English
In one of their first denouncing artworks the collective feminist group Guerrilla Girls (formed anonymously in the eighties by a diverse group of female artistic writers and filmmakers of all ages, ethnicity, sexual orientation and degree of professional success) specified with penetrating irony the advantages of being a woman in art. Among them was the advantage of working without the pressure of success, not having to share presentations with men, escaping the world through self-employment, knowing that there was room for their work to be recognized once they were over eighty years of age , to be sure that whatever work they accomplished it would invariably be labeled as feminist, to have the opportunity to choose between a career and motherhood, to have more time to work when their couples abandon them for someone younger or not having to feel embarrassed when they are called geniuses and see how their ideas continued to live in the work of others.
It is difficult, for example, to not appreciate her influence from Donald Judd, and Joseph Cornell. She also maintained a close relationships with Yves Klein and Frank Stella. The influence and stimulating effect of hard work are difficult to discuss, however for many years she suffered the stigma of being a beautiful and unbalanced woman (she spent more than thirty years voluntarily interned in a psychiatric hospital almost as a contemporary reincarnation of the myth of hysteria.
For some time, she even suffered the distrust of a certain division of feminist critic circle, which considered opportunist they way she used her beautiful body to promote her work, posing, naked for the camera on a bed of phalluses (a series where paintings become sculptures such as her famous sculptures Accumulation [Sculptures of accumulation], made of elongated hand-sewn phallic appendages that covered all types of furniture and shoes).
The truth is that for Yayoi Kusama it was more than a small necessity to appear in photos with her art pieces, she felt that in them, realizing their psychic hallucination, identity was disappearing and being replaced by someone else. Since childhood she had suffered these hallucinations, the most daunting of which was probably an endless and repetitive profusion of points covering the surfaces of all things, which she expressed then through art. Maybe that´s why her unforgettable Infinity Nets [Networks of infinite], an extensive and repetitive stretch of dots on everyday objects, canvas and environments, often amplified by mirrors, is as fascinating as disturbing if not frightening.
Her broad, rich and obsessive work includes video, and writings also. The Reina Sofia Museum (http://www.museoreinasofia.es/index.html) devotes until September 12th a vast exhibition that covers nearly six decades of artistic activity.
Paul Oilzum
To leave indifferent from an exhibition of Yayoi Kusama is literally impossible. See it for yourself when you rent in Madrid accommodation /p>
Translated by: Marc
