YAYOI KUSAME RETROSPECTIVE AT THE TATE MODERN

YAYOI KUSAMA RETROSPECTIVE AT THE TATE MODERN

Yayoi Kusama (1929-) was born in Nagano Prefecture in a hill town in the Japanese Alps about 130 miles west of Tokyo just before the second world war. She grew up in a traditional Japanese family with a traditional set of Japanese values that maintained that a woman should complete her education, then marry and have children. However, Yayoi possessed creativity and wanted to fulfill herself through her art rather than taking on a traditional role. This meant that she soon came into direct opposition to her family and especially her mother.

Her parent's business was marketing seeds and they were very opposed to Yayoi's artistic vocation. However she managed to complete one year of art school training in Kyoto in 1948 but the constraints of family, gender and being Japanese led her to rebel against these constraints and to become familiar with contemporary American culture but also the legacy of French surrealism, experimental art and the techniques of frottage found in Max Ernst and the work of the Catalan artist Joan Miro. Her work is often a symbiosis of the vegetal, physical and human and it is often marked by her own experience of war and the defeat of her country in WW2.

Kusama's work has often been compared to that of Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) and to her colleague Eva Hesse (1936-1970) and perhaps her real strength as an artist lies in her painting rather than her sculptures which do seem to resemble closely the work of Hesse, for instance. Kusame's works seem to reflect on an existence found somewhere between the mountains and the seashore since there are so many references to the maritime and the aquatic, to the sea's edge, to seaweed, tendrils, to underwater sea anemones that also resemble dildos, to floating sperm that might also be floating sea wrack, to roots that wind and wind around each other and disappear into the depths of the ocean or to the infinite horizon. Kusame has expressed her dread of both phalli and industrially produced foodstuffs hence the repetition of symbols of phalli and also mass-produced pasta which is literally stuck onto her canvases.

In 1957 Kusama moved to America at the behest of the artist Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) who she was previously in correspondence with. At first she lived in Seattle but eventually moved to New York where she became a colleague of the American artist Donald Judd, completed an important set of large abstract works presented here as the Infinity Net Paintings which were probably a response to the Abstract Expressionism of artists like Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), the then dominant aesthetic movement in America. Kusama joined the New York avante garde, her ambition was to rival the paintings of the great abstract expressionists. However she moved on swiftly from the public sphere of art museums and public competitions to the private realm of commerce, moving her preoccupations from high art to pop art. Her interests and activities embraced soft sculpture, installations, collage. By the mid 60's she had moved to the street, involving herself in 'happenings' which placed the artist at the centre of her own work rather than her earlier works which were more impersonal. She also worked on films, multi-part sculptures and eventually, by the 1980s and 1990s, to the brightly coloured phatasmagoric canvases which are the continuous diaristic renderings of what the artist sees today. She now works with acrylic paint, a temporary, fast drying medium which is the antithesis of traditional oil painting with its evocation of the work of the Great Masters.

Her sculptures evoke tentacular creatures as in Heaven and Earth (1991) and brittle mosaics as in her work Prisoner's Door (1994). Her artwork is typically eclectic, utilising a mix of mediums such as ink, ballpoint pen, watercolour, gouache and india ink. In her work Yellow Trees (1994) endless tentacles or roots are folding and unfolding through and around each other. In Sprouting (The Transmigration of the Soul) (1987) bubbling spermatozoa becomes a typical, synaptic patterning or Weeds (1996) with its infinite pattern, minimalist repetition and blank surface. The big acrylic canvases evoke brighter more buoyant work and a release from the dour abstraction of her repetitious collages of the 1970s which also summarise an entire decade of American pop art influence. The polka dot pattern that Kasume assumes throughout her work as a series of dots and nets as in I'm here but Nothing (2000/2012), a work which is a living room inverted through dim lights and the glistening coloured polka dots that cover everything.

Kasuma returned to Japan in the 1970s and feeling herself unable to cope with the real world self-admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital where she lives to this day, although she somehow escaped its confines to be with us at the opening of her retrospective event at the Tate Modern, London, earlier this week. She apparently makes the journey from the hospital to her studio everyday, returning each evening. This begs a question, why did she return to Japan, to its conservative, sterile confines which were ultimately summed up by the walls of the hospital that became her home? A work like I Who Committed Suicide (1977) seems to evoke this period and Kusame said at some point that without her art she would have committed suicide. The last exhibit is the Infinity Mirror Room, an installation which she first utilised in 1965, evoking as it does the infinite regress of art that moves between the earliest memories of the artist to the very last. Perhaps that's a good place to end this retrospective because the faded remains of those artworks summarise a life lived richly in a period of vast transition and energy between two worlds. These imply both beginnings and endings, east and west, tradition and revolution, sanity and madness or better still, the sensitivity of the artist in a world desensitised to subtlety, ambiguity, carefully arranged revolutionary statements or happenings bypassed by the conduits of power summed up in her invite to have sex with President Richard Nixon in return for ending the Vietnam War. Nixon never took up the invite but eventually had to end the Vietnam War anyway. He might as well have had sex with Yayoi then which goes to show just how stupid 'tricky Dicky' was.

Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, London, February 2012