Issue #40
Last Update August 3, 2005
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ARTS Yayoi Kusama by Gert Innsry The Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach is holding a retrospective of the works of Yayoi Kusama, a Japanese artist who moved to the US in 1957 and worked in Seattle and New York for 20-odd years until her return to Japan, where she continued to work despite a diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder and fear that had her returning each night to a psychiatric hospital. The retrospective covers more than 50 years of her work.
At first glance, the collection on exhibit seems to mirror the silliness and triviality that have given contemporary art a reputation of unimportance among museumgoers. Then, the more effective pieces begin to draw you in, and you realize that among the dross (works that make an intellectual statement but have no visual worth) are pieces of great subtlety, grace, visual impact and, sometimes, humor.
Kusama does not restrict herself to one medium; the exhibit contains paintings, sculptures, collages, freestanding visual environments, performance pieces video and photographed, and books of poetry. Except for the performance pieces, whose representations seemed inadequate to capture the original experiences (and the poetry, which I did not have time to look at) each of the other media had its successes and failures. The common theme in all of Kusama's work seems to be repetition.
In an amazing work like Infinity Stars (1955, 9.5x17 ft.), various-sized small white circles on a grey/black background are connected by radiating threads that look like magnetic lines of force, or the Golgi bodies that pull the chromosomes apart in cell division. The effect is an almost three-dimensional array of elements with subtle densities that pull the view into the work.
Many other good pieces (especially a ten sculpture grouping called Statues of Venus Obliterated by Infinity Nets (1998)) confuse figure and ground, in the Statues of Venus case by placing each of the 7 foot tall Venus de Milo copies (brightly painted, with an irregular patter of dots in a contrasting color) in front of a 7 foot square canvas with the same background and foreground as the statue.
There are quite a few works that are aggregations of hundreds of stuffed fabric tubes completely covering an object (in one case a sofa). The stuffed fabric elements look variously like tentacles , villi, or, in one case, penises. On the whole, these are Kusama's least successful works. They tend to be unpleasant to look at and uninteresting in concept.
The gems in this show outnumber the losers, and the view is well-repaid for attending. The contrast between this retrospective exhibit of an often groundbreaking artist and the derivative, uninspiring Yoko Ono retrospective last summer at SF MOMA is the contrast between a talented, if troubled artist and a less talented, though more famous wannabe.
The Yayoi Kusama exhibit will be at the Bass Museum of Art through May 11.
The Bass Museum of Art, 2121 Park Avenue, Miami Beach FL 33139.
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