Yayoi Kusama’s Obliteration Room: Community Building in Action
Introduction
Throughout Yayoi Kusama’s (1929-) career, her theory of “obliteration” has influenced her work in different mediums and forms. Obliteration, as defined by Kusama, describes a practice derived from obsession in which Kusama finds herself or others literally and metaphorically engulfed in patterning. Kusama considers the art of “obliteration” a method to confront her own psychological complexes directly, citing her mental health as the origin of her artistic practice.[1] The Obliteration Room, an installation that has taken many iterations since 2002, is one of Kusama’s demonstrations of the named theory, and it is how existing scholarship understands it. However, The Obliteration Room’s unique transformation from space for children to adults and its long-lived popularity offer a more complex picture of the dynamics between the artist and the participant of a participation-based artwork. My capstone argues that The Obliteration Room is an example of “censored play” in which Kusama’s agency ensures that The Obliteration Room stays in line with the abstracted nature of her obliteration art while also allowing the participants to share a sense of community through actively decorating the white wall with multicolored stickers and sharing their participation on social media, though it might well be illusional or even false. My capstone departs from psychoanalysis of Kusama, as scholars have traditionally discussed her in relation to, and instead focuses on how she chooses to present herself through her interviews and books.[2]
This capstone also maintains that the first Obliteration Room not only plays a critical role in various subsequent iterations of The Obliteration Room but also contributes to Kusama’s resurgence in popularity in the 2000s. Since 2002, The Obliteration Room has toured 18 countries and been displayed at 31 venues with a total attendance of over 6,242,000 people.[3] Over the 20 years that the work has been exhibited, its appearance and meaning have evolved but retained several constants—namely white-painted walls, furniture, and decor. Initially meant for children, the work has become adult-sized and focused over the years that it has been staged. Participants are given one sheet of solid color dot stickers and are told by museum staff to place the stickers “anywhere” in the room or on the furniture. All but the first audiences that enter are met by pre-existing contributions to the project in the form of colored stickers already plastering the walls, floor, fixtures, and furniture. Each installation is torn down after the exhibition is over. The furniture is not shared between institutions, and every institution is responsible for restaging and purchasing items for their new iteration of the work.[4] However, since these installations were organized during a revolutionary era of information technology, with the popularity of mobile phones and social media, they found an eternal life on social media.
The seemingly free-for-manipulation Obliteration Room is, in fact, a “censored play.” The communicated rules of the installation vary by the museum, but always include a constant underlying implication that the staff is allowed to remove stickers that present safety hazards or break the verbalized rules and that the stickers are not allowed to leave the space. Kusama’s overarching “hand” permeates the space as the rules of the space, the space itself, and the colors of stickers are all determined in advance by the artist and the museum. [5] This results in the formation of an artwork that can be considered “open,” or an artwork wherein the participant understands that his/her gestures contribute to the construction of the work.[6] It is also “open” in the sense that the museum visitors feel that they can interpret and add to the piece in any way they desire.[7] As long as the artist’s instructions are hidden from the audience, the work appears totally “open” to the participants. In reality, it is not.[8] Through analyzing how the artist and hosting museums monitor and regulate the participants, it becomes clear that the artist, acting in the role of a gardener, prunes and trims unwanted leaves and branches to monitor what this temporary community grows. While Kusama’s intervention, in a sense, blocked the participant’s agency, access to social media granted them a digital method to document their active participation. Moreover, the vast number of these posts formed a virtual, cult-like, community that helped the publicity of The Obliteration Room.
Capstone Structure
Part One focuses on the first iteration of The Obliteration Room commissioned by the Queensland Art Gallery for the Children’s Art Center (QAGOMA), where it was meant for children’s hands-on interaction. I argue that since the room was first conceived by Kusama for children, it then has artistic elements and goals catered to a child’s audience. I first contextualize the installation by embedding it into her artistic trajectory and comparing the realized installation to Kusama’s initial drawing. Then, moving to the design of participation, I discuss how the installation is meant to be experienced, including rules and what the audience can expect coming into the space. My analysis demonstrates that The Obliteration Room shares similar concepts with her earlier practice; her early works, like the Happenings, specifically require audiences to physically engage with both her and her artwork What makes the first Obliteration Room stand out among Kusama’s work is its participants – children, which enables me to discuss Kusama’s work in relation to the notion of “play” as it correlates with Kusama’s artwork in the 1960s, in which she first experimented with community building art. I conclude Part One with a discussion of the democratic merit of a space in which individuals are asked to physically touch and add to a collective work under the surveillance of museum staff.
Part Two investigates the two different meanings of community that come together in Kusama’s installation. I define “community” in The Obliteration Room as the combined sticker remnants left by the participants over the course of the entire exhibition of the installation and to the physical bodies of the participants in the space. I also discuss the ways in which The Obliteration Room has changed over 20 years in design and structure and examine how these changes relate to Yayoi Kusama’s increased popularity in the 21st century. I argue that since the work is no longer for children, it is critical to contextualize how the piece has changed both in physical format and in the eyes of the audience. The artist’s rules have become stricter and turned the installation into an explicit “controlled play.” Meanwhile, the adult participants are no longer naïve viewers and now have preexisting expectations of participating in a Kusama-branded space, taking pictures and social media content away from the art space, allowing free advertisement for both the hosting museum and Kusama’s personal brand. While the participant’s enthusiasm in bringing Kusama’s work to the digital world coincides with her resurgence in the early 2000s, but the evolution of Kusama’s artwork in type and scale over the past 20 years is also significant in that it equated to a type of institutional critique in which she “obliterates” the white space of the gallery, with The Obliteration Room as one of the earliest renditions.
[1] Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama / Yayoi Kusama translated by Ralph McCarthy, English ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011): 47.
Although many have discussed Yayoi Kusama’s mental health in relation to her artistic practices, I find it reductive and will only apply it when examining how she publicly portrays herself and in her definition of “obliteration” as used in the title of The Obliteration Room and in her explanation of her artistic goals.
“For example, by covering my entire body with polka dots, and then covering the background with polka dots as well, I find self-obliteration.” -Kusama, Infinity Net, 47.
[2] Izumi Nakajima offers a psychoanalytic analysis of Kusama in the chapter “Yayoi Kusama between Abstraction and Pathology” in Griselda Pollock, ed., Psychoanalysis and the Image: Transdisciplinary Perspectives, New York, 2006.
[3] Personal correspondence with Jacqueline Tunny Program Coordinator Children’s Art Centre QAGOMA, Email message to author, August 22, 2023.
[4] Tunny, email message, August 4, 2023.
[5] Samantha Josephine Judina Mallett, “Preventing Predictions: The Political Possibilities of Play and Aesthetics in Contemporary Installation Art and Works by Carsten Höller and Gabriel Orozco,” (University of Alberta, 2012): 40; Umberto Eco, The Open Work(1962), trans. Anna Cancogni, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989): 104.
“As early as 1957, Marcel Duchamp in ‘The Creative Act’ stated that viewers complete works of art. Umberto Eco defines ‘Open-works’ as ‘situations created by artists that involve members of the audience as participants or even partners in the art-making process.’” –Mallet, “Preventing Predictions,” 39; There are two color sets: either a sheet of six red, orange, yellow, green, and blue stickers or a sheet of twenty-eight stickers of all the aforementioned colors plus an extra pink shade. I have not determined why one-color sheet would be chosen over the other. I can only assume that the cost and quantity of sticker sheets purchased plays a role.
[6] Steve Dietz, ‘Foreword’, in Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2010, p xiv.
[7] Hyun Jean Lee and Jeong Han Kim, “After Felix Gonzalez-Torres: The New Active Audience in the Social Media Era.” Third text 30, no. 5-6 (2016): 479-480; I am taking the phrase “open” from Lee and Kim to refer to a participatory artwork in which audiences are asked to interact with and influence the artwork.
[8] Lee and Kim, “After Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” 479-480.
In reference to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ candy spills – “The certificate describes the operative rules for the artist’s work, and according to it, the work should always be refilled with a certain number of sweets at the end of each day. For curators, keeping the work alive is a great responsibility. However, such responsibility rests with the museum, not the audience. Moreover, the certificate may not have restricted the audience’s extended participation. Also, as long as the certificate is kept hidden from the audience, there is no such specific instruction for the audience, and this is the reason why the work appeared totally open.” – Lee and Kim, “After Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” 479-480.