Yayoi Kusama, Art as a Balm for Madness
This autumn, the prestigious Fondation Beyeler in Basel will hold a major retrospective devoted to the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (1929, Matsumoto). The famous building designed by Renzo Piano will house, for four months, seven decades of artistic production, from her earliest works -never before seen in Europe- to her most recent creations. The exhibition will include her emblematic Infinity Mirror Room, among other installations that immerse the viewer in a sensory experience without limits. Through paintings, sculptures, performances, collages, fashion and literature, a comprehensive vision will be offered of an artist who, at 95, continues to create with intensity and passion.
This autumn the prestigious Fondation Beyeler in Basel is going to hold the great retrospective of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (1929, Matsumoto). Renzo Piano’s famous building will house, for four months, seven decades of the body of her artistic work. Visitors will be invited to make a tour from her earliest works, never seen in Europe, to her most recent works. The exhibition will also feature her iconic work, Infinity Mirror Room. These repetitive structures such as the mirror rooms, the polka dots or the infinity nets transport the viewer to a sensation of limitless expansion. A fascinating tour that will show the various artistic techniques that Kusama has used as tools to develop her creativity, but above all, as a narcotic for her madness. Through her first happenings carried out in New York, her paintings, sculptures and installations, drawing or collages, performance, fashion and literature, they will offer a holistic vision of an artist who at 95 remains active.
Yayoi Kusama has been residing of her own free will for 50 years in a psychiatric institution, the Seiwa Hospital in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Which has not been an impediment to carrying out a prolific career, both artistic and literary. In her writings, in which images never stop springing forth, she recounts that she falls ill after creating a work. She fluctuates between sensations of reality and unreality, in an obsessive process. She suffers hallucinations, auditory and visual. Since her childhood she had episodes in which she saw auras in objects and heard plants and animals speak. When this happened to her, she would return home to be able to draw in her notebook what she had seen, before the apparitions vanished. Being able to channel the hallucinations in this way softened her fear and impression toward those episodes. This was the origin of her paintings. To recreate these apparitions was a way of being able to control them. Her work is the release of what is inside her. Kusama suffered from a condition known as depersonalization, as if the soul separated from her body. This happens when reality is too distressing and the mind produces defenses to escape that suffering through depersonalization, which Kusama finds more painful than any infernal reality.
“Great Gigantic Pumpkin” 2017.
A post-war Japan, conservative, narrow-minded, feudalist and anchored in retrograde traditions such as arranged marriages, produced in Kusama an obsessive desire to escape to New York in search of broader horizons. Her art needed unlimited freedom. The advice of a doctor who had treated her illness and who insisted that she must get away from her mother so as not to worsen her neurosis, since the relationship with her mother was always very difficult, was decisive for leaving Japan. Seattle was the first American city she arrived in. There was where she successfully presented her first solo exhibition in 1957. Two years later her wish to exhibit in New York would come. This solo show, “Obsessive Monochrome”, at the Brata Gallery, consisted of a set of paintings with her characteristic infinity nets. These repetitions in white on black, lacking composition and of a disconcerting monotony, produce, at the same time in the observer, a feeling of vertigo before the void and a deep sensation of hypnotic peace. Her artistic career had just taken off.
But when she had finally arrived in New York, what she found was a stressful, aggressive and violent city, which led her to find herself driven to acute neuroses. She worked from dawn until night on her infinity nets, a monotonous repetition that she carried out in the midst of severe neurotic episodes. At the hospital they advised her to go to a mental institution to receive psychiatric help. But what she did instead was paint compulsively. She filled the canvases with repetitive motifs, to continue painting the tables, the floor, the walls until she ended up covering her body. That process, as she expresses in her writings, ends up burying her, in what she calls obliteration. As for example when she covers her entire body with polka dots, the background or a horse end up disappearing and integrating into a timeless whole. The polka dots became the hallmark of Kusama’s Happenings. Those nets enveloped her and made her forget herself. Creating art was the way to alleviate the illness and combat the daily pain and fear.
Inflatable Kusama. Artistic installation by Yayoi Kusama on the facade of the Louis Vuitton store in Paris.
In 1961 Kusama found a new mode of artistic expression in soft sculpture. Her first exhibition was an armchair and a sofa with eight legs, covered with phallus-shaped protuberances made of stuffed fabric. According to Kusama, creating these sculptures repetitively was a way of curing a feeling of terror toward sex. The reproduction was a kind of self-imposed therapy to which she gave the name “Psychosomatic Art”. Reproducing these objects over and over was a way of overcoming fear.
In short, in Yayoi Kusama we witness an eloquent manifestation of the relationship between psychic disturbance and artistic expressiveness, as well as certain therapeutic and cathartic potentialities of art.
