” Standing with John, Kevin, and Karen, I don’t experience the poetry Zwirner promised. I felt the “eternity of interrelationships” more presently when I was alone, a solitary soul under the moon, all those years ago in Queensland. Now, I see images of John, Kevin, and Karen repeated in the boundless space around me. What do they see? From what I gather, they don’t see; or, rather, they aren’t looking. At the least their eyes are not staring at the mysterious horizon before them. Replicated in all directions is the glow of Karen’s face as she takes a photo of herself. John photographs Kevin; Kevin uses his phone to return the favor with just enough time before the door is swung open by the unsmiling gallery attendant, and we are expelled from the room, back into the drudgery of daily life. The next group is fixing their hair, straightening their clothes and preparing to face infinity.

The mirrors of Kusama’s infinity rooms evoke a seemingly endless, repetitive universe. A phone placed at the center of that universe projects that phone endlessly onto the only reprieve from the quotidian we are offered on a Tuesday morning. As I walk the remaining rooms of the exhibition, I can’t help but reflect on what had just happened. Forty-five minutes of waiting for a glimpse of infinity? Was this how the artwork was designed to be experienced? How was I supposed to experience that earth-shattering freedom and fear of the vast and immeasurable in under two minutes with three people I didn’t know? All a photo proves is that you, yes, you, were there, basking in Kusama’s work. (I may have even glimpsed someone taking a photo of the mirror above the basin in the bathroom, but I thought better than to mention that it was not one of Kusama’s.)

Cosmic Nature, the Kusama exhibition that opened this past weekend at the New York Botanical Gardens, will include Illusion Inside the Heart, the newly minted infinity room due to open its doors in late Spring. Will social distancing guidelines allow John, Kevin, and Karen to accompany me on my journey inside this mirrored cube that responds to natural light, or will this pandemic, which has drastically transformed how we engage our surroundings, actually work to bring me, and them, to that lonely and beautiful endlessness the room is meant to invoke?

I wonder what Kusama thinks. Does she care that viewers attending her exhibitions spend more time looking at their phones than at her artwork? She hasn’t said, not directly. She appears to favor generosity over complaint. In a video posted on the Zwirner gallery website, the ninety-year-old Kusama kindly says to those who would enter the spaces she creates, “please take a look at my work. If it can inspire a deep love of humanity and acknowledge the amazingness of who we are, I will be very happy.”