Spot On: From Louis Vuitton and the Internet is everywhere Yayoi Kusama

It should not be possible, a dull exhibition of works by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, a feisty 83 years old, whose scale defies the laws of work "infinite" net paintings, peas, happenings, and dabblings make media, fashion and trade issues could thus play well in a closet and an arena. However, the Whitney Museum managed, said in a warm retrospective: a limited and respectful representation of an artist who is bigger than life. Ms. Kusama was born in 1929 in Matsumoto, was in Japan one of the wives of the war, American GIs and food shortages. Paints fragile as the Heart (1951) and United Fern (1953) they did in the early 1950s, with oil, paint and house paint and sand and sometimes instead of canvas seed bag on the screen in two rooms at the Whitney, are gently surreal and hallucinatory. His family of his conservative disposition rejected the painting and the entire text at the Whitney Wall informed the audience that has the rationing of postwar Japan, the use of these materials eccentric necessary, remembers Mrs. Kusama her youthful rebellion took the form of theft of property of parent company to use as a nursery art materials. The works often include flower buds, and its start point of the character to appear in the painting of the Wind God (1955). When she decided to move to the United States, Ms. Kusama went to the U.S. Embassy, ​​looked up the address by Georgia O'Keeffe in the Who's Who and wrote one of the missives designed, disturbed a little, that would become his calling card. O'Keeffe in 1955 in response to the screen: "It seems very strange that you are so ambitious to show your pictures are, but I do the best for you .." Finally, in New York in 1958, when she was 29, and settled in a Zen center. The pictures she made shortly after his arrival there his best: rhythmic, are monochrome with cell surface so thick that the oil painting is similar to baked porcelain. His greatest artistic project is then the real here: Coupe and spread on flat surfaces and potentially sculptural forms. His work and strict division of labor has an impression in New York, where the world of art was made still under the influence of action painting. It was not long before she had a floor in a loft in the city center, where you rented used an old door for a bed and could not buy milk for the coffee, but had neighbors in the building Artist: Claes Oldenburg, John Chamberlain and Larry Rivers. A small self-portrait from 1959 shows us her fresh-faced and stubborn. It was different from his peers artist, although had experienced in what they ended up visual and auditory hallucinations for about 12 years, visions of nets and climbing spots on the skin that you are regularly in Bellevue. But his visions of trippy effects were not unlike the psychedelic experiences of hippies in their quest for utopia embraced against culture, and became famous with his series following happenings, "Dances with points," "Festival of the body" and "Impromptu nude-in "as they see Endless Love in 1966, after the text of the Whitney wall, with" pot-smoking, go-go dancing and general hilarity until dawn. "His film self-annihilation (1968), 24 -minute orgy of psychedelic lighting effects and polka-dotting shamanic shows the tone of rapture, which hit a cultural vein. When they rebelled against hierarchical and conservative Japanese society after the war, his promise of "self-annihilation" in accordance with the mood of America during the Vietnam. His staging of sex parties, Ms. Kusama used, in which girls and boys hippie gay pleasing appeal as canvases for his endless peas, very politically for the tabloids saw: anti-war, pro-gay, feminist and pro-drug laws in the breaking job name art.The found an international audience and the performance went to Belgium and Germany. (There is a "? She did what she did or not," We feel the involvement of Ms. Kusama in the most extravagant of his own work, she says she had no interest in sex or drugs: "I am absolutely never with one of they slept, "she said, dozens of young nude dancers hang around them, but many people went to asked for his performance.) The best-bedroom-curator of the exhibition at the Whitney is busy with his sculpture, sculptural shapes covered with ordinary accumulation: There are cases macaroni and sofas, boats, high-heeled shoes and dresses sprouting forests fabric phallic shapes. They are full of humor and a glamorous curly. It would have been nice to see their wallpaper to boot, said Warhol inspired famous painted cow, and it sold pornographic posters by post, with an entrepreneurial spirit pan when events began to catch on.Articles late 1960s for "Ms. Kusama" rotating Art at Events adorned dresses covered phallus and handbags. She had to navigate a strange gift to the sexual politics of a time when free love was in the news, but many women, even in artistic circles, found themselves stuck in their roles as wives and mothers. She lived alone in his apartment, staged a sense of self-promoter, the wild visionary and self-portraits in catsuits that always seems angry today. Marina Abramovic and Carolee Schneemann feet still in this online flash part-a-tat-feminist. But the show is not quite capture the flavor of this fun scream, it seems that video and brochures on the screen timid in comparison to his true self-obsession.Ms.Kusama unrestricted use of his outsider status, a beautiful Japanese woman in New York with Frank drinks Stella and Salvadore Dali, and a love story, retired for ten years living with the Joseph Cornell. Cornell works from his personal collection are on display, including one that reads: ". Returning spring flower for me and I'll tie a rope, like this butterfly" How much tie-in decibels date sales of Louis Vuitton shows (Marc Jacobs Women Kusama was in the blue-chip-bag artist Takashi Murakami and brotherhood of Richard Prince moved), she has a new resonance in these days as a proto-Murakami. (The irony inherent in Louis Vuitton encourage anyone who has had as his manifesto "Nudism is the only thing that costs nothing. Clothes cost money. Kusama you cover your body with peas" is, but it is far away.) The Grande Dame of the Japanese pop post-war period wore dresses with circles cut out the tits and ass, and a rack of these "clothes orgy" would have been interesting to see objects have the Whitney. As if in response to such institutional backup, Kusama-mania spilled into the streets of New York with the installation on the Christopher Street Pier, red and white polka dot biomorphic sculptures, and a display on the inside and outside the Fifth Avenue Louis Vuitton store which has already spread their scores on the home pages of countless fashion blogger to another. Since 1977, Kusama's wife voluntarily lived in a mental institution in Japan. Its 1980 rooms, as the extent of the Cornell box-shaped snow of the building remains in a Dream (1982), or some beautiful plants, biomorphic designs of the 1970s are more introverted, but also more ambitious than their happenings and social sculpture of the 60s and early 70s years. His willingness to continue his work photographed, it's perhaps the most photographed hermit in the world. A problem with the Whitney show is that there is (are Eva Hesse, Lee, and Louise Bourgeois, Bontecou to mind) to the work of women Kusama compared to his colleagues or artistic past or create contemporary artists like Kembra Phaler and Ryan fails McGinley, whose brand of downtown appear naked self-promotion and shamanic rocked-out artistic practice resonate with women has Kusama. Instead, the Whitney us in the past gallery of the show, Ms. Kusama pretty awful hung Keith Haring-like the last painting, acrylic low-emission floor to ceiling. The biggest problem is this: throughout the show, the sensitivity of a conservative should be clear: This spectacle, which comes to the Whitney after work at the Tate and Pompidou, feels more like it was created by the committee. The installation is not the instinct that might be interesting or dramatic, are not a feeling of projects, such as the best small or large, and no condemnation of the pieces might look important and this work is just filling a room. The objects themselves do much heavy lifting here, as well as the overwhelming personality of the artist. (It is perhaps not the best to be an artist, but with flying colors.) Even the Whitney focuses on American art is here, with the most insightful work of Ms. Kusama lost less known in Japan. There is a certain angle, ostensibly for the local show, despite the rough proxy: New York was and remains a place to reinvent yourself as a woman Kusama made. It was a hard worker, a hustler and a few surviving warned. Note the photo of woman Kusama 1964, 35 in Brooklyn looking fabulous in a long faux fur coat, full of confidence and ego, beautiful and confident. The best time in the show is its size 2002 rooms, romantic, low-fi piece Fireflies Installation of water. A person can enter at a time: a mirror with 150 Christmas lights, so they look like a cosmos, you have an interior, the infinite. The Infinity Net paintings and peas have the same effect: a small, repeating pattern on a single field can with the prospect of a turn, like a globe. This fragility, and a willingness to improvise in his project seemingly boundless is the best by Yayoi Kusama.