On Kusama

            Yayoi Kusama and her artworks are most frequently discussed in relation to her biography, mental illness diagnoses, and her Infinity Rooms, which have drawn unrivaled attention on social media. In her catalog Yayoi Kusama, Frances Morris details the timeline of Kusama’s life and work, from her start in Japan through the 2012 Yayoi Kusama Exhibition at Tate Modern. Morris’ timeline offers a biography of Kusama that tracks the different motifs in her work, specifically referencing polka dots, self-documentation, installation works, dioramas and works that involve audience participation to create a background for Kusama’s Obliteration Room. In a similar vein, Jo Applin’s essay in Morris’ book entitled “I’m Here, but Nothing: Yayoi Kusama’s Environments” elaborates on Kusama’s Environments and Happenings as they occurred in the 19607s-70s and her more recent environments of the 1990s- 2000s. Applin compares the practice of installation art to Kusama’s own lived environment, such as her voluntary move into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo and her moves between Japan and New York. Applin further discusses how she believes that Kusama’s environments function as a visualization of Kusama’s psyche in which she fears that she will “dissolve” or psychologically break down. Additionally, Applin explains that Kusama’s shared environments create a shared public communal sphere rather than an individual private world, which she then compares to the goals of Kusama’s Happenings and her “body festivals” from 1967 to 1969. Applin writes that Kusama’s installed environments, and her Happenings share a desire to bring together diverse subjects as onlookers, participants, and collaborators in a space that has been, she claims, only loosely scripted by Kusama.[1]

            Meanwhile, Heather Lenz’s 2018 documentary “Kusama – Infinity” includes interviews with several curators, Kusama’s best friends, and even the artist herself.[2] Lenz addresses more of Kusama’s experiences with her mental health and provides a more recent view of her artistic career after her major resurgence in popularity in the 2000s.[3]  The documentary offers a look back at Kusama’s childhood, her move to New York and her integration into the New York art world, and the director interviews her contemporaries and some gallery owners.

            In the book accompanying Yayoi Kusama’s first retrospective in China, Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now at the M+ in 2022, Doryun Chung discusses Kusama’s resurgence in the 1990s as a global icon in the essay “Narcissus Garden: How Yayoi Kusama Has Become a Global Cultural Icon and What She and Her Art Can Teach Us about the Way We Exist in the World Now.”[4] Chung explains that in 1993 Kusama represented Japan in the Venice Biennale which sparked her return into the global art consciousness and led to an increase in her crossovers with popular culture and well-known brands, like Issey Miyake, Louis Vuitton, Madame Tussauds, and Coca-Cola, which pushed her further into public awareness. Chung argues that the relationship between fashion and art enhances brand image, making concrete Kusama’s brand identification with her name, her signature motif, polka dots, and her now iconic face and crimson wig.

            As mentioned earlier, the longevity of The Obliteration Room is directly related to Yayoi Kusama’s careful persona branding.[5] Such phenomenon has attracted some scholarly attention, too (Fig. 36). According to Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Kusama began to challenge and confront her viewers with the limitations of Western concepts of identity and of consumption of the female body by physically incorporating her own Japanese female body into her art in the 1960s. She also argues that Kusama’s art was born from her upbringing in postwar Japan and amongst disseminated Buddhist philosophy with a goal of the loss of the self. However, Kusama insists on a non-Buddhist interpretation of her works. Foster argues that these two cultural practices inspired Kusama’s use of her own body as well as outside participants, such as in her Happenings and her film Kusama’s Self Obliteration (1967), but also in her later Obliteration Room. As such, Kusama’s work is a disruption of the Western ideas of identity, self, ethnicity, sex and sexuality, and the physical body.[6]

On “Play”

            “Play” is a key concept for my analysis of The Obliteration Room. Scholars have discussed the politics of “play” or a return to a childlike state of interaction, specifically in reference to children’s toys turned into high art meant for adults. In Samantha Mallet’s dissertation “Preventing Predictions: The Political Possibilities of Play and Aesthetics in Contemporary Installation Art and Works by Carsten Höller and Gabriel Orozco,” she discusses the politics behind “play,” a practice in which new modes of installation art can activate their viewer as an active participant and collaborator in the art piece through a return to “play” as a meaningful form of communication and community building.[7] Mallet further argues that play exists as a means to escape the predetermined rigid social hierarchy and repetitive work and can incite thinking that operates outside of societal norms and structures. Mallet’s definition of “play” not only directly relates to the original and intended audience of the work – children – but also explains why Kusama’s work became popular for adults as well as children and allows for an understanding of the social dynamics created in The Obliteration Room.

            The concept of “play” is also discussed by Donald W. Winnicott in his essay “Why Children Play,” in which he uses psychoanalysis to argue that children (and adults to some extent) play to master anxiety and impulses that can lead to anxiety when the child is not in control of a situation. Winnicott theorizes that “play” allows children to regain a form of control that would cause anxiety if not confronted and dealt with. “Play” allows children to be the managers of their own environment upon which they would normally not have influence. He goes on to explain that “play” exists within a place and a time and is much more inspired when children are amongst others who are willing and able to also be playful. Winnicott’s assertion that “play” is more enthusiastic in groups lends itself well to Kusama’s creation of community. Kusama’s installations foster play through communal creative activity in which all participants are willing and able to be playful. Additionally, Winnicott’s theories that excess anxiety in children leads to compulsive or repetitive play also connect well with The Obliteration Room, whose central activity is a communally repetitive action repeated with various sticker colors.[8] Kusama’s first Obliteration Room was meant exclusively as an art installation for children, engaging with Winnicott’s theories of play in children. It was then expanded to include adults as well. Applying Winnicott’s theories to adults would make sense as adults are often play companions to children and require their own anxieties to be managed in meaningful ways. 

            According to Jacqueline Tuny at the QAGOMA, “The artist has specified that the sticker dots should not be used to make shapes, pictures or spell out names. Staff working in The Obliteration Room are asked to discretely remove evidence of this. Stickers may also be removed for safety reasons (e.g. if they are placed on lights, exit signs, sensors and water sprinklers).”[9] The artist never explained why she did not allow representational and informational dots here, but Malina Mallos, explained that the rules only allow children to be obliterated anywhere, including themselves.[10] Melina Mallos  also discusses the QAGOMA’s embrace of children’s audiences through their Children’s Art Centre, a dedicated space for children and families. She argues that Kusama’s The Obliteration Room, specifically developed for Kids’ APT 2002 consisted of the instructions to the QAGOMA to “create a room similar to an Australian living room, furnish it with typical household items, paint the room and all its contents white, give children colored dots of various sizes, and invite them to “obliterate” the whole environment by sticking dots everywhere (including, if they wished, on themselves).”[11] Here, Mallos details the instructions that Kusama gave to the QAGOMA, which allows the museum freedom to choose the smaller details of the installation, like chairs, games, or other inclusions that they deem will make the room similar to an Australian living room.

On Community

            Kusama is mainly discussed in terms of her biography, her mental illness diagnoses, her polka dot obliteration theories, and her Infinity Rooms, but scholars have not discussed her focus on community in artworks other than in her Happenings. As I will demonstrate, the Obliteration provides an intersection between play and community, the scholars D.W. McMillan and D.M. Chavis define the term “community” as a shared feeling of belonging to both one another and to the group with the four elements of membership, influence, integration, fulfillment of needs, and a shared emotional connection.[12] On the other hand, scholar Claire Bishop, in Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, defines “community” created by art as art where the emphasis is placed on social processes rather than permanent outcomes and on a group attitude rather than on achievement.[13] As such, the “community” in The Obliteration Room can be defined in two ways. On the one hand, it refers to the combined sticker remnants left by the participants over the course of the entire exhibition of the installation. This community is only dismantled when the installation is torn down at the end of its exhibition, and the stickers are removed. It is not dismantled when the physical bodies of the participants leave the space. On the other hand, the community in The Obliteration Room may exist as a group of participants, but they are ultimately led and instructed by Kusama, who has the final authoritarian say over the results. They are allowed to make their own choices, though any choice that violates Kusama’s predetermined rules would be removed from the installation.

            The design of The Obliteration Room also begs scholarly attention to analyze it from the angle of participatory art. Participatory art or “relational aesthetics” is art in which the audience is given the structure to (temporarily) create a community through a work of art that examines the realm of human interactions.[14] Relational art, as termed by Nicolas Bourriaud, revolves around the interactions between participating parties, creating art that is a social exchange and an experience rather than a commodity.[15] Bourriaud argues that this collaboration has the potential to become a democratic space in that all participants are given the same task and asked to communicate with one another. Claire Bishop, however, disagrees and instead argues that since all participants are drawn together by an already-present common interest in art, demonstrated by their attendance at the exhibition, the space is not fully democratic.[16] Kusama’s pre-set rules make The Obliteration Room an installation that is more in line with Bishop’s definition. Kusama’s installation acts as participatory art in the way that it physically records community and asks audiences to interact with the work through a set of specific rules set by Kusama, herself.