haters will hate

 

Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Nets

Whitney Museum
July 12 - September 30, 2012

To reduce Kusama’s work as a symptom of her mental illness is another extension of the long familiar, bitter response to modern art, “my two year old can do that.” The dismissive commentary essentially contests the very notion of authorship of a particular form that does not appear to result from extensive “artistic” training. The urge is a powerful one, especially when the motif is so common and the artist herself has admitted that she has had hallucinations of dots and flowers ever since she was a child. Other people have testified that they, too, see dots. But the difference: while one hallucinating 15-year-old is screaming for her mother in terror because the “dots are going to get her,” Kusama uses her dots to communicate more than her own fears and obsessions.

The dismissal ultimately has in part to do with the source of her dots; but to focus only on the source is to deny the significance of any kind of art, which is how the artist uses her sources. Kusama’s use of her dots indicate the artist’s awareness of how they have functioned for her and their potential for others: as an “obliterating net.” The complexity in the these dots arises from their role as a screen that simultaneously protects and provides a view of the other side. Even if hallucinating infinite dots is a defense to all that is fearsome in the world outside the sick patient, manipulating the visual phenomenon so that it is no longer clear what is being protected from what (inside/outside ambiguity: Kusama’s nets sometimes seem to catch the world, not withhold her from it) while simultaneously giving a view of this world (a cat is still recognizable as a cat even if Kusama has covered it with dots) is clearly an artistic gesture that reaches beyond the psychological erasure of trauma. Kusama does not erase; she marks in order to see and confront. And this she generously shares with the rest of the world.

Her dangerously decorative paintings from 2009 to 2010 and recent collaboration with Louis Vuitton that brands her dots make our job more difficult. But the critic must always be generous and see, first and foremost, what is in front, then weigh the relevance of information that lies outside of the object.