Review | Yayoi Kusama: ‘Look Now, See Forever’
Yayoi Kusama
Dots Obsession 2011
Vinyl balloons, dot sheets, paint, mirrors
Image: Exhibition catalogue
Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist whose paintings, sculptures, performances and installations have influenced generations of artists from minimalists in New York to contemporary practitioners the world over. Kusama was born in 1929, in Japan where she studied for one year before moving to New York in 1957/58 (reports differ). At the time New York was living in the shadow of Abstract Expressionism, a movement which had thrust the city to the centre of the art world. Kusama’s influence was to be profound as she defied definition, experimented and captivated everyone with her eccentric persona. In 1973 Kusama returned to Japan and her profiled waned in the US until retrospectives of her work brought her international attention, particularly the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993. During the exhibition she began selling the silver spheres which made up her installation Narcissus Garden for the equivalent of $2. Reuben Keehan, Curator, Contemporary Asian Art, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art suggests this was clearly a critique of the institutionalisation of contemporary art. This is just one example where her work defies the expectation of genre, audience and authority.
Kusama has been continually influenced by the hallucinations she had as a child in which she was surrounded by colourful dots, flowers and patterns. Kusama’s mental illness is not extensively written of, nor does it need to be. She has an obsessive compulsive disorder. In Japan she chose to live at the Seiwa Hospital in Tokyo. She continues to live there, painting everyday. Her art and her life are inseparable.
An exhibition of Kusama’s recent installation, and well as video and sculpture is on display at the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art. Her exhibition ‘Look Now, See Forever’ features samples from her diverse output, but is perhaps less indicative of her defiance of genre and authority than earlier exhibitions. This exhibition, however, is highly engaging and sure to excite return visits.
Yayoi Kusama
Flowers that Bloom at Midnight (2011)
Fibreglass-reinforced plastic, urethane paint, metal frame
Image: Exhibition catalogue
Walking into the first room the viewer is surrounded by round mirrors and orange and black walls. In the centre are giant metal pumpkin shaped objects with more mirrors and circular holes. These hark back to Mirror Room (Pumpkin) (1991) which Keehan notes was among Kusama’s contribution to the Venice Biennale in 1993. Reach Up to the Universe, Dotted Pumpkin (2011) sets the viewer in a playful state of mind. Photographs are taken, poses are struck and reflections marvelled at. Immediately following this reflective delight is a short video work of the artist speaking to the camera while patterns and textures change behind her. Mirrors again distort the scale of the work as the images stretch forever to the left and right. The content of Song of a Manhattan Suicide Addict is understandably less whimsical than the preceding installation, but its placement near the beginning of the exhibition prepares the viewer for what follows. After Kusama’s words we are ready to view her work in a different light, we cannot continue to note only whimsy and fun. I think this video is designed to remind the (older) viewer that the artist’s life and work as one, it is a sobering vision.
In this way Dots Obsession becomes more than a room filled with white dots on a red background. We understand that this recreates something like the artist’s hallucinations. Through installations like this the viewer comprehends her experience, and take from it the something fun or something serious. Children viewing Dots Obsession are not required to grasp the deeper implications of a world of dots to know its disorienting and overpowering affect. Colour and repetition are the primary factors here and the viewers response might vary depending on both. The red and white room wasn’t as over powering as I thought. I’ve seen pictures of Kusama’s yellow rooms with black dots and for some reason this combination is much more unnerving. Perhaps yellow has associations of illness as well as of sunshine and sunflowers. Red and white, as in the international symbol for emergency, also suggest illness and institutions. These dots also reference pop culture and fashion, it’s an accessible and appealing combination that we see often.
After ducking under an inflated oblong of red with white dots we move to another of Kusama’s obsessions, painting. The artist paints daily as a form of therapy, and to challenge herself. A selection of her output from 2009-10, drawn from an 18 month period is displayed in a tight line around the gallery wall. Kusama’s palette is restricted to bold flat colours and her motifs appear similarly simple at first glance. Red, blue, white black and yellow and occasionally pink, form the basis of the works in this exhibition. There are 14 in total. An eye motif is repeated, an overwhelming number of them pushing at the viewer from the crowded wall. Repetition and bright colours again produce an optical force which is at times disorienting and overwhelming. The buzz of colour forces the viewer to appreciate the vast white space at the corresponding end of the room, which is blissfully empty of art as though expecting our optical refuge.
Yayoi Kusama
Transmigration 2011
Synthetic polymer paint on canvas
Image: Exhibition catalogue
Kusama’s similarities with Op Art have been noted and this is no where clearer than in Transmigration. This painting again oscillates in an overwhelming fashion, the eye has no where to go on the four panels of green and magenta. The inclusion of a work such as this references Kusama’s very early paintings, known as Infinity Net paintings which were produced in response to her flight to the US. Kusama attempted to replicate the pattern of the water that she saw from her plane window. Tightly looped brush strokes construct patterns without subject matter, the colours and process of construction seeming to be the artist’s only concern. Op Art shares these similarities but it isn’t the only movement to do so. Kusama’s Infinity Net Paintings were popular with emerging minimalist artists in 1960s New York. Donald Judd and Frank Stella purchased Infinity Net Paintings. These works, the catalogue notes, ‘anticipated the development of minimalism by six years’. Yet more proof of the ways Kusama defied and defined the art world of New York at this time.
From painting to sculpture and the exhibition next features large scale, brightly coloured flowers. They take up the centre of the large room and draw our eyes away from the paintings. The larger than human scale encourages viewers to walk around them, and prevents total view of some of their intricate stamens. The Flowers that Bloom at Midnight (2011) look lethal, and remind me ominously of John Wyndham’s 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids in which plants appear benign creatures but end up taking over the world with deadly tentacle limbs. Kusama’s flowers share this innocent yet deadly appearance. Their size and colour points to a cartoon origin, but I can’t help feeling some of their curving limbs have malicious intent.
Yayoi Kusama
Compulsion Furniture (Accumulations) c. 1964
Photocollage and paint
Image: Exhibition catalogue
The inclusion of these sculptures, while focusing on Kusama’s recent work, makes the absence of other works significant. In the 1960s Kusama experimented with new materials including textiles and found furniture. Another motif appears here, the soft sculpture phallus, in installations such as Compulsion Furniture (Accumulation) (c. 1964). In the catalogue essay Keehan describes the Accumulations as ‘sculptures consisted of pieces of found furniture covered in small, sewn protuberances. Formally, they suggested that the nets previously limited to the pictorial plane had finally exceeded the canvas and assumed three-dimensional form, covering every available surface.’ As noted in the video (posted on 1 January) these proved extremely popular with viewers and I’m sorry they didn’t appear in this exhibition. I felt that something soft and squishy would have complimented the many shiny, hard surfaces which made up ‘Look Now, See Forever’. The curator’s choice to avoid the soft and squishy was no doubt a conscious one determined by style and availability of artworks, as well as the artist’s wishes for the show.
Yayoi Kusama
The Obliteration Room 2011
Furniture, white paint, dot stickers
Image: Exhibition catalogue
The final piece of the exhibition is The Obliteration Room. I love a good participatory project, as I’ve mentioned before. Kusama does not disappoint and Obliteration Room takes GoMA’s penchant for the participatory to new levels. I think viewers might come to expect these engaging spectacles from all their contemporary art exhibitions. The Obliteration Room began as an entirely white interior, with white piano, chairs, tables and fruit. The gallery visitor is handed a sheet of stickers upon entry to the room and encouraged to stick them anywhere they like. When I walked through looking for somewhere to stick my colourful round dots, I was at a lot to find much white space left. I imagine in the coming weeks the white will disappear entirely. Viewers are definitely encouraged to return to this spectacular example of audience produced installation. The transformation can be viewed at the Huffington Post.
‘Look Now, See Forever’ is a disjointed experience punctuated with a dazzling diffusion of visual effects. Each installation remains separate from the others, self contained and alone, but this is not to say that movement and flow was lacking. A curiosity builds as you walk through this exhibition which is justly rewarded with the final participatory Obliteration Room. On reflection, each installation, painting and sculpture captures another aspect of Kusama’s diverse psychology and practice, revealing something of her amazing career and character.
‘Look Now, See Forever’ is on display 19 November 2011 - 11 March 2012 at the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art. An exhibition catalogue is available online here.
