Yayoi Kusama: Polka dots
Earlier this year, the Rain Room attracted a large audience to the Museum of Modern Art. With an unlimited time restraint on visiting guests, the line to enter lasted up to a six-hour wait. In comparison, guests to Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms, currently exhibited at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea, Manhattan until December 21st, are only given 40 seconds in each chamber. Whereas the Rain Room brought visitors into the center of an endless rainstorm, Kusama’s Infinity Rooms bring visitors into the center of an endless space.
Yayoi Kusama was born and raised in Nagano, Japan in 1929. She studied Nihonga, a strict Japanese-style of painting developed during the Meiji Period, at Kyoto Municipal School of Arts and Crafts. As a child, she decorated everything with polka dots and nets. Such motifs stuck with her throughout her whole career. And even now, her nets of polka dots, which she calls Infinity Nets, are still prevalent in her work. Kusama’s obsession with polka dots emerged from childhood hallucinations, a result of physical abuse from her mother. She saw the world veiled in dots. Once, during an interview, she described her inner life:
One day I was looking at the red flower patterns of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness. As I realized it was actually happening and not just in my imagination, I was frightened. I knew I had to run away lest I should be deprived of my life by the spell of the red flowers. I ran desperately up the stairs. The steps below me began to fall apart and I fell down the stairs straining my ankle.
Therefore art acted as a medicine for all her troubles from the polka dots. In her book Manhattan Suicide Addict, Kusama describes a polka dot as having “the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon, which is calm. Round, soft, colorful, senseless and unknowing. Polka dots become movement… Polka dots are a way to infinity.”
Kusama immigrated to New York in 1957 and worked alongside other avant-garde artists of the time, such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Joseph Cornell. Before her relocation, Kusama recreated her polka dotted universe through watercolors and paints on paper. But New York liberated her from the 2D. In the early 1960s, she started covering items, such as ladders, shoes, and chairs, with phallic protrusions as an expression of sexually and identity. Kusama posed in pictures with her works to be in the limelight as both an artist and an “eccentric personality.” Her most noticeable creations, besides her iconic polka dots, were her performance arts, which involved painting dots on naked performers, such as the Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead at the MOMA in 1969 and Homosexual Wedding at the Church of Self-obliteration in 1968.
The reason why we don’t study Kusama in art history like we might of Georgia O’Keeffe, or even other artists who worked at the same time as Kusama, is because she fell out of mainstream by returning to Japan in 1973. Due to poor health, Kusama voluntarily checked herself into Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Shinjuku, Tokyo. She’s been a permanent resident since 1977 and creates her art in a studio nearby. Since returning to Japan, Kusama has started writing novels, short stories, and poems.
In Kusama’s successful climb back into fame, her installations have attracted the most attention. Just last summer, her Fireflies on the Water exhibition was displayed at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In a dark room with mirrored walls, 150 lights were suspended over a pool of water creating an endless space. Immediately before her exhibition in New York though, Kusama had The Obliteration Room displayed in Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane where children visitors decorated a white room of white furniture with brightly colored polka dot stickers of various sizes. In the span of two weeks, the results were vibrant.
Kusama’s installations create infinite spaces through the repetition of polka dots, whether they are reflections of neon lights or colorful stickers. The purpose of overwhelming the physical world with what seems to be multiplying polka dots is to obliterate materiality. In Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York by Midori Yoshimoto, Kusama is quoted to saying, “Polka dots can’t stay alone, two and three and more polka dots become movement. Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos. When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots, we become part of the unity of our environment. I become part of the eternal, and we obliterate ourselves in Love.”
What was once a source of terror, almost like chronic insanity, to Kusama had now turned into inspiration. Art was initially a medicine to her troubles, and so she immersed herself in creation. Kusama had high output, and that speed added to her insanity. But her polka dots transformed from simply circles to a cosmic symbol, and Kusama believed that “by obliterating one’s identity, one could become one with eternity.”
Work Cited
Brooks, Katherine. “New Yorkers Flock To Yayoi Kusama’s New, Bespeckled ‘Infinity Rooms'” The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 18 Nov. 2013. Web. 20 Nov. 2013.
Brooks, Katherine. “Yayoi Kusama’s ‘Fireflies On The Water’ At The Whitney (PHOTO).” The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 07 June 2012. Web. 20 Nov. 2013.
Cotter, Holland. “Vivid Hallucinations From a Fragile Life.” New York Times. The New York Times Company, 12 July 2012. Web. 20 Nov. 2013.
Frank, Priscilla. “Yayoi Kusama’s ‘Infinite Obsession’ Heads To Brazil.” The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 21 Oct. 2013. Web. 20 Nov. 2013.
Pilling, David. “The World According to Yayoi Kusama.” Financial Times. THE FINANCIAL TIMES LTD, 20 Jan. 2012. Web. 20 Nov. 2013.
Swanson, Carl. “The Art of the Flame-Out.” NYMag.com. New York Media LLC, 8 July 2012. Web. 20 Nov. 2013.
