Even if you don’t recognise Yayoi Kusama’s name, there’s a chance that you’ll recognise the iconic work of the 87-year-old Japanese artist and writer. It’s a credit to her originality that her career can be conjured in just a few motifs – the infinite polka dots, the squat, slouching gourd, the furniture, shoes, and boat studded with stuffed canvas phalluses.
Despite her age, Kusama still works prolifically. She writes and creates art from nine till six every day, despite living voluntarily under psychiatric care in Tokyo, and she is just as eccentric as she was when she first achieved international acclaim.
And just as sincere, too. In footage supplied by Moderna Museet, Kusama discusses her work whilst sporting a graphic red bob-cut and matching lipstick. You’d think that her tendency to talk in hyperbole would become comic in its sincerity, but Kusama’s artistic credentials legitimise her. There’s nothing exclusive or high-faluting about her; as a matter of fact, her art is an invitation to the public to experience her lifelong relationship with psychiatric illness.
Kusama has explained that the dots that feature so frequently in her work are the very same that appear in the recurring hallucinations she has had since her childhood. Her art provides a way of translating these obsessional images into something material. By normalising her compulsive visions and anxieties through repetition, Kusama hopes to ‘depersonalise’ them. By stepping into her exhibition, you’re stepping into her mind.
Her obsession with the pattern is perhaps most explicit in her world-famous’Infinity Nets’. These are paintings which, from a distance, look rather underwhelming – it’s only when you get up close to these enormous canvasses that you’ll see that they’re actually lattices composed of numerous small, overlapping semicircles of paint.
Alongside the Nets, In Infinity also features some of Kusama’s full-scale installations, ‘Infinity Mirror Rooms’. These dimension-distorting rooms are a real crowd-pleaser, and you’ve probably seen a fair few videos of them cropping up on social media. Through the artful use of mirrors and LEDs, Kusama expands a modest-sized room into one of endless horizons.
A retrospective exhibition wouldn’t do Kusama justice by presenting her merely as a creator of spectacle. In Infinity takes a look at how Kusama began to align herself and her art with counter-cultural movements of the 60s, orchestrating anti-Vietnam war demonstrations and protesting capitalist greed. Assuming the persona of the High Priestess of Polka Dots, Kusama transferred her attentions from ‘self-obliteration’ with dots to a more inclusive mode of artistic expression. Dressed in polka dot outfits, she conducted performance art through the streets of New York. In Infinity features footage of her daubing polka dots onto nude participants with a grim sense of duty.
Alongside such a diverse display of Kusama’s work, the exhibition features material never seen before. When curator Marie Laurberg visited Kusama’s studio in Tokyo, she found a sealed package containing early work that Kusama had taken with her when leaving Japan for New York in the 1950s, before returning two decades later. These unearthed works allow visitors a chance to see early versions of ideas that are developed in Kusama’s later, more renowned works. The exhibition is also the first to comprehensively explore Kusama’s interest and involvement in fashion and design, which tended to be neglected by galleries in the past.
On display at Moderna Museet and ArkDes until Sept 11.
Words: Daisy Fernandez
