Yayoi Kusama’s psychedelic art was at its best when taken in high doses
I once had an argument about Yayoi Kusama with Peter Gabriel. Not in person – I’ve never met the prog rock hero. But after I recorded some critical comments on her work for the BBC, I watched the segment only to see Gabriel passionately defending her. My onscreen cynicism seemed harsh indeed compared with his soulful appreciation of all those dots.
My scepticism about Kusama started the first time I saw her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The context is significant because after a big dose of Jackson Pollock’s looping, tangled forests of colour and line (colour as line), Piet Mondrian’s pulsing Broadway Boogie Woogie and other great abstract art, Kusama’s dots appeared to me static, planned, predictable. I wasn’t excited or moved.
Well, things grow on you, or perhaps you just give up resisting when something is everywhere. Kusama is truly ubiquitous, not just in galleries but social media, her moving life story adding to the popularity of her art, her cosmic sensibility carrying global audiences along on psychedelic journeys into a natural world supercharged with outsized pixelations.
It was hard to resist her vision when I caught up with the Kusama phenomenon at Aviva Studios, Manchester, where vast installations and inflatables of dot-covered octopus tentacles and giant pumpkins made an industrial space feel enchanted and sublime.
But I can still walk into a Kusama mirror room and see just an infinity of nothing. And when I come across one of her pumpkins at an art fair or biennial, it can be extraordinarily blank, a by-the-numbers exercise in commodified multiple art. The Kusama cult has grown alongside and inside a contemporary art world of slick worldwide galleries, with branches from LA to Hong Kong, and a clientele of one percenters who buy art like jewellery. Her work has an obvious decorative appeal to this modern art market: one of those big spotty fruits would be great by the pool. Yet so meaningful!
In truth, there’s little connection between Kusama’s troubled life and anti-war activism and the feelgood vibes of her art. Those lurid greens and oranges punctuated by lines of little black circles cannot really be experienced as marks of trauma or expressive howls. Instead they create a dreamy utopia.
There’s nothing wrong with that. Art has a vocation to soothe and delight. But it takes a lot of Kusama to get me in the mood: where one of her works leaves me shrugging, a vast gathering does create enjoyable sensory overload.
It all depends your receptiveness and in particular how much of your critical brain you are able to shut down. There is art that’s nice to look at and art that harrows the soul. Kusama is seen by some as soulful but her work is as harrowing as a cupcake. It can be a lot of fun, but I don’t think she was a patch on truly mind-bending abstract artists like Pollock or Bridget Riley.
When you look into one of Riley’s abstract vortices your brain is interfered with. You see depths and heights that are not there. It’s an intelligent trip that opens the mind, leading you to imagine infinities of space while also seeing the illusory nature of the everyday assumptions we live by. One work by Kusama, least of all her Infinity Rooms, can’t provide that complexity. You have to overdose on them, drowning out your inner nay-saying voice with so many dots you dizzy yourself.
Lots of everything, on infinite screens, filling every moment, crowding out thought. Yayoi Kusama was the mirror of our time. That is undeniable.