As a teenager with severe depression, I began searching for the meaning of life—a famously fruitful search. I came out as queer fairly early on and felt alienated from other teenagers. The straight people around me didn’t seem to be struggling with the same questions about sexuality, gender, and life. I wanted to know why the expectations of me as a young woman were so limiting, especially since I grew up in a religious, southern environment. I wanted to know why my queerness provoked so much hostility from people. I wanted to know why I felt so out of place all the time and what the point of being human was. I felt increasingly isolated in my experience, which led to issues with my mental health. I was struggling with the human condition, but I wasn’t the first person to do this. It seemed like someone, somewhere, might have answers. I desperately consumed music and art, longing for someone to tell me why everything felt so awful all the time and what I could do about it.
During my search, I came across the painting “花朵” or “The Flowers” by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. The contrast of light and dark, femininity and masculinity, fragility and strength impressed me. The softness, the beauty of the dots on flower petals: an objectively unnatural image that somehow looks quite right. Her work felt like a kind of answer to my questions.
Kusama is a 94-year-old sculptor and painter who works with polka dots and mirrors, creating some of the most striking artwork I’ve ever seen. She herself is a striking woman, known for her eclectic, often polka-dotted outfits and her bright red bob.
When we asked Kusama about her love of polka dots, she said, “Our Earth is just a polka dot among millions of stars in the cosmos. Polka dots are a path to infinity. When we erase nature and our bodies with polka dots, we become part of the unity of our environment.” I love this concept: the erasure of nature that connects us and makes us all one big polka dot, rather than leaving us in our fragments.
Kusama grew up in Matsumoto, Japan. In her twenties, she moved to America. She spent the 1960s in New York’s avant-garde art scene. Her work and style inspired artists such as Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, and Joseph Cornell. She was involved in performance art and music. She opened a gay club called Kusama’s Omophile Kompany. She wrote to Richard Nixon, offering him sex if he would end the Vietnam War. She participated in political movements and created protest art.
She then returned to Japan in the mid-1970s and had herself admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where she still lives today. Her studio is located nearby and she continues to create art about feminism, sex, sexuality, destruction, politics and more. She has lived in the facility for 45 years, exactly half of her life.
The idea of living an impactful, creative life while battling serious mental illness has always resonated with me. Kusama continued to create internationally acclaimed art while in the psychiatric hospital. She painted The Flowers in 1983, meaning she was living in the facility full-time while she created the flowers that would influence me around the world 35 years later.
Roland Barthes’ theory of the “death of the author” refers to the idea that the author of a work is considered “dead” or irrelevant to the interpretation of his text. Barthes posits that an author cannot determine the meaning of his own work; he can simply produce art and leave it for the world to see. He goes on to explain that a reader would be making a mistake if they analyzed a literary work in the context of an artist’s life. In his text “What is an Author?” Michael Foucault presents a similar idea. Foucault begins with a discussion of the historical context of authorship, tracing its development from ancient Greece to modern times. He notes that in the past, the author was often viewed as merely a transmitter of divine knowledge, rather than the original creator. However, as literature became more secular, the figure of the author became more important. Foucault argues that this has led to a narrow approach to literary interpretation. Like Barthes, Foucault believes that we should focus on the text itself as well as the broader cultural and historical contexts in which it was produced.
I’ve always struggled with this concept. Not in the sense that I separate the art from the artist, like a culture clash, but in the sense that I prefer an artist’s background and intent to shape their artwork. I don’t deny that historical context is relevant to literary and artistic analysis. But as an art consumer, I have to admit that knowing an author’s background often strengthens my emotional connection to a work. Maybe that’s a huge betrayal of my English degree, but that’s how I feel.
I’ve always looked for art by creatives who also use their art form to process their queerness, their femininity, their mental illness, or all of the above. Kusama’s flowers and her polka dots mean more to me knowing her health history. It means more to me knowing that she was also political, social, and funny. It would be difficult to evaluate my relationship to her art without considering my knowledge of her life and the context it brings to her work.
Kusama is often quoted as saying, “If it weren’t for art, I would have killed myself a long time ago.” As someone who asked questions of art, it was comforting to know that this stranger on the other side of the world had been looking for the same answers. And most importantly, she seemed to have found them.
Kusama’s life inspired me to believe that even if I struggled with mental illness for the rest of my life, I could still have a chance to create meaningful art.
A few years ago, her work “All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins” came to the art museum in my hometown of Dallas. This work was one of Kusama’s iconic Infinity Rooms: small rooms with sculptures and mirrored walls that make the art appear “infinite.”
I had booked my ticket for the exhibition well in advance. When we arrived at the museum, my friend and I waited in a long line that snaked through the halls of the museum. Without context, it would have looked bizarre: a line of people waiting to enter a small white cube in the middle of a large, empty room.
We only had two minutes to enter the piece. As we walked in, I felt a nervous awe, the same feeling I had when I entered church as a child.
The tiny room was filled with bright yellow, polka dot pumpkins that went on forever in the countless mirrors. And we were gone forever, too.
I was erased. I was swallowed up by infinite dots on infinite pumpkins. In this little box, I too became a speck in the vastness of the universe.
Photo courtesy of the author
