dotty for dots
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I started last week’s newsletter discussing the passing of Dolly Parton, and immediately the news arrived of other luminaries moving on to the next great adventure, including actor Tim Curry, who was known and beloved for playing an array of irascible roles on the stage and screen.
Then to discover that iconic artist Yayoi Kusama had merged with mystery at the age of 97.
Kusama’s best known for her devotion to polka dots, pumpkins and mirrored infinity rooms, which seems all very cool and in tune with our modern interconnected multi-media sensibilities, but Kusama fought long and hard to create and develop work that eventually earned her recognition as an important international artist.
She noted in the 2023 book, Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now: “I’ve been absorbed in building myself for a long time. I believe that I was born an artist.”
She arrived in the world on the 22nd March 1929 to conservative, well-to-do Japanese parents, who expected her to marry and conduct herself as a traditional wife and mother. Kusama burned with an early desire to create art, partly due to her unique perception which resulted in transgressive hallucinatory images.
Drawing gave her a way to transform and contain the visions, but her mother actively opposed Kusama’s passion for art. Kusama did not give up. After the end of World War II she managed to leave home to study the Nihon-ga style of painting in Kyoto, but she became disillusioned with the restrictive techniques, and began experimenting with abstract works. She produced hundreds of pieces using ink, pastel, gouache and watercolour.
By 1955 Kusama was achieving some success with exhibitions in Tokyo, and had struck up a correspondence with the famous American artist, Georgia O’Keeffe, who was greatly encouraging.
Kusama knew that if she wanted to develop further she needed an environment more receptive to her ambition:
Staying in Japan was out of the question. My parents, the house, the land, the shackles, the conventions, the prejudice….For art like mine—art that does battle at the boundary between life and death, questioning what we are and what it means to live and die—this country was too small, too servile, too feudalistic, and too scornful of women. My art needed a more unlimited freedom, and a wider world.
She arrived in Seattle in November 1957, and moved to New York in 1958 at a pivotal moment of art experimentation. She was galvanised by the new opportunities of the era, but she also ran out of money and lived in very poor conditions, working constantly and obsessively to damp down her ever-present hunger. By October 1959 she debuted her huge Infinity Net paintings, which were monochromatic canvases of repetitive shapes.
My nets grew beyond myself and beyond the canvases I was covering with them. They began to cover the walls, the ceiling, and finally the whole universe. I was always standing at the center of the obsession, over the passionate accretion and repetition inside of me. (Yayoi Kusama, 2000).
By 1965/66 she was creating mind-blowing three-dimensional art spaces using multi-coloured lights and mirrors to offer the participant a sense of infinite reflected images. She also became involved in counterculture art protests against the Vietnam War that involved naked performers. Her political activism brought approbation from all sides, and she returned to Japan in 1973, burned out and with few financial resources.
In 1977 she made the decision to move into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, and reside there voluntarily for the rest of her life — although she was given great latitude. She set up an art studio across the street and would work a normal day there before returning to the hospital in the evening.
She wrote a novel, Manhattan Suicide Addict, in 1978 as well as poetry, and continued innovating in ceramics, collages and prints. By I993 she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale with Mirror Room (Pumpkin) and her reputation began to rise on the international art scene.
Eventually the world fell in love with Kusama’s bold prints and large-scale installations, but she didn’t wait for its approval: she pursued her imagination carefully, consistently, and with curiosity.
This culminated with one of her 1959 Infinity Net pieces — Untitled (Nets) — selling at auction for $10 million in 2022. But ‘marker of success’ wasn’t her purpose.
Kusama had tended her creative bright light despite the obstacles, setback and even when its dazzling nature threatened to overwhelm her. She learned how to work with its permeable quality and conduct its essence onto canvases and conjure it into spaces. Thus creating portals (connecting dots) into the luminous nature of her personal imaginal realms.
Kasuma explained her passion for the polka dot in her autobiography Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama in 2013.
My desire was to predict and measure the infinity of the unbounded universe, from my own position in it, with dots — an accumulation of particles forming the negative spaces in the net. How deep was the mystery? Did infinite infinities exist beyond our universe? In exploring these questions I wanted to examine the single dot that was my own life. One polka dot: a single particle among billions.
'Beyond Art' by Yayoi Kusama Even before I was born, the shining art had been sending off sparks across the world. Why this whole body of mine symbolizes my living and why it represents everything about my body and mind. I want to ask myself these questions. Even after I have been led away beyond the universe by the body and mind born out of my body, I want to keep living, today, tomorrow, and the days to come, carrying pieces called art that were left inside my body. By going through death and life, and leaping across the universe and the earth just as I am doing today, I am determined to keep fighting ever more vigorously. To the best of my ability, and with all my might, I will keep fighting. With all my might From Everyday I Pray for Love
