 I was told my disability is relevant, so I will say I have a spina bifida. Today I have been given what I consider to be a real honor. I have been asked to introduce Isabelle Martin. Isabelle is a truly remarkable individual that has my admiration. Isabelle is currently finishing her senior year at the University of Kentucky, majoring in art history and visual studies. Her research primarily concerns issues of racial and cultural identity in contemporary art with special emphasis on the politics of representation and visibility. In the fall she will attend graduate school with the hopes of eventually pursuing a PhD in art history. Her talk today is titled Visions of Infinity, Singularity, Polyforation, and Transcendence in Yeyo Kusami's Infinity Mirror Rooms. The subject of her talk is Japanese contemporary artist, Yeyo Kusami. Kusami has long suffered from sinistapathy, which results in hallucinations and anxiety attacks. Her use of the polkadot is not only a way for her to visualize her hallucinations, but also an example of the physical commitment she has to her work. Her repeated application of small motifs onto expansive services is at once both therapeutic and manic. I would ask today that you would please do me a favor, please refrain from using local chat or voice during the presentation. Helping me today translating my Australian to English as the voice is Suelen Mahogany whom I wish to thank as well. Thank you all and please welcome Isabel Martin. Okay, thank you Betty for that very sweet introduction as I thought I'm so excited to be here. And as Betty mentioned my talk today is titled Visions of Infinity, Singularity, Polyforation, and Transcendence in Yeyo Kusami's Infinity Mirror Rooms. Since beginning her career in New York in the 1950s, Japanese contemporary artist Yahya Kusama has continually utilized the concept of the infinite throughout her work. Through the repeated use of infinitesimally small motifs in her work, Kusama conveys the total surrender of the individual, namely herself, to the world as she perceives it. In doing so she projects her own role as a Japanese female immigrant in the white Western male-dominated art theme in which she became established. This projection explicitly calls forth her identity as the other and appropriates it as a major theme of her own work. Since childhood Kusama has been afflicted with a hallucination inducing anxiety disorder associated with a condition called depersonalization, a phenomenon of experiencing a loss of personality. This condition, combined with a tumultuous relationship with her mother, drove Kusama to flee to New York in 1957 in desperate pursuit of creative freedom and personal liberation. She did find success though it cost her time, sleeplessness, and even starvation in a city she described as, in every way, a fierce and violent place, increasing and intensifying her neurosis. The proliferation of particles expresses the surrendering act of what Kusama calls self-obliteration, an aesthetically welcoming visualization of her struggle with mental illness. This accumulation of minutia signifies the overwhelming visions of neurosis that have long played Kusama. Though her work has long expressed her feelings of alienation and resistance, it is far from oppressive to the viewer, instead producing the opposite effect of enveloping them in her spaces, which create opportunities for personal interpretation and moments of self-reflection. During her time in New York, Kusama came to associate with a number of artists, one of whom was up-and-comer Donald Judd, a self-proclaimed empiricist who had been trained as an art theorist and critic, and was only just beginning to create art himself. Judd, who had studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Columbia University, was interested in the concept of credible art, that which creates possibilities from realities. As such, he used algorithms and numerical sequences in his work, appealing almost exclusively to a learned Western audience. He was highly influenced by a long list of Western philosophers, like David Hume and John Locke, and artists like Jackson Pollock, Joseph Albers, and Constantine Brancusi. In his established style, Judd often created works that occupy a fixed reality, with regulated structures that retain the particularity that shapes reality and discredits nonsensical concepts. Kusama and Judd, who passed away in 1994, entered the art scene at the same time and even spent several years as neighbors, developing a close and at times intimate relationship. The two share their early endeavors as artists, supporting and influencing one another. Although the particular works I will address were not necessarily contemporaneous, both Kusama and Judd were consistent in their styles and objectives throughout their careers. Examining Kusama's infinity room installations and Judd's sculptural and three-dimensional work reveals a relational model outlined in philosophers Jill DeLuce and Felix Cattari's theory of the minor. First addressed in 1975, the theory of the minor expresses the idea that within a major system, there is a minor figure utilizing the same expressive elements put forth by the major. However, these elements are in a displaced or altered context with no standards or regulations. The minor, according to DeLuce and Cattari, moves away from the attempt to offer itself as a sort of official language in favor of emphasizing oppressed qualities. The minor is identified by three foundational characteristics. First, it must be territorialized. Second, it is always political. And third, it is always collective. The fact that Kusama was on the scene during the development of movements like late surrealism, pop art, and minimalism and subscribe to none of them attests to the minor artist's quality of existing simultaneously within and outside of the dominant system. In their respective styles and objectives, it is clear that Kusama was a minor artist as an outsider Japanese female artist in the masculine Western environment of New York in the 1960s. Conversely, Judd, whose career was rooted in Western philosophy and art theory, adhered to the very standards and formulas that Kusama aimed to defy. In doing so, he represents the major dominant system and the movement within which Kusama's minor art practice operates. Kusama's work expresses de-territorialization by manipulating depictions of reality in order to express visualizations of her minutia-driven neurosis. The minor artist displaces these forms or elements by bringing them into three-dimensional space as in performances or happenings or as with Kusama's particular practice, rooms. The forms then become reconfigured or reinterpreted in a new lens put forth by the minor art practice, familiar enough to be recognizable but manipulated in order to push up against the edges of representation. Kusama's 2002 installation, Obliteration Room, elucidates this notion of manipulating existing forms. An ostensibly average room, furnished domestically with an assortment of chairs and tables and decorated with phases and flowers, is made canvas with one simple but staggering detail, the stark whiteness of absolutely everything in the room. As viewers enter, they are able to contribute by placing colorful adhesive polka dots, which collectively amass a kind of filter through which one is able to imagine the accumulation regularly experienced by Kusama. The 2000 installation, I'm Here But Nothing, similarly expresses this realm of reality made slightly unrecognizable by the proliferation of colorful dots. The setting resembles a typical home, but Kusama's use of light and glow in the dark particles evokes a more hallucinatory and uncanny environment, causing the viewer to struggle to feel at home in an otherwise familiar place. Infilled with the brilliance of life from 2011, as with the rest of her infinity mirror rooms, Kusama's use of mirrors and pools of water confronts the viewer with their own immediate reflection, which is at once innately familiar and yet strangely unreal, mystically separate from the viewer themselves. Here, the reflection becomes the other. The infiniteness of viewer's reflections in the mirrored walls, ceiling, and floor call to mind a sense of displacement and other worldliness, expressing Kusama's experiences as an outsider in the Western world. Conversely, Judd's creation of inhabitable space acknowledges and in fact emphasizes the existing world. In untitled DSS-221 from 1970, a room installation seen here at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, rubber frames from presenting a deliberate expression of reality. 18 slabs of galvanized iron are set up around three sides of the room, the material evoking the aesthetics of industrialization. Instead of the total envelopment provided in Kusama's spaces, Judd's work here feels more resolute, more temporal, balanced, and algorithmic. Additionally, instead of materializing reality or a sense of displacement, Judd allows reality to be completely present in leaving the fourth side open and allowing the yelp and spotlight of the gallery space to be visible. His interest is primarily in the space that already exists, handled matter-of-factly. In providing material connections between spaces, he extends them. With scale, space, and surface as his variables, Judd creates sculptures that are seemingly immovable, to find flight and de-territorialization in favor of stagnation, weight, and resolute presence. The second characteristic of the minor is that it is always political. It's politics, which are not necessarily bureaucratic, calling to question the power dynamics between the dominant and resistant, and according to art historian Simon O. Sullivan, they connect art to the wider social milieu. Kusama's politics in particular address power relations between the other and the dominant society, which for her would have been the masculinist west. In I'm Here But Nothing, familiar signifiers of gender and class are almost obliterated into abstraction, as the pattern of stationary dots of light accumulate, forcing one's eyes to adjust to the colors. Even the title evokes a sense of suppression to the point of invisibility. The presence of colorful dots in obliteration room also reinforces these notions of absolute suppression through obliteration, but instead the west, the dominant, is objectified. Again, the installation begins with the caricature of a room where everything is completely white, a signifier of the west. Visitors filter through, adding their color dots throughout the day, and eventually the room is awash with color. If any of the oppressive white background remains, it is nearly indiscernible amidst the accumulation of dots. In continually refusing to subscribe to one artistic style, Kusama has instead committed herself to the polka dot, thus ensuring that her work refrains from being associated with and confined to a larger program or artistic intention. Though the polka dot represents the intense self-obliteration that has plagued her throughout her life, she has come to reclaim it in her favor, not only embracing it and creating spaces for it to proliferate, but also allowing it to envelop her beyond her infinity rooms. With this allowance of people into her world, and the manner in which she has closed herself in the polka dot, thus disappearing into it, Kusama comports herself as perpetually indomitable, alluding desire and defying objectification. In revealing herself completely, she vanishes. Judd, who created works that he believed had political implications, tended to respond more to institutional politics. However, he was openly political mostly as a theorist and critic. While his sculptural art championed local order, it refrained from coinciding completely with his political views, as he did not believe art to be a viable platform for potential social change. He expressed that any art that strongly advocated a political agenda risked becoming illustration instead of being an attitude stated directly. There is therefore a disparity between Judd's art and politics. Although both advocate for self-government and the individual, Judd's work seems to reflect dominant power ideals of masculinity and Western philosophy in attempting to resist solidarity. While Kusama addresses identity and body politics regarding race, sex, or class, Judd and said relies on the resistance of bureaucratic qualities, government, and institution-based structures. In using materials that evoke industry and austerity, he comes to express them in his work, as with Untitled 1984, a series of 15 concrete monoliths on a former military base in Marfa, Texas. And that is the work shown here on the projector. The final characteristic of the minor is that it is collective. This element of collectivity manifests itself in a shift in focus from the individual artist to the creation and collaboration of the collective. The art Kusama creates from her own hallucinations and experiences remains highly personal but not exclusive. Her rooms in particular bring her hallucinations into fruition. But by inciting opportunities for participation and reflection, she refrains from alienating her viewers. In exploring her own infinitesimally small life, she hopes to unearth truths that can be projected onto others' lives as people, like polka dots, cannot stay alone. Viewer's ability to contribute to the proliferation of polka dots in a obliteration room creates a sense of collectivity through interacting directly with the installation. Kusama's use of mirrors in her infinity room installations proliferates ad infinitum, not only my new particles but also the viewers themselves. In what lecturer Basia Sloinska refers to as relational participatory spaces, viewers' own reflections of themselves proliferate and evoke the experience of a community. Viewer presence and participation is in fact essential to the room as fulfilled with the brilliance of life. Sloinska writes that the insertion of subjects into sculptural environments and installations activates the political dimension of Kusama's art. Even the title of the work expresses the necessities of bodies of life. However, Judd's work provides a contrast to the collective in that it is external. His work is mainly comprised of solid, massive, minimalist structures that are stationary and reflect masculine or dominant ideas. Judd's 1982 to 1986 untitled permanent installation presents a series of 100 aluminum units in former artillery sheds at Marfa. Each unit's reflective aluminum exterior and dimensions are identical. Though they evoke a sense of proliferation, their resoluteness and reflectivity create feelings of exclusion and control. Additionally, each interior has a unique design, further reinforcing the controlled exteriority of Judd's emphasis. The persistent square calls to mind industrial and military austerity, inherently oppressive and intolerant of transcendence. Judd's sculptural structures, based on singular forms, exude a silent strength, a power in their stateliness. Though many of them have semi-reflective surfaces, these only seem to further increase the sense of isolation. Judd's are primarily concerned with relationships of forms to space and not relationships between himself and viewers. Far from attempting to establish solidarity between minor groups, Judd was politically interested in decentralization and localized self-government. While his writing emphasizes a disdain for authority structures in favor of individual power, his work expresses a standardized impersonality that evokes this very sense, whereas Judd's art is, from the start, adamantly distant, provides insight into her own experience. Her representations and manipulations using proliferations of dots parallel her encounters with emigration, transcendence, and oppression by both the major Western environment and her own hallucinations. By constructing her work around the polka dot as a way of both fixating on and overcoming these hallucinations, Kusama continues to examine the endless possibilities that stretch between the infinite and the infinitesimally small, along the way inviting viewers to become the minutiae she proliferates. Her infinity rooms explore the politics of her own identity as a non-Western female, a minority, and a minor artist, channeling her feelings of alienation and obliteration into intimate spaces that create moments of singular reflection and opportunities for collective experience, circumventing the various art movements that have developed during her career. Kusama retains a prominent place within major history while still remaining on the outside, a single particle among billions. Thank you very much. And thank you, Isabel. I think it's really important to look at mental illness from perspectives other than the medical perspective, which is what we've got mostly today. And it's really great that you were able to show us Kusama's work. This was a fun presentation. Thank you all. And very, very fun art with dots on most paintings is called pointillism. That's right. Pointillism, though, is it? It's not. And Luke has a question. She said, did Kusama have any favorite colors in this journey of depicting her total surrender to the world? I'm not sure that she had any favorite colors. She, in addition to creating these rooms, she also created infinity nets, which were paintings. And she used a broad range of colors, but she fired by the sea when she was actually flying from Japan to New York. Just experiencing this broad expanse of the sea totally inspired her and marked a really serious transition for her from her homeland of Japan moving to New York. And so that sort of soft blue appeared in one of her first infinity nets and really sort of started this whole series. Joyce is saying that she wants more clarification about why this isn't pointillism because she thought in college that was what they called it. Yeah, so pointillism started in the, I guess, around the 19th to 20th century with artists like George Saras and Paul Zingak. And pointillism is really characterized by figural representation. So it's people, landscapes, seas, but they are painted in the style with dots, whereas Kusama's work is more abstract and there are no figural, there are no representations. And actually in her paintings, you can see dots, but the way she creates them is by painting lines that reveal negative space. So they really become nets and that for her is also a therapeutic practice. And would you define negative space please, Isabelle? Negative space is really just the absence of paint or the absence of a material. So sort of drawing or painting these lines that create U shapes that then accumulate to express a net. James has a compliment for you. He says, thank you. Has a relatively non-visual person. He says, he's never really understood much about art and you are an absolute nature. He says, for the first time, I seem to have actually gained a bit of understanding of the art you've shared with us today. Now, if only he could remember it. Oh, thank you so much, James. That's a really kind comment. Now, Ice Guy says, the funny thing to her is that Judd's art seemed devoid of emotion, very mathematical and logical or Kusama seems very emotional. That's a great observation. That does seem to be very present in the contrast between their work. And also Judd, I think really tried to refrain from applying any of his own ideas or theories to the way his viewers received his work, which is why all of his works are untitled. He didn't want to influence the way they would be received. So in a way, he really is trying to refrain from applying his own emotional experiences, whereas Kusama is welcoming people into hers. Now, Mooc had an observation that you may want to reflect on. She said to her, Kusama's polka dots not only suggest fragmentation and disintegration, but also remind her of blood spatters and spotting, such as that which you might get at violent crime scenes. And she says, especially in the obliteration and infinity rooms. I'm just gonna go back to one of the obliteration rooms. I think that's a really interesting observation that I have never thought very much about. Thank you, Mooc. There is definitely a feeling of discomfort and sometimes even violence that comes with some of Kusama's earlier work, especially when she first arrives in New York, as I mentioned, it was very difficult for her to become acclimated with the New York art environment and the city itself, as I'm sure anyone who's been to New York can attest to, is very fast paced and can often be really oppressive. And a lot of her early works deal with the sort of shock that she experienced coming to this Western environment that was so commercial and chaotic and so very different from what she was used to. So yes, thank you, Ice Guy. There's a lot of culture shock. And I don't know to what extent that continues throughout her later work, but that is a really interesting observation. Orange had a rebuttal, I think I would call it. He said he sees both of them, both Kusama and Judd, as being emotional, but Judd's work is more of the control others requirement. That's an interesting observation as well. And I think that maybe one of the things that makes Judd's work so powerful is that it really opens up to all different interpretations like that. I think definitely with some of those works that take up almost all of the space that you're in, it can seem very oppressive and very controlling. And I certainly wouldn't say that he has a totally hands-off approach to his art. And Ice Guy says, culture shock, adjustment period, she doesn't think that Kusama ever adjusted. I might actually agree with that because she didn't stay in New York. She actually lives in Japan now in a mental institution that's very close to her art studio. So it's very possible that the environment in New York was just too much for her. And then Ice Guy said she found her own place. Yes. Orange says, I think perhaps it's more the splattering of ideas against the background of her experience. Interesting. I like that. And of course, all these people are jumping on my question, which I wanted to ask. This morning we asked the audience to think about how various poets portrayed their identity as persons with mental illness in their writing. I'd like to ask the audience the same question about this artist. How does she tell you about her identity as a person with mental illness through her chosen style of artwork? Let's ask the audience that. That's a good question. Okay, I started out by saying she was definitely fragmented. Orange disagreed. He said, overlaid. Her perception appears layered or obscured. Ice Guy said to her, I am here but nothing. She really speaks volume to Ice Guy. I think she expresses the fragmentation, the loss of self amidst crowds and multitudes. So Ellen says, I think she's letting people enter her own world by allowing them to create what the dots they add, giving a bit of their own lives into hers without actually letting them in altogether. And James wonders if she may be using her feeling of powerlessness but making much of her art dependent on others who participate. And I don't know, those two people, they were the ones who did the readings for poetry but they anticipated my question. I wondered about her invitation to the audience to place dots. What does that say about her identity as a person with mental illness? They're reading our lines today. This slide just says, being overwhelmed to me or sensory overload or too much to do anything with it. Yeah, that comment that Luke just posted is really interesting, especially when you remember that this slide, the obliteration room is blank and then people can add their own stickers. So it might really be saying something about how it feels for other people to sort of push themselves onto you, push ideas and opinions and sort of suppress you. And that whole accumulation covers things up and makes it very chaotic. That's really interesting. And then suddenly Sue wondered, do the colors they selected have a meaning? I think she really just likes many, many colors, the multicolored aspect of it. I don't know that the colors in this installation have any particular meaning. They're just very bright. I just wanted us to notice where the dots are most concentrated. They seem to be concentrated sort of adult level, standing level. Oh, Emmy says she knows nothing of art. I think she is underestimating herself, but this seems childlike and maybe she was frustrated as a child and wanted to share that. That's a great thing to point out, Emmy, because she did have a really difficult childhood and it was when she was a child that she started her art practice. But growing up in Japan, there is a traditional more government-oriented art style called Nihonga, I'll type it out. And that's what she was trained in, but she always really felt a lot of pressure from it and never felt that it allowed her a lot of creative expression, but she was having hallucinations from when she was a child. We have some more observations about that question. Ice Guy says it seems the natural tendency for people to put things on walls. Notice it was concentrated in a corner. And Luke noticed there were one or two, seven footers in that room because there are some stickers up on the ceiling. And Ice Guy says there are a few outliers putting stickers onto furniture, lamps, even the ceiling, but a vast majority go to the back wall. And BET says, I feel sorrow. You wanna say more about that BET? And when BET is typing, Matilda said those are the aquariums that put them on the ceiling. And Orange said, because people are more likely to paint a wall than paint furniture. BET is picking up on isolation. Isabel, do you have questions for us? What can't you do, Bebe? I was curious if anyone has seen either of these artists' work before in pictures or magazines or in person even. Looks like a preponderance. And we do have an art gallery on Cape Able Island. And that art gallery, we feature only works by artists with disabilities. And I'm thinking maybe to see if we can get her to be exhibited there if anybody wants to visit it. That would be really cool. Yeah, I would. We do have a branch of the R.L. Fenimore Museum right across the island from the... Any other questions? And Ice Guy says, imagine her coming up with a three-dimensional version of one of her art installations, all the possibilities. And Mila says, this would be excellent for the Second Life Environment. She's glad to have been introduced to this work. Right? I have not. I have actually never seen one of her works in person. But I imagine it'd be overwhelming. I imagine it would be. Because these rooms are quite small too. But I mean, you could walk into those rooms, right? You can. At museums, I mean, the lines are really long because people are really interested in her work. But you only get a really short amount of time in the room about like a minute because it's so small. James says he knows a Japanese artist. The only thing he's familiar with is his brother-in-law. He had the misfortune to be confined in one of the American prison camps during World War II. His art is pottery. And James says he's blessed to have a couple of his pieces, which he uses often. That would be very special, James. Wow, yes. I agree. The room installations would be interesting as virtual reality pieces. Some interesting thoughts here. Well, if the audience doesn't have more questions for Isabel, we should probably let her go with many thanks. This was great. High opening. I mean, when you have an audience that not one single person has heard of your topic before, that's pretty fantastic. Yes.