Yayoi kusama paper

Annie Brinich & Aiden (Shuai) Wang Bennett Ideation & Prototyping Fall 2017 November 6, 2017 Yayoi Kusama’s Healing Process In a dark room, its walls completely constructed of mirrors and its interior dotted with glowing orbs, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama hopes to create an environment where the self is obliterated. The space is one of her Infinity Rooms, which one enters from an open doorway.

Inside, viewers examine perpetual reflections of purposefully placed lights, as well as reflections of themselves. Like most of Kusama’s work, this Infinity Room is arranged to conjure ideas about fear, unity, and absurdity. Kusama’s process for creating the tirelessly dotted canvases, the infinitely lit rooms, and the large, repetitive sculptures for which she is known relies heavily on her tendencies to hallucinate, to repeat herself, to immerse herself in her work, to expand upon her vision, and to fear.

Yayoi Kusama has experienced hallucinations since she was a young child. In her autobiography, ​Infinity Net​, Kusama mentions the first time she experienced her hallucinations, and her response to them. She describes sitting in a field full of violets only to suddenly hear them speaking to her. Walking along the path back home, she saw radiant bursts of light in her vision. “Whenever things like this happened,” Kusama writes, “I would hurry back home and draw what I had just seen in my sketchbook, churning out one sketch after another.” As a child, these hallucinations plagued Kusama. She learned to express her discomfort via art. Drawing

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served as a kind of therapy as well as early training in art-making. She found that the only effective method of banishing hallucinations was “to recreate them visually with paint, pen, or pencil in an attempt to decipher what they are” (Kusama 66). Kusama’s hallucinations aren’t just a part of her art-making process—her art began as the process of trying to transcribe and translate her hallucinations.

It is impossible to see what Kusama sees. But watching videos of Kusama, even in her middle and late age, it is clear from the way she pauses to react to her environment that she examines with fascination what others react to with total indifference (サイレントベイビー).

It’s possible that her hallucinations led her down the path of seeking connections and reflections between what most people regard as nonsense. Though she has tackled painting, sculpture, live exhibition and other media, Kusama’s work remains largely abstract. She does not try to replicate reality in her art. Instead, she seems to use the unreal world she saw as a child as inspiration for creating surreal environments and representations that all audiences can recognize as visually appealing, if absurd, landscapes.

Kusama’s childhood hallucinations would be extremely influential to her later work.

Though she destroyed many of her early hallucination-documenting paintings and drawings before moving to America at age 27, of those that she kept, some show early patterns of dots and reflections that she would become known for later in her career (Turner). So while much of Kusama’s well-known work is not a direct result of the transcription of her hallucinations, documenting the hallucinations from an early age not only allowed her to become practiced at

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drawing, but fleshed out some of the patterns that reappear in her work in the decades since her childhood.

Kusama’s process is also marked by her utter dedication to repeating herself. She works in her three-story studio, which is packed with her creations, from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM every day. She says that her daily routine is to “...head to the studio at a regular time every day, pick up brush and pen, and begin working.” When she feels a creative block coming on, she simply continues to paint (Rathe). It helps that she does not appear to use any real-life models for her subjects; many of the patterns she put on her canvases can simply be repeated until they fill as much space as possible.

In many of her interviews and photos from the past few decades, Kusama wears the same clothes. She always appears to be wearing makeup. Her hair has been the same bright red shade for years. Repetition is part of her personal routine, as well as her art-making process, although for Kusama, the personal and the professional are practically indistinguishable. Making art has been always been therapeutic for her, and the rigor and repetition with which she works and lives, though it appears obsessive, seems to help her sort through the neuroses that plague her (Fifield).

Most notable of her repetitive creations are her “infinity nets”, which she began painting when she arrived in New York in her 20s. For the nets, she filled enormous canvases with paintings of tiny circles, forming huge works of mesmerizing patterns. Over time, Kusama began to apply her repeating-circle patterns both literally and figuratively: the circles themselves grew to be larger polka-dot shapes. They began to cover not just canvases, but entire rooms, and even

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human subjects. They were applied to large, phallic sculptures, which in turn were used to cover couches, floors, and ceilings for installations. During her New York residency, these patterns and sculptures were painstakingly molded, sewn, and painted by Kusama herself (Kusama 39).

Kusama’s art-making process is also founded in immersion. In her daily routine at her studio, Kusama is surrounded by art she has made. While living in New York, Kusama mentions visiting art museums when she was feeling creatively drained, writing: “I would gaze on the works that have survived beyond their times, analyzing and evaluating them as if trying to solve mathematical puzzles, attempting to assess them in the context of the societies and times that have engineered them; then I would return to myself and, in trying to consider the next starting point for my own work, always find myself faced with the difficulty of reading my own future.” (Kusama 37) Kusama’s habit of immersing herself in her own artwork and in the artwork of others has parallels to her habits of hallucination and obsessive repetition. She describes her childhood hallucinations as periods where she would not be able to distinguish reality from unreality (Kusama 62), and her repetitive patterns make such surreal, disorienting landscapes possible. She has also created works while literally immersed in the substances that help make her art. A video from the 1960s shows her creating watercolor dot paintings while she is immersed to the torso in a pond, with some of the dots on her canvas floating away as she paints them (Yalkut).

Besides immersing herself in works of art, as well as immersing herself in the medium she uses to create art, part of Kusama’s process is immersing the art-viewer in the art. Kusama creates whole rooms that seem to engulf the people who engage with it. Because Kusama’s work

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surrounds, and in many cases, overwhelms its audience, its is by nature immersive. The practice of creating art that surrounds its audience began during her New York period, when she began experimenting with applying paint to the human form. In her “Happenings”, most of which occurred in the 1960s, Kusama would paint polka dots on naked volunteers, who would parade in locations with heavy pedestrian traffic, such as the Brooklyn Bridge or Manhattan’s Financial District (Kusama 110, 121). In theory, the polka dots on the naked body served to draw the viewer’s attention to the absurdity and harmlessness of human nudity and freed the dot-wearer of any self-consciousness, another tool for them to “obliterate” their sense of self.

In her later work, with her Obliteration and Infinity Rooms, Kusama found more subtle ways of immersing the viewer in environments that challenged their idea of themselves.

Nonetheless, seeking and constructing environments that temporarily immerse the viewer in a world that challenges or upsets them has been a notable part of Kusama’s art for several decades.

It has also been a notable part of her own process: Kusama has repeatedly put herself in uncomfortable environments in order to make her art more thought-provoking, as she did with her phallic sculptures, or more accessible, as she did with her move from Japan to America.

In leaving Japan and arriving in a country and an art scene that did not initially embrace her, Kusama cut ties with her family (Turner). Her immersion into the American art scene may be in part due to advice she was given before moving to America. In her twenties, Kusama wrote to American painter Georgia O’Keeffe, seeking advice for a young artist. Sources conflict on what O’Keeffe told Kusama—some articles report that Kusama felt encouraged by O’Keeffe’s letter to move to the States, and others mention that O’Keeffe warned Kusama away

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(Greenstreet, Turner). Whatever the circumstances, Kusama felt compelled to move to the place with the most active art scene of the time: New York City. It was there that she felt she could fully immerse herself in her art, and where she eventually did, gaining momentum and monetary success by the 1960s.

Interestingly, advice-seeking does not appear to be a notable part of Kusama’s process.

She mentions bucking trends and ignoring suggestions made by her friends while living in New York (Kusama 34). Before that, she went against her family’s wishes by pursuing a career in art, and angered her mother by moving to America (​Yayoi Kusama – Obsessed with Polka Dots​).

Painting, drawing and designing her art is a solitary act; it is not surprising that Kusama’s favorite collaborator is herself (Rathe). But at this stage in her career, she does rely on others to help her plan and set up large installations. She works with museum staff (サイレントベイ ビー.), directing the placement of her sculptures via scaled-down model, as she is no longer physically able to install her work. Though it could be dismissed as being controlling or standoffish, Kusama’s predilection to working alone may be another result of her tendency to immerse herself in her art and in her own world. Her art is a projection of her very particular mental space.

However, Kusama’s unwavering ambition cannot be ignored: it is an essential part of her process. The rigor with which Kusama works is matched only by her early desire to have her works displayed to as large an audience as possible. She describes carrying a large canvas to a gallery forty blocks away from her 1950s New York apartment, only to have it be immediately declined (Kusama 21). Despite her initial trouble finding shows that would support her, Kusama

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continued (and continues) to make art that fills entire canvases, and entire rooms, with shapes and patterns inspired from her hallucinations. Given her early efforts for artistic acclaim, it makes sense that the one thing Kusama does make time for during her daily 9-to-6 schedule is publicity: she does not unplug when she works, but answers calls and takes interviews at her Tokyo studio. In 2017, when asked what her dream project would be, Kusama replied: “for my work to transcend national borders, generations, and time, and to reach people's hearts around the world, and that my message of peace and love will be received.” (Rathe) Growth has been part of her process since Kusama arrived in New York: in fact, the move was in part made because she wanted to work on her artwork on a larger (both physically and audience-wide) scale (Greer). She has consistently sought out new ways to expand her practice in order to make it more inclusive, or at least more shareable. Her shocking nude Happenings were not only her art’s immersion into the “real world”—they also served to catch the attention of international news outfits, expanding her notoriety to Europe (Kusama 115).

Besides trying to get her art into as many spaces as possible, part of Kusama’s process is moving her art onto planes where it can spread and expand, as her work in water and her work on the human body demonstrate. Related to immersive art (in both inception and exhibition), Kusama creates work that repeats itself, sometimes infinitely, a process that often requires devotion to repeating a process tirelessly over a huge scale. This gives her work a kind of borderless, liquid quality. In paintings and installations, Kusama repeats patterns tirelessly, leaving no surfaces untouched.

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Kusama uses another method to ensure that her art can expand on itself and be shared with others: she uses almost comically simple, playful shapes and colors. Her artwork is marked from its very beginnings by its roundness, its brightness, and its silliness. Colorful polka dots are universally pleasing on the eye. Kusama purposefully chooses color schemes and patterns that aren’t abrasive. Though Kusama’s art is founded in things she fears and/or does not understand, she goes out of her way to turn her fears into environments when people seem to be encouraged to act playfully and more childlike. Her works are especially popular with people attempting to get selfies or pictures with friends amongst her forests of polka-dot phalluses and her mirrored Infinity Rooms. The popularity of making viral or shareable digital content seems to be affirming of this key part of Kusama’s process: she sets out to make work that crosses borders and disseminates into whatever environment it is placed.

There is a natural challenge in creating artwork that is intended to be universally understood, to unite reality and unreality, and to display the infinite: there’s usually not enough space to do that. So while Kusama’s paintings have spanned 30 feet or more and her works has taken up entire rooms, part of her process is creating an illusion that fools her audience into living in a hallucination. For this, she has been known to use mirrors and glowing lights, forests of polka-dotted phalluses, and stages that appear to have been consumed by a colorful paint-bomb.

In creating challenging and hallucinatory landscapes, Kusama takes a step into the grotesque, the bizarre, and the frightening. This is her intention. Not only is immersion in art part of Kusama’s process; immersion in fears is essential to her practice as well. Part of Kusama’s

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process is exposing herself to the things that frighten her (hallucinations included). This kind of immersion—putting herself in a room full of the unusual, strange, unfamiliar, and/or frightening and being able to examine herself in that context—is something that Kusama’s art does to its audience as well. It allows viewers to examine themselves from a new perspective.

Kusama’s childhood in Japan was unhappy. Her parents’ marriage was fraught by her father’s infidelity, her mother was temperamental and disapproving, and her family (and the culture in which she grew up) was not encouraging of her dedication to art (Turner, Kusama, Fifield). On one occasion, Kusama’s mother had her follow her adulterous father, who she later witnessed having sex with another woman. The young Kusama was scarred by this event and a fear of penises is a recurring theme in her work, especially her work from the 60s. Much of her sculpture at that time was concerned with filling rooms with small phallic representations. Her work with body paint was in part an attempt to demonstrate that there is nothing to fear from human sexual organs, a fear Kusama herself admits to having. In her autobiography, Kusama writes: “By continuously reproducing the forms of things that terrify me, I am able to suppress the fear. I make a pile of soft sculpture penises and lie down among them. That turns the frightening thing into something funny, something amusing. I’m able to revel in my illness in the dazzling light of day.” (Kusama 42) The process of documenting her hallucinations was an act of exposing herself to her fears as well. Kusama reports that she did not enjoy her hallucinations as a child; she found them confusing and worrisome. Kusama found that the process of illustrating her visions, reliving

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them through her drawings, was one way to, as she puts it, “suppress the fear.” And in her unhappy childhood, fueled by Kusama’s fear of her mother’s temper, painting became not only a way to deal with frightening hallucinations, but to have something to look forward to, despite conservative Japan’s unfavorable attitude toward female artists at the time (Kusama 70).

Kusama’s goal is to examine and challenge, if not obliterate, the self, creating works that unite minds. She has immersed herself in drawings of the hallucinations that plagued her as a child; she has dedicated herself to reproducing hundreds of representations of phallic objects that frighten her; she has steeped herself in a foreign environment and used it to cultivate a global audience.

In her autobiography, Kusama states simply: “I remember the many times I stood beside the tracks of the Chuo Line, waiting for the train and thinking of ending my life. What saved me was making my way—blindly and gropingly at first—down the path to art.” It is no mistake that Kusama’s process for art-making relies heavily on techniques that victims of trauma use to recover. She has set up a familiar routine in order to make what frightens and exhausts her less frightening and exhausting. Her art-making process is a dogged attempt to examine and heal herself, and to encourage others to do the same.

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Works Cited Anna Fifield. "How Yayoi Kusama, the 'Infinity Mirrors' visionary, channels mental illness into art." WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post. Feb 15, 2017. Web. ​US Newsstream. <​https://search.proquest.com/docview/1868949844​>. May be helpful for the "hallucinations" portions of the essay/video. Also, this article contains one of the few pictures I've ever seen where Kusama is smiling. Also talks a bit about her repetitive, regimented schedule.

Greenstreet, Roseanna. "Yayoi Kusama: ‘A Letter from Georgia O’Keeffe Gave Me the Courage

to

Leave

Home’

"

(2016)

Web.

​The

Guardian.

<​https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/may/21/yayoi-kusama-interview-artis t​>. A short interview detailing Kusama’s routine and influences. She discusses the correspondence she had with O’Keeffe, though in this article she makes it sound like O’Keeffe encouraged her to leave Japan for America, while in the ​Bomb ​article she says O’Keeffe warned her not to come to America.

Greer, Germaine. "Yayoi Kusama's dot paintings are obsessive, weird, inspired - why can't we

see

more

of

her?"

May

24,

2009.

Web.

<​https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/may/25/yayoi-kusama-art-germaine-

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greer​>. An article about Kusama's history of mental illness. Mentions why Kusama left Japan for America (other than her mother). Also gives a comprehensive explanation of when and where Kusama makes/has made her artwork.

Kusama, Yayoi. ​Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusuama​. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011. Print. The main text for our essay. Though (or maybe because) this book is not in chronological order, Kusama details her process and her personal philosophy with each chapter.

Rathe, Adam. "The Creative Questionnaire: Yayoi Kusama." ​Town & Country Feb 3, 2017: 40. Print. Short but very helpful article about Kusama's creative process with details about her daily routine and where she prefers to work. Her answers to the broader questions from the interviewer about the future of her work are very vague and unhelpful (for our purposes), but the most specific questions about her personal practice are great.

Turner,

Grady

T.

"Yayoi

Kusama."

​BOMB

Magazine​Web.

<​http://bombmagazine.org/article/2192/​>. An in-depth interview with Kusama, and a great resource. Kusama talks about her hallucinations, which I want to use for the subject of our documentary video, as well as her artistic process. You get a good sense of how unusual Kusama is, just based on her word choice in the interview.

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Yalkut, Jud. "Kusama's Self-Obliteration." (1967) Web. A documentary video from the 60s showing Kusama working while immersed in water. Used as a reference for a scene in our video. Also mentioned in the “immersion” section of our paper.

Yayoi Kusama – Obsessed with Polka Dots. ​Anonymous Tate Museum, 2012. A short video that actually shows Kusama at work on one of her installations. Very useful for understanding how Kusama works and what she looks like when she works. Also, the video includes a short interview where the viewer gets a good idea of how Kusama speaks about her work.

サイレントベイビー. "Yayoi Kusama 草間彌生の秘密の小部屋 X the Counter Pop." Web. This video is in Japanese. But, it is the only one we could find where you can see Kusama creating small models of work that will be enlarged for room-sized installations. This will come into play when we discuss how Kusama ideates, edits, and directs large installations in our paper and in our video.