Dots

Initially formed by the negative space between the meshes of the nets, the dots began to take on a life of their own in the early 1960s, eventually becoming a motif in their own right. Their proliferation, just like that of flowers and networks, underpins Kusama’s quest for ‘Self-Obliteration’. It is these polka dots that already feature in her earliest Infinity Rooms and, before that, in her installations combining furniture, canvases and painted plastic mannequins. It is also with these polka dots that she covers the bodies of the performers in her happenings of the 1960s and the fabrics of her fashion collections. In her autobiography, Kusama writes: “I make them and make them and then keep on making them, until I bury myself in the process. I call this ‘obliteration’.” Covered in dots against a fitting backdrop, she merges with the setting in an attempt to disappear, to be swallowed up by her surroundings, until she becomes one with them.

The fact is that Kusama attributes to this motif the symbolism of the individual within the collective that unites all the components of our cosmography. ‘A polka dot is shaped like the sun, which symbolises the energy of the whole world […]. Polka dots cannot bear solitude. Just as in communication between people, two, three or more polka dots become a movement. Our Earth is but a single polka dot amongst a million stars in the cosmos. […] When we cover nature and our bodies with polka dots, we merge into the unity of the environment.’ For Kusama, polka dots have for decades represented the path to infinity and harmony between human beings and the cosmos. The format of this work, as if dedicated to a private devotion, may seem very different from the vast installations where mirrors further accentuate the multiplication of the dots. Here, however, the frantically repeated pattern, following no particular composition, seems to want to escape beyond the pictorial field, transcending the intimate format of the canvas to evoke the infinity of the universe.