Yayoi Kusama’s contradiction: she wanted to dissolve the self, but became a logo

She died in Tokyo at the age of 97, having spent a lifetime multiplying dots, nets, mirrors, fouls, pumpkins and, above all, herself. In recent decades, all it took was a red surface covered in white polka dots, a yellow pumpkin speckled with black or a room lined with mirrors for the public to utter her name even before they knew what they were looking at. A level of global recognition that is a rare achievement in contemporary art. The irony is that Yayoi Kusama had built all of this on the erasure of identity; she called it ‘self-obliteration’. It can be the case that the more you want to hide, the more you are noticed. Ever since she was a child, she spoke of being haunted by hallucinations in which flowers, dots and grids gradually invaded objects, the room and her own body, until the distinction between herself and her surroundings was erased. For Yayoi Kusama, making art was a form of catharsis: reproducing what terrified her in order to master it – or at least to try to.

Few careers offer such a clear perspective on the gulf between the post-war avant-garde and the contemporary culture industry.

Born in Matsumoto in 1929 into a family that traded in seeds and plants, she left Japan for the United States in 1957, arriving in New York shortly afterwards. She had written to Georgia O’Keeffe asking for advice on how to make a name for herself in America. The reply, in essence, was: make yourself seen. The New York she arrived in was dominated by Abstract Expressionism – a movement that was male-dominated, monumental and rather convinced of its own importance. For her part, Kusama began painting the ‘Infinity Nets’ – enormous canvases covered in tiny, repeated marks, centreless and seemingly endless. Donald Judd was among the first to understand them and also among the first to buy one of her paintings, paying for it in instalments. Almost everything was already there in those canvases: obsession, repetition, infinity and the attempt to make the artist disappear into the act of creation. But the canvas soon revealed its limitations, so she began covering chairs, shoes, sofas and other household objects with sewn-on, padded phallic protuberances. In 1965, she created Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field; the objects multiplied in the mirrors until the space no longer seemed to have any boundaries. The Infinity Room was born, half a century before anyone thought that the most natural thing to do in front of the infinite reflection was to take a photo of oneself with a mobile phone. A mad, platonic (and reciprocated) love affair with Joseph Cornell – a splendid, unlikely couple.

In the 1960s, Kusama was not the reassuring artist she would later become. She organised happenings featuring naked bodies painted with polka dots, protested against the Vietnam War, staged same-sex weddings, and proclaimed herself high priestess of her own ‘Church of Self-Obliteration’. In 1969, she organised an unauthorised orgy in the fountain of the MoMA garden, having the naked participants strike poses modelled on sculptures by Picasso and Giacometti. The most ‘Kusama-esque’ episode, however, took place in Italy in 1966. Although she had not been invited to the Venice Biennale, she turned up anyway and arranged 1,500 mirrored spheres (Narcissus Garden) in front of the Italian pavilion; she then attempted to sell them to visitors for two dollars each under a sign reading: ‘Your Narcissism for Sale’. The organisers intervened and put a stop to the sale.

Twenty-seven years later, in 1993, the Biennale welcomed her back; this time, Kusama had been officially invited to represent Japan. Between these two events lies a less spectacular chapter in her story: having returned permanently to Japan in 1973, she went through a long period during which the international art world seemed almost to have forgotten her. From 1977, she chose to live in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, leaving regularly to work in her nearby studio. She painted, wrote novels and poetry, and continued to produce art. Then, as happens not only in fairy tales, the tide turned. From the 1990s onwards, Kusama was gradually rediscovered, and in the 21st century this rediscovery became recognition, and subsequently a mass phenomenon. Exhibitions began to draw queues stretching for kilometres, and monumental pumpkins appeared in museums and public spaces around the world. The Infinity Rooms became attractions capable of rivalling concerts and theme parks. Then came Louis Vuitton. Polka dots on handbags, shop windows, robots modelled on her likeness, and a giant inflatable Kusama leaning against the façade on the Champs-Élysées – somewhere between pop art and cringe. The artist who wanted to erase the self had become a global logo.

It is easy to dismiss this transformation as yet another victory of the market over art, but that would be simplistic and unfair to Kusama. Everything was already there from the outset; repetition serves to eliminate the hierarchy between original and copy. One point is worth another; one sphere reflects another; one mirror produces another mirror. The image can continue indefinitely. Kusama had invented a potentially viral form of art many decades before social media. Instagram has not betrayed the Infinity Rooms; it has simply discovered just how compatible they are with its own logic. There remains, of course, a tragicomic contradiction. Entering a Kusama room theoretically means losing oneself in infinity; in contemporary practice, however, it means waiting one’s turn, stepping inside for a few seconds and ensuring that one is perfectly visible in the photograph. Self-obliteration has thus become self-documentation.

The ‘self’ that Kusama sought to dissolve has returned, multiplied into millions of images. Perhaps that is fine too. Perhaps it is precisely this contradiction that explains her success better than the polka dots. Kusama belongs, in fact, to that extremely rare category of artists capable of being simultaneously challenging and popular, pathological and decorative, radical and commercial. She was an outsider and a superstar, forgotten and omnipresent, a voluntary resident of a psychiatric hospital and the star of the shop windows of one of the world’s largest luxury firms. Above all, she possessed something that no communication strategy can fabricate retrospectively: an entirely personal vision of the world. She continued to paint right up until her death, repeating more or less the same process: one dot next to another, then another, and so on. Taken individually, almost nothing; repeated long enough, infinity.