Homage to Yayoi Kusama

Thanks to Blip U. and some of you who have been to see the exhibit in Manchester, I have recently learned about the “top-selling female artist in the world,” of whom I was ignorant till I saw those Blips. I am so drawn to her work that I borrowed from the library both a documentary about her, called Kusama: Infinity, The Life and Art of Yayoi Kusama ; and a massive Thames & Hudson book of her visual art, some of her writing, and a collection of what art critics, curators, and historians have said about her. I have spent my day with her.

I am entranced.

I love this elaboration on the dot, which she developed in an interview in 1968: “A polka-dot has the form of the sun which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon which is calm…. Our earth is only one polka-dot among a million stars in the cosmos.”

She sees herself as a dot, each of us a dot, all those who have gone before us as dots, and all who will come after us. Dots. A flow of life into death into life. Connectivity. 

I was thinking about her as I walked about ten blocks this afternoon, trying to rebuild some modicum of fitness. The blip is a double exposure.