Polka Dots — a dialogue between Yaoi Kusama and Damien Hirst
After witnessing the preparations for Hirst’s retrospective, I finally had a chance to visit the epic showdown between polka dot queen and king — Yaoi Kusama & Damien Hirst — at Tate Modern.
Hirst’s work is semiotic, full of symbolism and metaphors of life and death, capital, science, and religion. His oeuvre is linked extensively to the western art canon: Duchamp’s ready-made relate to Hirst’s pharmaceutical vitrines. His spin paintings are a re-appropriation of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings.
Judd’s minimalist boxes are quoted in Hirst’s containers, but filled with organic matter and its life cycle.
In Hirst’s work the relationship of art to viewer, however, is classical: One moves through the museum from piece to piece and visitors contemplate his work safely from a distance, though occasionally irritated by the smell of rotting meat or cigarettes.
Kusama’s work is environmental, atmospheric, and spatial. It engulfs and embraces the viewer, and pulls her into the world of the artist. One becomes fully immersed in Kusama’s art. It’s this all encompassing spatial immersion that undermines the classical viewer-object dichotomy.
Kusama was a pioneer of monochrome painting, the ready-made, and the environmental installation:
Her declared independence from any group or association allowed her to respond fully, freely, and immediately to the most diverse positions and influences — from cool minimalism to manga kitsch — at different times.
In her spatially most radical project “Infinity Mirrored Room — filled with the Brilliance of Life”, Kusama transforms polka dots form a two-dimensional graphical technique into an atmospheric three dimensional effect.
Hirst’s polka dots, in contrast, remain tied to the canvas like wallpaper to the wall — they stay graphical and flat.
