If you haven't 'spotted' Kusama yet, to take a cheesy quote from
Vanilla Sky (
Abres Los Ojos if that's more your bag) : OPEN YOUR EYES. Kusama's been rockin' and shockin' the art, film and design work with her "obsessive art" since the mid-70's.
Despite elegantly battling a mental illness for many years, Yayoi Kusama's surreal performance art and installations are genius: think 'step, and repeat' to the power of infinity, and you get some idea of Kusama's brilliant grasp of repetition.
Yayoi Kusama, Soul Under the Moon One day in the mid-70's Kusama started covering walls and floors and anything else she could find with polka dots, and she's not stopped since, taking her outlandish work out onto the streets, onto the bridges and into the parks, even painting the odd naked hippie.
Yayoi Kusama, Alice in Wonderland Happening, Alice in Wonderland statue, Central Park, New York, 1968.
Every time she busts onto the scene: whether in the name of art, fashion, architecture or design, Kusama calls it a "happening": a verbaliciously apt description indeed. Her stuff's been likened to Pollick and Rothko, and she's buddies with Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, sharing gallery space with them more than a few times.
Yayoi Kusama "Anti-War" Naked Happening and Flag Burning at Brooklyn Bridge 1968
These days, Kusama spends the majority of her time in a Japanese mental hospital, with her studio closeby.
She claims the majority of her work comes from her hallucinations. If my world looked like this on a regular basis, I'd be flipping out, too.
Yayoi Kusama, Fireflies on the Water (2005)She's got a doco out there somewhere called
I adore myself: keep your eyes peeled, hopefully it'll pop up in a festival programme at some point. In the meantime, if you really wanna get inside Kusama's crazy mind, check out Kusama's 1967 film
Kusama's Self Obliteration, that documents the nude 'happenings' of her 60's work, and has been shown at several international film festivals to great acclaim. Definitely one for the imagist avant-garde film fans.