Kusama The Crazy

Yayoi Kusama was born in 1929 in Nagano, Japan as the daughter to seedling merchants.  An admirer of the American Avant Garde, she wrote letters to Georgia O’Keefe across the pond, persistent to learn about the American art scene.  As a child she experienced hallucinations and nightmarish experiences that translated into morbid and highly complex surreal paintings, such as “Corpses” that features a snakelike shape in deep coloring.  As she aged and came into her own in America, Kusama challenged everything deemed to be normal and held happenings around the city where nude artists would parade around fountains painted in polka dots, such as in the “Body Festival” in Washington Square Park.

My first experience with Kusama came about in late 2008, when I entered the Gagosian Gallery for the first time and stepped inside “The Infinity Room.”  Little did I know at the time the impact that Kusama would hold over me.  This work is something that I wrote and thought about incessantly, and would remember for the rest of my life. This summer Kusama came to life for me at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

“In-fin-i-ty: unlimited extent of time, space, or quantity; boundlessness. As I entered the Infinity Room, the hustle and bustle of everything external became non-existent. I walked down the mirrored pathway alone into a dark and completely enclosed eight by eight foot room. The walls, ceiling, and platform on were made of mirrors, surrounded by a thin layer of water. As the security guard slowly closed the door, the last brink of light escaped, and I became inundated with vertigo.  It appeared as though there were candles surrounding from every which angle, and that I stood on nothing but a figment of my imagination.  The dim lights from the candles appeared to be everywhere, extending as far as I could possibly see – for infinity. I was suspended in time and space, somewhere far in the universe where no one could find me. For those few minutes, I had infinity in front of me.  I felt capable of doing anything that I wanted, able to move forward forever, to achieve anything that I wish.  I was there, fully breathing it in.”

(Excerpt of a personal essay , 2009)

Many of her works from child to adult featured these small polka dots, which she explains to represent the “Earth, moon, sun, and human beings…a single particle among billions. This is one of my important philosophies.”  This theory of one in a billion is also manifested through her Accumulation sculptures, where disturbing, phallic white tubes encase furniture, clothing, and massive fields of sea-weed like shapes.  She challenges the gender divide by sexualizing domestic objects and making the reader feel uncomfortable in the grotesqueness within familiar objects. Most recently, Kusama is known for her collaboration with designer Marc Jacobs for the Louis Vuitton collection.

What I love about Yayoi Kusama spans farther than an obsession with her grotesque, controversial, and strangely beautiful work that evokes a feeling of excitement and confusion upon view. It’s the story behind an Asian American artist who defies all stereotypes of being a quaint Asian female. She paraded her boldness regardless of what others thought of her and threw herself into a completely new environment despite her humble and

extremely conservative Japanese roots.  She felt no inferiority writing to Georgia O’Keefe, remains relevant to society without reprimanding its materialistic emphasis, yet remains true to herself by continuing to create art in the mental institution where she exiled herself to in 1975.   Yayoi Kusama intrigues me. She brings to life a side of risk, persistence, and craziness in her work that I live vicariously through, as I hope to find the Kusama in me.