Art

Yayoi Kusama can be described as one of the most dominant artists in Japan in the 2960s and also in the modern era. She was born in Matsumo in 1929. Her desire for drawing and painting led her to plot her escape from Japan with the help of art magazine after entering the black market American embassy into the seams of her clothes. She then latter arrived the united states in New York City in the year 1958.  There is when she began to develop her career as an artist (Malcolm, 2003). Her artwork was experienced when she infiltrated the Museum of the Modern arts sculpture garden with a bunch of naked co-conspirators to perform her so called Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead.

In the United States she showed a lot of large paintings, soft sculptures and environmental sculptures by using electric lights and mirrors. In the late 1960s she had showed some many happenings that included body painting festivals, fashion shows and anti-war demonstrations. Then she launched some of her media related activities such as film production and news paper publications. In the year 1968 she produced a film titled the kusamas self-operation that had won the Second Meryland Film Festival and also won the Ann Ardor Festival (Farris, 1998).

She returned to Japan in the year 1973. There she produced a number of novels and anthologies while still continuing with her work of producing and showing the art works. She wrote a novel that won the Tenth Literary Award for the New Writers from the monthly magazine of Yasei Jidai (Pamela, 1999). The title of the novel was  The hustlers Grotto of Christopher Street.

She began to create open-air sculptures in 1994. This is the time that she went on and produced the Fukuoka Municipal Museum of Art, the Kirishima Open-Air museum, Matsumoto City Museum of Art, the Bunka-mura on the Benesse of Art, and finally the Fukuoka Municipal Museum of Art. In the 1966 she began to show her works at the main galleries in New York. There was a solo show that was held in the same year that won the Best Gallaries show in 199596 and the Best Gallery show in the year 199697 from the international Association of Art Critics in the year 1996 (Lumpkin, 2000).

When Yayoi Kusama arrived in New York, she realized that she had to market herself. That is the time that she reclined nude on the beds of the phalluses for the photographers, but hers was just a mere self-promotion. Therefore, her relentless work was able to replace the self that she could not control with a new self as she describes it this tortured her nameless dreads and the hallucinations (Mario, 2001). So whenever she worked in her artwork she used to photograph them throughout her works.

Though she had spent some time in Europe for a decade and that she was seemingly forgotten in the United States, she later moved to The Hague in 1973. After this she returned to Japan where she committed herself voluntarily to a psychiatric hospital where she continued living there while commuting herself to Tokyo.
In 1989, her appearance in the Venice Biennale brought about the rise in the interest in her college and installation work, especially in America where a number of young artists were influenced by her works.
In the Kusamas sculptures, the qualities of her paintings were expressed in three dimensions. Some of the household furniture, womens clothes, and high-heeled shoes of the women were covered by the bristling fields of the fiber-stuffed phallic forms that are painted in monochrome white, silver, or bronze. The other objects are covered with macaroni pasta and also painted with gold (Farris, 1998).

Among Yayoi Kusamas works is the infinitely net painting. She described it as the paintings that are without the beginning, end or the center. These nets represent the accumulation of the connected, though individually applied, crescent-shaped brush strokes of a think paint. The marks show a curving in the same direction that is gradually shifting up, down, left and right. They arrange themselves into a congregation that enlarge and go out across the painting. The comparison that is close to their structure can be found in nature where the visible matter clusters around the invisible points of gravity.

The result is a design that is not random or systematic (Malcolm, 2003). A clear view of the Kusama paintings is that one of a river in which the rise, fall, and direction of the glistering surface is being made by the riverbeds topography.

In close examination of the painting is the diffusion of the opulent monochrome paint that is interrupted systematically by openings in the net that are very small, the organic variations of the circles and ovals through which there is the canvas underlying. On the other hand the accurate and perceptual exchange that occurs between the materiality of the painted net and the pictorial space is the heart of the infinity nets.

It therefore follows that the effects of the infinity nets by Kusama are complex and also simple. This is because it is essentially produced by the combination of two parallel lines that are somehow close to one another and that also there are some points that merge at the surface plane and others that emerge diverge at a slight distance from the surface place. Therefore, this interaction between the background and the net causes her work to be alternating between the infinity of the pictorial space and the presence of the material surface (Lumpkin, 2000).

The Kusamas infinity net painting is described as aesthetic and spiritual affinities that have abstraction expressionism. These paintings and gestures are grand, boisterous and directional and also they are unpretentious and repetitive without relinquishing their individuality. The infinity nets move to a more direct perceptual experience from pictorialism which is a painting that suggests a vicarious experience.

Therefore, this is a black-on-black painting that boldly interprets all the pictorial spaces and that confronts the viewer with an abundant opticality and a trapped materiality of the paint itself.  The paint shows its iconic stillness by using the square format. In addition to that by considering the fact that the impasto of each brush mark, that takes both the light, of which is both natural and artificial, makes us to read the painting as something that is having an expanse of darkness (Pamela, 1999). The various aspects of the paintings surface will assert themselves when the light condition changes over a given duration of time.

Another painting that was done by Yayoi Kusama is that one of the Women Waiting for Spring. This showed a series of white silkscreen print canvases that are fifty in number, each which is being printed in an edition of five. These images are seen to be moving between the abstraction and the figuration that include the female faces, child like bodies and the long-lashed eyes that appear in the profile. This painting showed a grid like presentation of the of a salon style method of display that emphasizes about the enormity of the series of labor and also the labor intensity of these womens practice.

This image shows a large number of black and white canvases that are displayed evenly. In other words she said that that means the environment which is an attempt to create a world by showing the canvases that are rectangular-shaped (Farris, 1998). In her painting of the Women Waiting for Spring she layered a multiple of feminine profiles that appear not to have the differentiating features such as the colored hair, dimples, or even the eye brows. Instead of including these, she instead filled the profile with heavily patterned and densely accumulated eyes that form a blanket covers the faces suggesting a universal female identity. When doing all her paintings she first of all used a marker pen and then the works are then transferred to the silkscreen for printing. She did this in order to make the paintings durable and conservable.

Yayoi Kusama had a diversified range of paintings in which she did. Among the most influential painting of them is the painting of the Whilst Walking Piece.  This image shows Kusama traversing the streets of New York in the traditional Japanese dress. Her original work was documented in a 24 color slides that are having images of the unfolding performance (Mario, 2001).

Here she draws the attention of her own isolation by being able to contrast the exotic, colorful kimono that were opposing the faded streets, bullrings, and the suburb of the city of New York in the United States. From this picture drawing, there have also been some highlights of the issues of gender and race which were the aspects of identity that led to an increasingly difficulty in her success in the art world.

Therefore the Whilst Walking Piece is well understood as an insight into what was felt by the artist as isolation and also can be considered as a commentary on a cultural stereotype. Here Kusama had taken the role of the exotic, oriented woman in the work and from her femininity she is seen to be around the streets and under an umbrella cover of flowers (Lumpkin, 2000). This practice uses satire to bring about the role of a feminine character and also on the other hand uses it to promote herself as an artist and also mainly in the promotion of her artwork.

On the image she brings about a distinction between a grocery shop front of the various advertisements and what she embodies as a delicate foreign woman, here her character is bought about to be against the mass grid that can produced in the supermarket  advertising. In addition to that there is another still that she appears to be crying hence covering her face with the sleeves of the Kimono that she leans against a harsh and grided brick wall (Pamela, 1999).

The Waking Piece moreover, shows how her personality and the identity as becoming as an integral part in the art practice that has on the other hand continued to be explored throughout her various performances and happenings and also her career. From her artistic works she is seen to be an example of an artist that deals with the successive struggles of the living and working in the foreign country and environment at the same time successfully examining the role of the artist in the provision of the social and commentary.

Though Yayoi Kasuma might be getting older she is deemed to be enthusiastic about the creation of the artwork. Her consistent approach to the work of art has extended a great influence on the art of work in the United States and the European artists, as well as other artists. Her ever inexhaustible energies continue to evolve throughout her lifetime beyond the limit of her body as she says (Malcolm, 2003). The incredible beauty beyond humanity for which she says love forever had been struggling thought her life with an everlasting language.

Kusama describes herself as being an obsessive artist this is because her work shows a fixation with the repetition, pattern and accumulation. Apart from holding an integral and complex role in the art history and also in the society, she has been highly influential to the society and other artists and designers (Farris, 1998). From her peculiar perception, originality and uncompromising vision has brought about her respect as the most acclaimed contemporary artist today.

Yayol Kusamas passion for the dots does not arise from the pop influence but from the sensitive observation she had developed for the world. Her ink drawing that was executed before she arrived in the US shows a random black dot on the sheet of a yellow paper and marks the origin of the infinitely net that inspired the memories of the a red flower pattern  dissolving and accumulating, profiteering and separating.

There is that perspective that Yayoi Kusama is being fanatical with sex and that the rounded, conical forms that comes from the surface are arbitrary phallic. This is less expected from a female artist as it is being viewed as the male art critics writing. There is a great effort to show her as the Pop artist, a sixties icon that involves love with things that are synthetic (Pamela, 1999).

In the 1960s the media accused her committing the artistic charlatanry. This is because that her happenings a combination of body paintings, nude dressings and orgiastic confusion. The vocabulary that she might have appropriately described was not yet available. The fact that the numerous public actions in which the artist was involved, the relentless expense of her own resources had been argued to have led to the emotional breakdown in the early 1970s. This physical breakdown and the emotional effort that was required by the performance artists did not command the respect it deserved.

There have been some critics about her work as being mnimalistic, feminism, obsessive, surrealism, art brut, and abstract expressed. In reference to this her work has not been with any close association with the entoptics till the present time (Mario, 2001). It is though bard to be able to imagine that there is any other explanation that is brings any evident reasons for between her paintings and the genre.

She is therefore, one of the female artists that have motivated the society and also influencing women in the utilization of their talents.