There is an argument that maintains the artist Yayoi Kusama is obsessed with sex and that her trademark  - the rounded, conical forms that sprout from all surfaces are blatantly phallic.This is what male art critics write. Kusama herself cannot be quoted as saying such. There is also a great effort to label her a Pop Artist, a sixties icon in love with things synthetic. Certainly all this is correct and nothing could be more blatantly sixties, the age that introduced the inflatable chair,  than her installation Dots Obsession 1996 a yellow painted room completely covered in giant black polka dots.  A kind of  'bouncy castle' it is proving a hit at the Serpentine  with anyone willing to take their shoes off (very Japanese). 
 

      Kusama's installations are so amusing and funky that they steal all the attention. Little is said about her consummate skill as a draughtsperson and her exquisite paintings on canvas that reflect early  training in traditional Nihonga painting.  Her passion for polka dots does not arise from Pop Art influences but from her sensitive observation of the natural world. Her ink drawing Accumulation 1951 executed before she arrived in the USA in 1957 shows random black dots on a sheet of yellow paper and marks the origins of what she calls her "Infinity Net" inspired by memories of a  red flower pattern "dissolving and accumulating, proliferating and separating".  Whilst visitors may enter Dots Obsession for a laugh, just as many are brought to a standstill before the oil on canvas No. AB 1959.  Painstaking brushwork knits thick white loops over a subtle grey ground creating a textured surface which resembles the skin of some beautiful pale reptile. A quiet contemplative painting, people seemed reluctant to move away from it. The white on white theme continues with her installation Solitude of the Earth 1994 in which a dining table laden with food and wine is covered in netting and paint. It looks like a shop window display in a posh department store and is a lamentable under use of Kusama's talent. 

      Thankfully, the artist who all but abandoned painting for two decades returned to it in the early 1980s. Today, her technical skills on canvas are reaching perfection with the artist switching from oil to the brilliancy of acrylic paints. Her Gentle Are the Stairs to Heaven, 1990 seems once again to honour the patterns in nature as a network of red veins covers a vibrant blue 'infinity net'. Works such as this from the last decade show a Kusama reaching back to her past to revive the lessons of Japanese art and philosophy. 
 

      Her draughtsmanship and feel for colour and composition have been successfully transposed to sculpture. Ever-present are the biomorphic 'phallic' forms which could equally be interpreted simply as coral polyps or stalactites, fungal growths or the tentacles of a sea anemone. Kusama lines them up on the floor to create A Snake 1974 or squashes them into boxes to form a grid sculpture called Sleeping Stamens 1985. In the sixties these friendly forms sprouted from silver painted clothes hung on the wall for Suit 1962 or attached themselves to a full size dinghy Aggregation Rowboat 1965.
      Do all these works covering a period of fifty years have any fluency? Not yet mentioned in this review is the peepshow Love Forever 1996, the collages, the objects covered in macaroni or Kusama's 16mm film Self-Obliteration 1967. Yet fluency is there, the spots and stumpy soft sculptures flow over nearly all her ideas. The Serpentine is small for a public gallery with only three rooms and it is perhaps a mistake to attempt a retrospective in such a confined space. An installation called Driving Image takes up a large chunk of it. First shown in New York, Milan and Essen in the early sixties Driving Image is a combination of painting, sculpture and performance spectacle. In its present reincarnation the piece is without the benefit of dogs being let loose to crunch through a stage filled with macaroni. Apparently this caused a sensation in 1964. 
 

      What is exciting is Kusama herself. A septuagenarian outliving her contemporaries Donald Judd and Warhol this artist has cast off the stale sixties and enters the new millennium producing her finest work to date. 

Raichel Le Goff

SERPENTINE GALLERY 
 Hyde Park London 
26 Jan - 19 March 2000
Open Daily 10am - 6pm 
Free Entrance