I. A dot is more than nothing and less than a ball. It's a funny problem, because ball and point can be infinitely small - and even infinitely big. And everything we see as a point could be a ball, too. Additionally, you could ask what kind of ball. Whether we can see it, as what we see it and where.
The japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, born in 1929, has burst with balls and dots into a worldwide popularity, that forbids every connection of her art with a big ball of soap.
This spring the Haus der Kunst in Munich showed a big installation "Dots obsession", that must have convinced every visitor to learn some more about this great artist.
"The white brushstrokes, who cover the picture like a whole, frame dark holes of a silent death in front of the background of nothing.", describes the artist her early work of the sixities, when she had managed to come to New York from Japan and succeeded in the galleries of Manhattan. Her paintings of this time, huge like the walls of her galleries, showed, like the one of minimal art, allover unified nets. In a very short time and under the eyes of the art critics Yayoi Kusama developed her wallpaintings into huge installations for rooms and halls, more and more filled up with dot-like objects, dots and polka dots. These should be the objects she would care about for the rest of her life.In the sixties she used phallic forms, too, to let her artworks talk about body themes and the body's symbolic construction.
But this was not the perspective art critism took on her. Actions and performances made her new art popular, but not acceptable for the market.
II. When she painted on harmless hippies running around on the first european body festival 1968 or caused by the forbidden covering of the venice biennale's lawn with dot bubbles in 1966 , which she tried to sell for very low prices, she even lost her financial supporters. 1974, after the market in New York had changed into a retrospective of the fifties and Europe cared about theory and deconstruction of rationality (in Gemany especially launched by the documenta 1972), she left New York for Japan, at this time quite unpopular. .
But was this return to Japan, where she even put herself into a psychiatry (she's still living there), really resignation? Her artwork out of points and dots had for a couple of times been judged as "psychiatric"by friends, psychologists and even herself. But did it mean "psychotic"? Or "dignified for psychiatry"? In the psychodelic seventies, when everybody was concurring in having the best halluzinations - whatever the cause - to be halluzinatorical gifted had another image than today.
III. Consequently, Kusama continued to work on her art-themes, the dots, the halluzinations, the universe. She started to write experimental literature about the life of modern Japaneses. Well, and Japan accepted the artist with academic education, a lot of publicity in the New York art scene and the brand name "Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam" in her biography. Such, she got a prize for literature in 1983 for her book "The Hustlers Grotto of Christopher Street" and was invited to represent her country at the Venice Biennale 1998 officially. Well, at this time, even the Moma of New York took again notice of her. A lot of exhibtions followed - in Germany in the last years Berlin-Tokyo , Tokyo - Berlin, 2006 in the New National Gallery in Berlin (Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin), and this one 2007 in Munich, Haus der Kunst, that had been photographed by the author again and again.
These huge presentations of her art work, in the well ordered frames of museums, with the artist herself about 78 years old, are of cause, very "framed" Kusamas. Now she talks about her art as therapy, not as universe, inversion or revolution like in the late sixties or seventies. Like all artists she doesn't want to be classified. Does she represent - as a persona - the irrationality of art and the unconceptual of personality?
IV. Well, if she does, then she does against her artworks. For example, the new "Guidepost to the New Space", a Land-Art installation shown on the 12ed festival FINA World Championships in Melbourne 2007 (pictures on: www.yayoi-kusama.jp) have nothing to do with it. Forms in red and white, curved like monstruous worms from outer space, are laying around in the landscape, with skyscrapers at the back, as if Kusama liked to show the workers in these skyscrapers, that the world is just like such a worm, if you look at her from outer space. This would be a simple change of perspective. A look not from earth or heaven, but from a space lab station, moon, mars, jupiter?
V. As important as space, stars and planets are for our scientific inquieries, as rare are our opportunities to catch a glance on earth from this perspective. You'll need some millions or a very sophisticated imagination. It's not in the hands of most of us, we may say, like Kusama, who will perhaps loose the possibility to explain her art in the next years and leave this to rich collectors.
But think about Japanese culture. The Japaneses aren't christians. They don't believe in a god watching the world and perhaps caring about its creatures.As such, this perspective on the "whole world" is allowed and nothing really special - just a practical problem. And even if you just look around, you'll notice an awful lot of dots - I found at least 36 dots in less than twenty minutes.
Another special of Japanese culture is the enthusiam about Van Gogh, the psychiotic genius. Well, his famous sunflowers are not just modern-in-its-time. They are dotted. His suns, his flowers, his sunflowers, they are strolling around in circles as if they are building streets for Kusamas dots. Like Kusama, van Gogh managed to get his art accepted as serious innovation, even if in his afterlife - and like him, Kusama's psychiatic image doesn't really hurt the seriousness of her life - even if just now nearly at the end of her art-life quite late.
In the exhibition in Munich she showed herself on a big videoscreen between the huge pink and black dots in the great entrance hall. She explained her art on Japanese and gave reasons for this universe of dots. She was, as such, like a godess, a god-like figure at the sky between stars and planets, in a phantastical universe. The cult of geniusness put on scene and into selfirony. She presented herself like a real monotheos, of his / her own universe, not thinking about any existing religion. As such, to conclude, Kusama is perhaps a special kind of japanese Van Gogh, and has, with her pink wig, her funny conviction, a lot of similarities with - perhaps - Woody Allen?
Report and photos by Dr. U. Ritter,
german versions