Yayoi Kusama and Art as Therapy

How much do you know about art as therapy?

 

Did you know that it can have a ginormous impact on somebody’s mental wellbeing? Some people would go insane without it. 

 

This essay looks into the painter, sculpture and performance artist Yoyoi Kusama (Case and Brett and Foster, 2000, p.62) and her instantly recognisable work that she produces. Creating art is a necessity to her life, it’s something that she feels she must do rather than just wanting to do it, similar to eating, drinking, breathing. Just imagine being shackled to doing a certain activity for the entirety of your life, over and over again. It would drive you mad, wouldn’t it?

 

First appearances can be deceiving. Kusama’s work looks fun, playful and exciting doesn’t it? An exciting burst of colour and pattern, almost like a play area for children. When you look deeper into the situation, it becomes clear that it’s a lot darker than you may have initially thought. 

 

Yayoi Kusama has been doing these immersive installations her whole life and is now aged 91. Dot, after dot, after dot. Largely due to her oppressed childhood under the Japanese militarist campaign, her parents’ strict discipline and traumatic experiences, Kusama started to have hallucinations at a young age (Yoshimoto, 2005, p.45). Many of the installations that she produces are designed to look like and give the effect of the hallucinations she had as a child, offering a mix of playful chaos and psychosexual drama that has become a defining theme of her artistic output (Applin and Lewis, 2012, p.9). It soon becomes clear that Kusama is obsessed with creating these patterns and simply cannot stop. The countless dots never end, especially in her infinity rooms that communicate a claustrophobic and pressured environment (Applin and Lewis, 2012, p.12). She often ‘performs or stages herself as a subject’ (Applin and Lewis, 2012, p.11) when exhibiting her work and enacts the exoticist and sexist dynamics of the culture at large to her advantage (Case and Brett and Foster, 2000, p.63). She features in many photographs that have been taken of her instillations, always wearing clothing that adds to the effect of the room, almost blending into the pattern. These rooms, although fascinating to go in and experience, are the result of Kusama’s obsessive compulsive disorder.

 

OCD is a complex disorder with very different clinical manifestations, courses and outcomes (Zohar, 2012, p.22). It causes the sufferers of OCD to have obsessions and/or compulsive acts/rituals aimed at reducing distress (Doron, 2020) which explains why Kusama has been creating art using the same dots her whole life. It is a compulsive act that she feels she must do in order to stop herself from going ‘mad’. 

 

Kusama voluntarily lives in a hospital for people who suffer with mental illnesses, which may seem strange to some people because as a rule, people want to get out of hospital as quickly as possible. Clearly, she finds comfort by staying in the hospital and sees it as a safe space. It is a way for her to release the chaos that is going on in her mind.

 

The art that she produces is another way that she releases the thoughts that eat away at her inside. The obsessive-compulsive style of artmaking (Yoshimoto, 2005, p.45) is therapeutic to her, necessitated by her desire to overcome the symptoms of her mental illness (Yoshimoto, 2005, p.45). 

 

Art therapy is a practice that is used by many in order to reduce the effects of a mental illness, such as the intrusive thoughts that can be caused by OCD. Many people feel that the arts have an enormous role to play in the arena of medicine at large (Kirkcaldy, 2018, p.21) because it can be used in many ways. This not only includes the sufferer making art as a way of reducing the impact that their illness has on them but can be used to assess someone’s mental wellbeing. A good example of this is the Rorschach test. The person receiving the test is asked to explain their interpretation of an inkblot and what they see can indicate how their mind works. 

 

The aim of using art therapy is to improve or restore a client’s functioning and their sense of personal well-being, (Kirkcaldy, 2018, p.6) which is a technique that has clearly worked for many artists including Yayoi Kusama and Vincent van Gogh who have both been associated with a stereotype of a “mad artist” because of their long-term mental illnesses (Yoshimoto, 2005, p.45).

 

Yayoi Kusama’s way of producing incredible pieces of artwork has fascinated me and opened my eyes to a whole different way of thinking. I was unaware that art is such a necessity to some people’s lives and can even keep them sane.

 

I can link the theory behind art as therapy to the ideas that I have around my practice by putting some deep consideration into how my audience will perceive my work. It has given me an understanding about the purposes and effects that art can have. There’s a lot more to think about that just how something looks. How the user perceives it is just as or even more important and can be very beneficial to them. I will also think about the work that I design in a different way when I am producing it. I won’t forget that the reason I do design work is because I am passionate about it and will see it as something that I do to keep my mind happy rather than something that can often become stressful.

 

Due to my previous obliviousness to the practice of art therapy, I would like to make it more widely known as I believe that it could help many people that are unaware of it, including both those who are in the creative industry and those who are not.

 

To conclude, Yayoi Kusama is an artist who has found a fascinating way of defeating or minimalizing her obsessive-compulsive disorder. She creates large instillations and pieces of art that help to relieve her mind from her mental illness. She forces her audience to think deeply into her work and the idea behind it rather than just seeing it as a fun instillation. ‘Art as therapy’ is the theory behind her practice and it is something that she feels she needs to do in order to survive. Her practice can influence others way of thinking about the way that they produce their art rather than seeing it as something that can get quite stressful and a lot of inspiration can be taken from the dedication that she has towards her work.