Artwork of Yayoi Kusama and Criticisms of the Japanese Woman Behind Polka Dots
Assignment #5: Peer-Reviewed Draft Paper
Length: Full Essay Draft — 2100 words [not including footnotes or bibliography]; Bibliography should include at least 6 scholarly sources; Word count to be written, justified right, at end of essay. [your format will be "Word count: ####"]
Include completed peer-edit sheet
Context: Three major goals have animated this course: (1) to explore art criticism’s histories as a fluid lineage of chronological events, philosophical ideas, and images; (2) to explore art criticism’s theories and publications as a literature ruminating on those histories; and (3) to foster your critical skills in reading, writing, speaking and listening, all of which will be important to your further education and to your subsequent professional endeavours.
Writing projects are crucial to the developmental goals mentioned above--our assignments do a fair bit of work in terms of exposing you to the research and writing process that will help you attain these competencies. For this preliminary full text, you will continue from where you left off in Assignment no.4, completing an entire draft of an essay on your selected artwork/work of criticism. Above all, your goal is to form a rigorous argument and support it with solid, well-referenced literary and image-based evidence.
As a starting point, you have already considered and selected one of the following approaches:
write about a key work by an artist or designer [potentially one who was discussed either in class discussions or the readings], using analytical techniques discussed in class and appropriate textual supports found in scholarly journals, book publications, and select internet sources; or
write about a key piece of criticism [again, potentially one that was discussed either in class discussions or the readings], using analytical techniques discussed and appropriate image supports
Of course, the differences between these approaches are not absolute. (For instance, any robust discussion about a key work quite likely will mention key ideas/criticism along the way, and vice versa.) Also, regardless of which approach you chose, you will need to conduct thorough research (primary and secondary sources) and structure your essay around discussions of 2-4 key works. Assignments 1, 2, and 4 should have supported you through the process of developing your focus and expanding it into an essay.
Format for Assignment no.5: Futura Lt BT or Arial, 12pt, double-spaced. To be handed in, STAPLED. [If handing in late or under extension, please email word or PDF document]
NO [SURNAME, DATE] CITATIONS. FOOTNOTES ONLY
Assignment:
For this stage, you will refine the argument and subsequent paragraphs you submitted for Assignment no.4 and improve your citation practices. Remember the instruction given previously: "You might opt to revert to what many of us learned in high school—namely, starting with a general statement and narrowing your content towards the specific [your thesis statement]. This technique is often referred to as the “hourglass” format." As you have already generated an introduction and several paragraphs [Assignment no.4], the success of this draft will be in completing your essay with further explanation and a complete conclusion.
In addition, ensure to list at least 6 sources that are germane to your paper. N.B. Robust approaches to this assignment will seek out a range of perspectives (i.e. rather than restricting your sources scope only or mostly to sources that agree with you or support your argument, look for material that counterposes your thesis as well as material from other disciplines. Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology, and Politics are streams of study and knowledge that connect and directly influence with art).
IMPORTANT: Further information on MLA citation practices can be found here:
https://owl(dot)purdue(dot)edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_formatting_and_style_guide/mla_works_cited_page_basic_format.htmlLinks to an external site.
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Assignment #5: Peer-Reviewed Draft Paper
The artwork of Yayoi Kusama dazzles audiences globally with its impressive anesthetic that captures polka dots, light, and pumpkins. She was the first woman to receive the Premium Impariale, a prominent Japanese prize for internationally recognized artists, among other awards, including the Order of the Rising Sun and the National Lifetime Achievement Awards. Yayoi's work displays attributes of pop art, feminism, and minimalism infused with psychological, autobiographical, and sexual content. Her work displays motifs and psychedelic images that put certain themes to art, such as obsession, creation and destruction, sex, feminism, and psychology. The inspiration behind the repetitive patterns in her art draws directly from her hallucination. Today, it has become common ground for critics to define Yayoi's art by attaching psychedelic quality to it. This write-up will highlight Yayoi's performance and its meaning through her mental state and how much she has contributed to the arts and the art industry. The paper also tackles the criticisms of the woman behind polka dots, pivotal works of Kusama, and analytical techniques based on scholarly readings.
Criticisms of the Japanese Woman Behind Polka Dots
Yayoi's art is often associated with her mental inadequacy based on her repetitive polka dots motif that is considered neurological. The concept behind her neurological condition is legitimate due to the unconventional aesthetic of the long history of psychosis, her artistic installations, and the fact that she admitted to being mentally inadequate. The psychosis condition was a source of artistic inspiration. She stated that she suffers episodes of severe neurosis, which sometimes make her cover a piece of canvas with nets and continue painting them on the table, the floor, and her body. On the other hand, paying close attention to her artistic works reveals her work to be sublime; her art pieces are not as whacky and eccentric as most people assume them to be. Besides, the most eccentric looking of her artwork are best discussed within a rational reasoning framework.
Contemplating Yayoi Kusama's artwork, the polka dots and nets extended over infinity rooms and the canvas of her work. These are the negatives and positives of the same motif. People afflicted with the same neurological condition as Yayoi perceive and experience their selves as though they are observing from the outside. In this regard, the victims are divorced from their mortal bodies and mental processes. Yayoi comments in her writings that she has released her feelings through painting and performance into a chaotic vacuum. One can interpret her artwork as a display that eliminates the contours of things visible in the real world with nets and polka dots to show that everything in creation is interconnected. For instance, in her solo exhibition in 1963 Aggregation, she displays black and white photography of a 10-metre boat covered with phallus-like objects all over the floor, ceiling, and ceiling walls.[Thomas, Mika. "Life's Form and Formlessness: Translating Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Net." (2020).]
The motifs of Yayoi Kusama's origins are constructed in conjunction with her neurological impairments that justify the idea of referring to her as a mad artist. Pull and Henderson argues that the polka dots displayed by Yayoi evokes powerful insight into how she views the world due to paranoid schizophrenia. The validity of the critic can be illustrated by the significance of polka-dotted patterns in Kusama's artwork. The artist states that the earth is one polka dot among millions of others. Therefore, the meaning of her artwork is debatable based on the message it communicates.
To grasp the actual significance of her art, one must understand the oriental mentality regarding the artist's commitment to achieving self-actualization through art. The practical usefulness of an oriental mindset is also displayed by Kusama violating the provisions of socially constructed morality in the West. She accomplishes this through the exhibition of female and male nudity that acted as triggered a public outcry. For example, the 1968 naked protest on Wall Street in New York displayed the significance of sexual liberation. The protest was illustrated by four naked participants who danced to the sound of bongo drums while Kusama sprayed them with polka dots. The artist also displays some hidden themes of feminism, especially in her 1964 sculpture Travelling Life.
Understanding Yayoi Kusama through Several of her Pivotal Artworks
After moving to New York in 1958, Kusama began applying her motif on canvas, walls, floors, and naked bodies. Her early work of infinity net paintings paved the way for minimalism, which helped her sublime to installation art, Pop, and performance. Her actions bring about nude-doted individuals in New York to express sexual liberty, while her installations bring visitors to environments representing endless universal infinity. Kusama states that the desire in her artwork was to use dots to measure and predict the infinity of the universe from her understanding due to her obsessive-compulsive neurosis. The artist continues to create her work, spreading her endless polka dots, paintings, and sculptures globally.
The first artwork is Infinity Net of 1959. Yayoi describes it as a painting without a beginning, end, or center, which causes an empty, dizzy and hypnotic feeling among visitors. The nets represent an accumulation of crescent-shaped thick paint brush strokes that curve in the same direction into congregations that ebb and swell across the painting. One can find the closest comparison of the nature of the infinity net in nature, whereby invisible matter clusters around invisible points of gravity. The diffusion of opulent monochrome paint on the infinity net painting is interrupted by manifestations of small openings and organic variations of circles and ovals.
The uniqueness of the art is displayed by the perceptual and literal exchange between the net's materiality and the space's impression within the net, holding different paradigms in an inseparable equilibrium. According to an essay by Donald Judd, a critic for ARTnews, the effect of the infinity net is complex and simple. It shares aesthetic and spiritual affinities with abstract expressionism.
Image 1: Infinity Net
The second artwork, Accumulation No.1, features objects and canvases characterized by repetitive visual motifs. The piece is her first sculpture where she covered an armchair with hand-sewn painted protrusions which she makes and keeps on making until she buries herself in the process. Kusama names the series of objects as compulsion furniture that represents an embodiment of other psychological forces like sexual anxieties. She states that as an obsessive artist, she fears everything. She worked on the armchair covered in Phalluses when she feared sexual vision. Kusama illustrates abstract expressionism b...