Yayoi Kusama’s entoptic art – By Klaus Podoll, Frank Schneider, Takuji Hayashi

A new exhibition of the work of Japan’s premiere artist, Yayoi Kusama, appears at Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland, 6 April – 16 May 2004.

Yayoi Kusama’s entoptic art

By Klaus Podoll, Frank Schneider, Takuji Hayashi

 

 

 

 

 

A new exhibition of the work of Japan’s premiere artist, Yayoi Kusama, appears at Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland, 6 April – 16 May 2004. The origin of Kusama’s artistic universe of dots, nets and accumulating patterns has prompted many interpretations both from the artist herself, who celebrates her 75th birthday this year, and from fellow artists, art critics and art historians (http://www.yayoi-kusama.jp/). In her essay "Entoptic phenomena in contemporary art, " which examines the impact of various types of visual phenomena arising from the central nervous system upon Paleolithic art, indigenous art all over the world, and contemporary art, Norwegian artist Jorunn Monrad wrote: "Yayoi Kusama, who has been defined as Japan’s most influential artist, has painted clearly entoptic paintings since the fifties – depicting a unifying field of dots or nets – confirming their hallucinatory origin. Critics have variously ascribed her work to minimalism, feminism, obsessivism, surrealism, art brut, pop, and abstract expressionism. She herself rejects all categorizing. Her work has apparently not been associated with entoptics until now. That she has been associated with art brut may be attributable to her well-known mental condition; it is hard to imagine any other explanation, given the evident differences between her paintings and this genre. Regardless of her source of inspiration, Kusama’s art is executed with lucidity, constancy and patience… Artists like Kusama are not concerned with how their works interact with the spectator; they merely recreate certain hallucinatory effects" (http://www.entopticart.com/).

In fact, Yayoi Kusama never made a secret of the fact that she considered her illness was the major driving force of her art. "It started from hallucination," was the first sentence of her 1975 autobiographical essay entitled The struggle and wanderings of my soul (SWS). However, there exists a great confusion among physicians and art critics in regards to the diagnosis of Kusama’s illness and the origin of her hallucinations. Does she suffer from schizophrenia, as first suspected by Japanese psychiatrist Shiho Nishimaru in a lecture during a 1952 congress of the Japanese Association for Neurology and Psychiatry? Or is she afflicted with obsessive compulsive disorder due to traumatic experiences in childhood, as seems to have been taken for granted by most art critics and apparently also by the artist herself? Although the artist has been treated ever since 1977 in a mental hospital in Tokyo, no communications have been published by her doctors (including authorities as Yoshihito Tokuda, Chairman of the Japanese Society for Psychopathology of Expression). It is no surprise that there have even been rumors that her "mental illness" is a fake publicity stunt.

More clarity can only be achieved by a careful analysis of the self-experienced phenomena which Kusama has described in a most precise and subtle way. The artist has recorded her visual symptoms which have recurred ever since her childhood: "I was often troubled by a thin silk-like greyish-coloured veil that came to envelope me. On the day this happened to me, people receded far away from me and looked small" (SWS). During these episodes, she experienced geometric hallucinations of nets and the visual illusion of teleopsia whereby objects appear further away, corresponding to her painting Accumulation of Corpses, 1950. She felt like being separated by a curtain from reality and people. She was informed by her doctors that she was suffering from depersonalization phenomena as symptom of obsessive compulsive disorder. However, a closer scrutiny of Kusama’s descriptions of her visual symptoms, which can be found in many variations in her poems, novellas, and in her autobiographical novel Infinity Nets from 2002, suggests that the artist was haunted from her childhood by paroxysmal cerebral visual disturbances – i.e. entoptic phenomena, to use Jorunn Monrad’s nomenclature, which can occur as visual aura symptoms of migraine.

This is also true for the recurring visual symptom which started in Kusamas’s childhood and which motivated her installations (Driving Image 1965/66) and performances (Kusama’s Self-Obliteration 1968), transcending the boundaries of the canvas. Commenting on her experiences as teenager, Kusama wrote: "One day I was looking at a red flower-patterned table-cloth on a table, and then when I looked up, I saw the ceiling, the window panes and the pillars completely covered with the same red flower patterns. With the whole room, my whole body and the whole universe covered entirely with the flower patterns, I would self-obliterate… and be reduced to nothingness" (SWS). This is a clear description of a type of visual perseveration in space first described by the British neurologist Macdonald Critchley in 1951, the so-called "illusory visual spread" (http://www3.oup.co.uk/jnls/supplements/braini/hdb/Volume_74/Issue_03/740267. sgm.abs.html), which also affected Kusama’s perception of her own body and thus created a feeling of "self-obliteration." This is celebrated in Kusama’s art as the spiritual experience of the loss of individual identity by becoming one with the forms of the universe.

The diagnostical classification of Kusama’s inspiring hallucinations as a symptom of mental illness has placed her work into the field of so-called "art brut" or "outsider art," despite the obvious phenomenal differences between her works and those produced by artists suffering from psychosis, as previously noted by Jorunn Monrad. The present re-assessment of Kusama’s illness suggests that the artist neither suffers from schizophrenia nor from obsessive compulsive disorder, as has hitherto been assumed. According to the present findings, migraine aura experiences, anxiety, and depression may account for all known facts of her medical history as well as for the imagery of her artistic universe of dots, nets and accumulations. Thus Kusama’s art may be labelled "outsider art" with no more and no less justification than the art of other great artists who used migraine experiences as a central source of inspiration: Lewis Carroll (http://www.migraines.org/new/newsalic.htm), Giorgio de Chirico (http://www.aerzteblatt.de/ v4/archiv/artikel.asp?id=33328), Sarah Raphael (https://nyartsmagazine.net/bbs2/messages/ 1228.html), to name just a few whose work has been reconsidered from a neuroesthetical perspective in recent years. Obviously, with her "outsider art," Yayoi Kusama is in good company. There are good reasons to believe that her work will belong to the enduring icons of 20th century art.