Yayoi Kusama at the Tate Modern

Even at 82 years old, Japanese pop artist Yayoi Kusama is one of the most vibrant creative minds on and off the canvas. With a career that has taken her from rural Japan to the birth of the New York art scene, Kusama has amassed a ridiculous little black book of collaborators and inspirers including Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell and Donald Judd over her nine-decade career.

My love of Kusama is an inevitable attraction – I love bold prints and patterns, Kusama has spent much of her life’s work obsessing over the creation of patterns so out of control they escape the canvas, seeping onto the walls, floors and ceilings. Obsession is certainly the operative word for Kusama, self-institutionalised since the early ’70s, using her mental illness and compulsions as an inspiration and driving force behind her art. In this staggering retrospective at the Tate Modern, we are granted access to Kusama’s world through the paintings, films, sculptures and large-scale installations that earned her unrivalled reputation as a one of the foremost female conceptual artists.

The Accumulation sculptures introduce many of the key themes and psychologies that appear throughout Kusama’s work, namely the phallic form. Juxtaposing gender stereotypes, Accumulation marks her first experiment with sculpture, attaching hundreds of fabric phalluses to everyday objects – coats, chairs, kettles – playing the domestic femininity of crafts and homeware against overtly masculine imagery.

Exploding the phallic theme, One Thousand Boats Show is Kusama’s first full room installation, sees an image of a phallus-encrusted rowing boat reproduced on the walls, floor and ceiling, as if refracted from the sculpture itself, placed at the centre of the room, giving you full immersion in her idea.

Sex is a blatant concern, and interest, particularly in her work throughout the ’60s with her Body Festivals. For Kusama, the body is art, a canvas to be painted on, viewed and celebrated, as demonstrated in her performance works, including Kusama’s Self Obliteration, the now cult arthouse film by Jud Yalkut.

While beautiful, the proliferation of these obsessive behaviours throughout her art is a reminder of the internal struggles Kusama endures and that we are essentially looking at her most exposed self as the canvas becomes her therapist couch. Kusama is regularly photographed in front of her work – often wearing matching outfits – proving her true commitment to the work, or perpetuating her obsessive need to ensure control and ownership by placing herself within the work.

For me the true champions of this retrospective are the infamous room installations, unparalleled by anything you’re likely to have seen before. I’m Here But Nothing, is a fully furnished living room, complete with television, but instead of an inviting place to relax, Kusama welcomes us to her hallucinatory world, covering the UV-lit room in fluorescent polka dots on every object and surface. It’s disorientating to say the least, but once the eyes adjust you can appreciate the intricacy but simultaneous randomness of her work. Or at least to us it’s random…

The piece de resistance of the exhibition has to be the Infinity Mirrored Room, a spatially small but profoundly affective room lined with mirrors and light installations so entrancing that the attendant had to practically drag me out for holding up the line.

Accompanied by an extensive collection of journals and photo collages, these breathtaking installations and large scale works make up a frankly unmissable exhibition, moving beyond a retrospective on the walls (and other surfaces) to give access to the woman behind, opening our eyes to her various cultures, her passions and, of course, her demons.

Yayoi Kusama is showing until June 5, 2012 at:

Tate Modern
Bankside
Southwark
SE1 9TG

Image: Yayoi Kusama  1965. Courtesy of Victoria Miro Gallery, London and Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo © Yayoi Kusama, courtesy Yayoi Kusama studio inc. Photo: Eikoh Hosoe