creative forces

Blog # 82…June 2018

Yayoi Kusama’s blockbuster Infinity Mirrors at the AGO recently had everyone agog and lining up to scoot through the Infinity Mirrored Room. I didn’t get there, maybe you didn’t either, and too bad for us.  Luckily, we’ve got YouTube, where we can get a taste of her and her work from the comfort of our couches.  Not the same I know, but cheaper and more comfortable.

Known as the Princess of Polka dots, Yayio was born in 1928 in Matsumoto, Japan. She grew up in a repressive and controlling atmosphere, training in a traditional Japanese painting style called nihonga.  Art was her saviour, a world that she could control, and she turned her hallucinations into visual images. As with many artists whose work inspires the dismissive …”I (or my kid) could do that”...Yayio’s art is based on a strong foundation of skill in technique, colour, shape and form that comes from an early training and discipline.

Moving to New York in 1958, she quickly joined the group of avant-garde artists who were emerging and creating pop art in painting, music, film and fashion - hanging out with Georgia O’Keefe and Andy Warhol. She was daringly experimental during the sixties, staging several memorable performances involving naked people painted with brightly coloured polka dots.  Her art is complex, both whimsical and dark. She uses the dots to explore the infinity of the universe and the  spherical objects that surround us...the earth, moon and stars, ovaries, baseballs, oranges  - maybe that explains my fondness for ellipses...

 

In the seventies, she returned to Japan, seriously ill and in 1977, checked herself into the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill, where she’s  chosen to live ever since.  She goes daily to her nearby studio and has produced a large body of work, including several novels and Japan’s contributions to the biennales in Venice in 1993 and Singapore in 2006   Her autobiography Infinity Net was published in 2003 and her life and art are viewable on a number of screens (back to YouTube) most recently (2008) Kusama: Infinity.   

I’ve just scratched the surface of this fascinating artist (who was completely unknown to me before the AGO show). But her work and her life bring up thoughts of the connection and interplay between art and mental illness.  Just like all people who smoke marijuana don’t go on to be heroin addicts - remember that? - all people with mental illness don’t have artistic talents (although it demands a huge amount of creativity to get through their daily lives…but we'll leave that for another time).  The expanded visions, looser boundaries and frenetic energy that often accompany mental illness, as well as being intolerably painful to experience, can lead to amazing results.


See you in July.