The work of Yayoi Kusama spans the history of modern art. From beginnings in post-war surrealism, by her 60th birthday Kusama had made her mark on all the big movements of the century: abstract impressionism, performance art, pop art, and installation art all bear some of her influence. She corresponded with Georgia O’Keeffe, drew comparisons with Jackson Pollock and was Warholian before Warhol. Never staying still long enough to achieve lasting fame, she arranged orgiastic ‘happenings’, offered to sleep with Nixon to end the Vietnam War, and wrote novels and anthologies of poetry. Any retrospective seems doomed to fail.
With such a daunting body of work to make sense of, the Tate Modern starts at the beginning with her early domestic successes. And by the second room clear themes begin to emerge and repeat. There are dots. Lots of dots. Kusama refers to them as her polka dots, and the childlike garishness of the effect seems to chime with her out-sized personality. But they often look more like pores. Her 50s work is marked by watercolours and pastels with titles like ‘The Germ’, ‘The Stem’ and ‘A Flower’ that takes a view of life as seen through the microscope. Kusama’s dots seem to have less to do with fashion and more to do with mitochondria, cell walls, membranes. Everything. Or, in her own words: ‘a polka-dot has the form of the sun… Polka-dots are a way to infinity’.
The theme of art as therapy and biography also runs through her work. Struggles with her health only became apparent in 1973 when she returned to Japan and checked herself into a hospital for the mentally ill, but psychological trauma is evident in her earliest works which feature post-apocalyptic landscapes and corrupted nature. In ‘Lingering Dream’, neon green butterflies rest on limb-like stalks. The surrounding landscape is charcoal and sparse – the horizon bleeds into the sky – and it’s hard not to think of the firebombing of Japan, Hiroshima, Nagasaki.
Kusama would later confess to suffering from hallucinations and suicidal thoughts as a child as well physical abuse at the hands of her mother. Her accumulation sculptures depict furniture and clothing, most tellingly high-heels, whitewashed and covered entirely in white phallus-like protrusions. ‘Macaroni Shirt’ and ‘Macaroni Pants’ depict clothing made from … macaroni, suggestive of some revulsion or compulsion to do with food. Toward the close of the decade and at the height of the counterculture movement, Kusama’s dots took on psychedelic colours and were daubed on every available surface – even people.
These two themes – the psychological interior and the natural world –best combine in her most famous works. Her Infinity Net series catches Kusama in her abstract expressionist mode. Like Pollock et al, the paintings are about cause rather than effect, but the result is something that looks like a collection of organic cells created with an approach equal parts obsessive and therapeutic.
But of all the works on show, it’s the most recent ones that are most impressive. 2000’s ‘I’m Here, but Nothing’ turns Kusama’s childhood hallucinations into a gallery space; a living room is bathed in ultra violet light and scarred with vinyl – you guessed it – dots, while Kusama croons at visitors from a TV in the corner. Simiarlly awing is ‘Infinity Mirrored Room’, which, though more of a narrow-ish corridor, does exactly what it says on the tin. Using lights hung from the ceiling and an array of mirrors, the piece plunges you into a galaxy of light and space where everything and every movement echoes into the vanishing point. The room feels more science than nature – or at least a kind of fantastical nature only represented in science fiction – but fulfils the disorientating and psychological promise that runs through the rest of her work. You get the impression that Kusama’s meditative obsessiveness is a mind-bending effect that can never really be pulled off inside a gallery space. Infinity can’t sit inside a frame, and when the gallery space becomes the piece, that’s when the magic happens.
