RESEARCH: YAYOI KUSAMA

Posted by Emilie Gordon on October 9, 2010 ·

Yayoi Kusama,
born 1929, Japan


Accumulation No.1, 1968, Yayoi Kusama

In an interview with Grandy Turner for Bombsite in winter 1999, Yayoi explains how some of her work is produced from the experience of hallucinations brought on by her mental illness, the intrusion of the mind with obsessive thought becoming sculptures and paintings. Kusama goes on to explain how she used painting to help cure her disease. She left Japan and moved to New York to peruse art and escape her chilling family life, She became acquainted with Artist Georgia O’Keeffe and then Eva Hesse whose work I will go on to discuss later. Looking at craft being art and the use of textiles I first came across Kusama in Art Fabric Mainstream by Mildred Constantine. The work Couch and canvas and Accumulation No. 1, 1962, the idea that an object you may use throughout your life, a sofa or chair can be transformed into a beautifully bizarre textural sculpture, fascinated me. When I first saw the image I was reminded of the human body, arms and flesh and possibly a phallus symbol. ‘As an obsessional artist I fear everything I see. At one time, I dreaded everything I was making. The armchair thickly covered in phalluses was my psychosomatic work done when I had a fear of sexual vision’ kusama explains to Grandy Turner – From the images you do feel a sense of being overwhelmed by phalluses as if they are wriggling and swarming around the surface of the couch like a swarm of bees buzzing and moving in formation around the nest. There is the sensation of the feeling of a fear. It is a repetitive image consuming the shape or an object, which moves from the artists mind to reality. Kusama is an artist who works in many mediums and with many materials, however I chose to look at her fabric works, as I begin to explore the idea of craft as art and understand how craft started to become recognized as art.