Dot, dot, dotty

Another artist that uses repetition in her work is Yayoi Kusama. The first thing that caught my eye with her piece of artwork was the repetition of dots. Yayoi Kusama uses lots of bright colours most of them primary colours this emphasises the repeat in her work. What I like best about of her work is the way she uses mirrors to reflect and multiply. In her work 'infinity mirror room' the room seems like it is filled with hundreds of dots. Yayoi Kusama work is obsesses and this is certainly apparent in this piece.

Kusama paintings / using Polka dots and nets as motifs at around aged ten and created fantastic painting in watercolours, pastle and oils. As she got more active she was influenced by an anti-vietnam war movement and American Presidential election and social elements. All these influences were shown in her artwork. She started creating Kusama dress and textiles, which were sold at department stores and boutiques all over the united states.

A precursor of the pop art minimalist and feminist art movements, Kusama influenced contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg. Kusama is now acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come of Japan and an important voice of the avant-garde.

Well-known for her repeating dot patterns, her art encompasses an astonishing variety of media. including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, performance and immerser installation. It ranges from works on paper featuring intense semi-abstract imagery, to soft sculpture known as 'Accumulations' to her 'Infinity Nets' paintings, made up of carefully repeated arcs of paint built up into large patterns.

Since 1977 Kusama has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric institution and much of her work has been marked with obsessiveness and a desire to escape from psychological trauma. In an attempted to share her experience she creates installations that immerse the viewer in her obsessive vision of endless dots and nets or infinitely mirrored space. Kusama has traded on her identity as an outsider in many contexts as a female artists in a male- dominated society, as a Japanese person in the Western art world and as a victim of her own neurotic and obsessional symptoms.

I have found some information from a magazine called Disorder and it explains about Kusama history. In the article it say that she had parents which disapproval of her work. In 1939 she drew a portrait of her mother and covered it in seeds shaped like sots as her parents were farmers. Kusama also created other shapes from nature like contorted eggs, stems and branches. 'My art needed an unlimited freedom and a wider world' this quote is from Kusama. Kusama had a movement she call this her 'self obliteration era. She gained psychedelic cult status amongst the experimental hippie crowd- these rebelling against social norms. With this Kusama threw herself into the movement by hosting art performances she call this body painting festivals. this is were she started to paint people in dots. These were staged around Warhol's factory on the wall street and as a protest against the Vietnam war. Kusama was a consummated rebel. she invented the ' church of self obliteration and staged gay right protests. After all this her success turned sour; her partner artist Joseph Cornell died still suffering from bouts of mental illness that haunted her life Kusama returned to Japan. To this day she is voluntarily stays in the mental institution.

Polka dots. Polka dots is the trade mark of 'Kusama Happening' Red, green and yellow polka dots can be the circles representing the earth, the sun or the moon. For Kusama their shapes and what they signify do not really matter.

I paint pola dots on the bodies of people and with those polka dots, the people will self-obliterate and return to the nature of the universe.
-An excerpt from 'infinity nets' Kusama Autobiography.

'Infinity mirror room' is an installation in which Kusama uses mirrors, beanbags and dots.Spotty shapes on the floor of the installation are organic like beans or pods or penises. They are white with bright red dots on them. This is a large-scale enviroment: a mirrored room that consumes the visitor and makes him or her a participant in the work.

The same theme still resonates in her latest work, namely obsessive repetition, dots (and their silver spherical 3D counterparts) and infinity intimates via the use of mirrors. This compulsiveness is said to be Kusama's means of dealing with the hallucinations that began tormenting her as a child, leading her to paint and draw and make art as a way of exerting control over her dark vision in this piece. A claustrophobic, mirror-lined hallway leads as if via an oesophagus into the belly of a massive room filled with several dozen paintings Kusama has produced over the past few years.

Thought she preferred the somwhat antiquated ' avant-garde' label to Abstract Expressionism Minimalism or Fluxes, her was nonetheless the perfect art practice for the wild 1960s. It mixed a vivid pop sensibility with a knack for media pranksters, best manifested in her elaborately staged performances and happenings, some of which she referred to as 'nude-ins'. But when the party that was the 1960s wound down, Kusama retreated to Japan and checked herself into the Tokyo mental hospital, far beneath the art world's radar.