Irini Zervas

Date of Award

2013

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Hassold, Cris

Keywords

Art History, Yayoi Kusama, Women Artists

Area of Concentration

Art History

Abstract

Yayoi Kusama's consciousness is pervaded with her desire for "self-obliteration," a process in which the self becomes one with her surroundings. She creates art in order to mitigate this fixation with death and alienation. Kusama's art practice reflects her personal life through a number of themes, motifs and practices: art creation as therapy, the obsessive repetition of dots, and the artist's manufacture of a unique public persona. However, while Kusama's art represents and works through her personal suffering, it also reflects the idea of self-obliteration. Kusama performs a split sense of self that is in parallel with the multiplication of objects and patterns present in her work. This essay is framed by the concern, particularly in feminist art history, with how to relate an artist's biography to his or her work. While Kusama's art practice relies heavily on her biography in its elicitation of her mental illness, it also emphasizes the constructedness of her personal narrative. Through a study of the artist's photographs and documentary images of the artist's body, Amelia Jones asserts that Kusama's art exhibits an excess of identity while disallowing the notion of a stable sense of self. I wish to extend Jones' argument to Kusama's other work and to her process-based art. At once non-figurative and impersonal and representing the artist's history, Yayoi Kusama's work challenges dominant modes of artistic creation and visual experience.

Rights

The author has granted New College of Florida the nonexclusive right to archive, make accessible, and distribute for educational purposes this work in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. The copyright of this work remains with the author.

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