If last year belonged to Damien Hirst and his spots, then this year belongs to Yayoi Kusama and her spots. The Tokyo-based artist helped Louis Vuitton roll out spotted accessories, clothing and window displays, installed spotted earth art at Pier 45, and is being feted with a retrospective at the Whitney that highlights her spot performances and paintings. But while Hirst’s spots radiated happiness, and stripped painting to its syntactic, pleasure-giving essentials, Kusama’s spots are testimony to an obsessional, repetitive personality. They’re strange.
The introductory wall text at the Whitney describes Kusama as an outsider artist rather than a conceptualist, which is what I think she is. The fact that she voluntarily checked herself into an insane asylum in 1973, where she remains, is offered as irrefutable evidence. This description seemed insulting to me at first, but after seeing the exhibit I might agree. The work’s single-mindedness – its disregard for proportion and balance – make it hard to understand as art. This is particularly true of Kusama’s sculptures, conglomerations of stuffed biomorphic forms that resemble protozoa, sperm and phalluses. As we passed a particularly exuberant piece my companion, a strong and sophisticated lady, covered her eyes and said, “I just can’t take this." Kusama’s work is powerful and also unsettling. It reminds me that art always comes from a person, and that that person might have no choice about who she is.