The Spell to Re-integrate the Self: The Significance of the Work of Yayoi Kusama in the New Era by Yuko Hasegawa and Pamela Miki

Hello guys!  I figured it would be nice to summarize and share some thoughts about this article, since we didn’t get to go over it in our seminar.  The article is fairly short and I think it is worth taking the time to read.

Yayoi Kusama is prolific Japanese artist who uses many different mediums to address her concerns.  She is a painter, performance artist, filmmaker, sculptor, and novelist.  Her work is representative of her psychological conditions including obsessive-compulsive disorder and schizophrenia.  

In the 1950s and 1960s Kusama spent time painting in New York, largely influenced by the Abstract Expressionists.  She returned to Japan sometime during the mid-1970s and has remained there since.  She started to receive international attention in the late-1990s, and there may be a number of reasons for this.  Kusama seems to be addressing current issues.  For example, in this information-driven society, it can become easy to become overwhelmed with information to the point that “knowledge and desire seem to escape our control or authorship.”  This creates confusion about individual identity and separates us from the world at large.  Kusama deals with these issues by reaffirming her identity through the physicality of making art (just as others reaffirm identity through physical actions).  For Kusama, “art production is connected to living itself”. 

Kusama’s works that involve polka dots and nets are not only physical translations of her hallucinations, but are also symbolic of the earth, moon, sun, stars, and individuals.  “Kusama thinks of her hallucinations as moments of rapture that assault our senses within a process of self-destruction or self-diffusion.”  She embraces and controls her illness by making artwork, and in making the work she unites physical and virtual reality.

Today, Kusama lives in a Japanese psychiatric institution were she chooses to stay.  Originally she was omitted because she painted nonstop for three or four days without eating, and finally collapsed.  Her commitment and obsessiveness with respect to making art is inspirational.