While today's, gay-rights campaigners and anti-capitalist demonstrators are perhaps unlikely to see Kusama as a worthy precursor, a careful reading of her history proves that, for a few years, the artist certainly worked towards similar ends - while taking her polka dots far beyond the gallery system. She turned to clothing design, tried writing novels, and eventually left New York for Japan in 1973, checking into a Tokyo mental health institution, where the artist currently resides.
“Kusama called her performances during this period ‘social demonstrations’” writes Kultermann, “but their thin veneer of progressive political rhetoric did not disguise the fact that the true agenda was Kusama’s ‘symbolic philosophy with polka dots’.”Īs the artist’s notoriety declined, so Kusama’s tactics changed. Likewise, imagine a horse covered by polka dots against the. These events had the tenor and trappings of sincere political protests, yet not everyone is convinced of the artist’s motives. What happens then is self-obliteration, in which you completely wipe out your self on your own. TateShots produced this timelapse video of The Obliteration. Over the course of a few weeks the room is transformed from a blank canvas into an explosion of colour, with thousands of spots stuck over every available surface.
In her Stock Exchange stunt, a kind of poppy precursor to 2011’s Occupy movement, Kusama called on passersby to “obliterate Wall Street men with polka dots”, while in one of her anti-war communiqués, she offered the president-elect Richard Nixon, veiled promises of sexual intercourse in exchange for withdrawing US troops from Vietnam. Yayoi Kusama 's interactive Obliteration Room begins as a white space which visitors are invited to cover with stickers. Kusama's Anatomic Explosion outside the New York Stock Exchange, 1968. The artist has experienced hallucinations since she was ten years old, and she confronts her fears and anxieties through a process she describes as self.
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