A short story by Karen Blixen reads as follows: A man, who lived by a pond, was awakened one night by a great noise. He went out into the night, and headed for the pond, but in the darkness, running up and down, back and forth, guided only by the noise, he stumbled and fell repeatedly. At last, he found a leak in the dike, from which water and fish were escaping. He set to work plugging the leak and only when he had finished went back to bed. The next morning, looking out of the window, he saw with surprise that his footprints had traced the figure of a stork on the ground. Karen Blixen now asks herself: “When the design of my life is complete, will I see, or will others see a stork?” (1)

To write an obituary is to be looking for such figures and designs — the stork or perhaps the lion or flower that a life with all its fumbling and stumbling leaves behind. It is comforting to think that, in the end, after all of life’s many accidents and seemingly meaningless affaires, the footprints will connect in the dirt, a figure will emerge, and a meaning shine forth, like a star-constellation — that in the end, as the end, chaos will succumb to order. Karen Blixen’s story is also appealing because it points to the uniqueness and unrepeatable identity of every human existence. (2) The design each of us unknowingly traces and trots through life will be unlike the design of any other. What death will grant the deceased is, in short, the image of his true and irreducible singularity; the final proof of his irreplaceable uniqueness.  

With the recent passing of the Japanese superstar and queen of polka dots, Yayoi Kusama, a global hunt for her unique design has set in. What is the figure she leaves behind? One may try to connect the dots between her troubled childhood, her early visions and hallucinations, her mental disorders, and her initial failure and later success as an artist. Undoubtedly, it is possible to find a pattern and to write not only a cohesive but also thrilling story — one that is both unique to Kusama and that, at the same time, confirms all the widespread and attractive myths about the modern artist: the stereotypical links between brilliance and madness, light and darkness, inspiration and inner conflict. Long before Kusama’s passing this pattern, this design, had, in fact, already become apparent. It was not necessary to await her final breath for the story to be told. It was all too obvious, too alluring. One might even say that Kusama spent the last years of her life as a rather strange and hardly necessary appendage to her own myth: chaos had already become order, chance had already succumbed to intent and plan, and one had to look very carefully to still find a living, breathing being under this death mask of a finished and perfect design. The question remains, however — by now an almost impossible question! — how accurate this design truly is? How well does it describe not only her personal life but also her artistic endeavours, ambitions, and ideas? Is it possible that the finished and perfect design may, in some cases, be more of a problem than a solution? At least in Blixen’s tale, the figure the protagonist ends up with, a stork, is also the very creature that will quickly and happily devour everything the man had worked so hard to protect. 

Without the comfort of figures and lines, let’s look at Kusama’s points and dots. What are they? How do they either move us or arrest us? Standing in front of Kusama’s work, one is immediately struck by her art’s powerful visual appeal. By very simple means, often using no more than two contrasting colours, she constructs wondrous worlds that quickly engulf the viewer. Oversized pumpkins and giant octopus’ arms have a fairy tale-like charm and allure, reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s fanciful stories. One moves through her installations and Infinity Mirror Rooms feeling, in turn, like a shrunken and outsized Alice — both amazed and slightly uneasy with the strange surroundings. And yet, we are not the protagonists of these colourful worlds — nor is there, strictly speaking, much of a tale to be told. What constantly interrupts any attempt of constructing or narrating a story is the persistent stammer of Kusama’s dots. The progression, the development that all storytelling needs, is constantly called back to the punctuated beginning beyond which nothing moves. Even the enticing creatures that populate her works — from dogs and butterflies to seahorses and birds — turn out, upon closer inspection, to be less the goal and final design of the dots than the colourful occasion for their continued growth and proliferation. The creatures seem to exist for the sake of the dot — not the other way around. We are, as Kusama herself, unable to free our eyes and minds from this endless visual stammer.

Returning to Blixen´s tale, we might say that Kusama’s dots, her “footprints” on the canvas, never connect to reveal a larger and complete design. There is no finale figure, no “stork” to save us and give meaning to all our fumbling and stumbling in the night. On the contrary, her work emphatically shuns such satisfying closures and meaningful designs. What seems to interest her is less unity than dispersion, less uniqueness than sameness, less finitude than infinity. Surpassing even Andy Warhol in her obsession with the perfectly repeatable and easily reproducible, Kusama famously turned her entire artistic praxis into a vast mass production of dots. Whatever the medium — a canvas, a balloon or a human body — she would repeat the gesture, repeat the dot. And what became therefore strikingly unique about Kusama’s art, what always made it stand out, was each work’s complete lack of uniqueness and utter indifference to the art world’s traditional demands for singularity and completeness. In this way, Kusama fully embraced and perfectly embodied Warhol’s dream of painting like a machine: the same movements, the same idea, the same product ad infinitum, ad absurdum. With impressive resoluteness, she became her own one-woman enterprise, one-woman factory — working both as the machine and its operator in an unending production of polka dots. Yet however apt this comparison with Warhol and his factory-like machines may be, it only provides a superficial and much too general idea about Kusama’s praxis. To go further we need to ask more specifically what kind of machine Kusama sought to construct?

As I have previously argued in my article “Polka Dots and Post-Industrial Humanity: On Yayoi Kusama and Our Dotted World”, printed in this journal, Kusama’s artistic praxis must be understood in relation to contemporary changes happening outside the art world — changes that in the second half of the 20th century drastically transformed our means as well as understanding of communication. If Warhol was still thinking and dreaming in terms of industrial factories and industrial machines — still caught up in a Henry Ford universe of assembly-lines and classic mass production — Kusama’s production belongs instead to the post-industrial age and is closely related to the digital revolution. When Kusama in the ‘40s and ‘50s started to break pictures and representations down into dots, she was doing artistically what scientists and engineers were simultaneously doing on early computers. During the ‘40s, the engineer Claude Shannon had pathed the way for a new understanding of information and the possibility of breaking all kinds of information down into simple yes/no choices. (3) Computer bits and Kusama’s dots were thus born roughly at the same time: the one on canvases and inscribed in an aesthetic and sensuous world of art, the other on hard disk drives and beyond the reach of human perception. Above and below the level of perception, the traditional lines of painting and the lines of language and information were suffering similar blows: miniscule units — bits and dots — were supplanting the old regime of linear information. Kusama’s artistic machine was, in this sense, a universal machine — capable of handling and processing any type of information. And as Shannon had already made clear, it did not matter what was communicated, what the content of a message was, since all information could and would be processed in the same way. (4)

For Kusama as well, it came down to a simple binary choice: dot or no dot — paint or no paint. Her artistic program, her painterly algorithm would infallibly repeat itself. By turning art idiotically redundant and by translating every figure and every image into series upon series of miniscule units, she put color and paint on otherwise imperceptible operations and visualized both the enormous efficiency as well as the flagrant meaninglessness of these same operations. Not because she sought to criticize them or wanted to distance herself from the digital age, but because she — like Shannon, Turing, Wiener and others — wished to go beyond the limits and finitude of human existence and enter a post-industrial and posthuman world. The idea of infinity was as enticing to her artistically as it was to Shannon mathematically, and although she only sought it through strictly analogue and classic material means — paint on a canvas — she nevertheless managed to paint her way out of all of painting’s usual traps: the limits of the canvas, the limits of the figures, the identity and uniqueness of beings. What she was aiming at was, in fact, a design to end all designs — the design that would render all further designs superfluous and bring an end to all forms and closures — in short: bring all ends to an end. Thus, she spread her famous Infinity Nets, cast them over painting after painting, hoping to catch nothing less than the beast of finitude itself and to set infinity free. Or to put it slightly differently: the nets were made entirely for the sake of the meshes — for that which should be caught only as an escape.        

From a posthumanist stance, Kusama’s work is undoubtedly as fascinating as it is extremely pertinent. Her emphatic dethroning and decentering of the human subject and her radical transformation of the artistic praxis into a pre-programmed production rhyme perfectly with the posthumanist ambition to move beyond the borders of the human and into an inhuman world. Not only posthumanism’s technological but also its ecological strand finds itself reflected in Kusama’s attempt to redefine the relationship between humans and the environment through the obliteration of human agency and control. As Kusama once explained in an interview: 

Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos. Polka dots are a way to infinity. When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots, we become part of the unity of our environment. (5)

From a more traditional humanist stance, however, Kusama’s work is far more disconcerting. For where does this new, borderless world of miniscule units lead us? How shall we function in a world without lines and outlines — without the limits that grant us our identity, our irreplaceability, our singularity? And what happens to the lines of thinking, to krinein — our ability to distinguish and judge — if we no longer have any finite figures to both delimit and substantiate our thinking? Is it still possible to keep the idea of not only human values but of any values in this infinitely dotted and stuttering world? As Vilém Flusser once wrote:

The codified world in which we live no longer signifies processes or becoming. It does not tell any stories, and living in this world does not mean acting. The fact that it does not mean this any longer is called a ‘crisis of values’; for we are still generally programmed by texts, and thus for history, for science, for a political program, for ‘art’. We ‘read’ the world, for example, as logical and mathematical. But the new generation, which is programmed by techno-images, does not share our ‘values’. And we still do not know for what meaning the techno-images that surround us are being programmed. (6)

No, we still do not know for what meaning our contemporary images are being programmed. But perhaps it is precisely this search for meaning and finite designs that reveal our stubborn adherence to an old and increasingly outdated order? Kusama herself was hardly troubled by this “crisis of values” since, unlike Flusser, she did not demand the world to be neither readable nor logical — nor was she, as Flusser put it, “still generally programmed by texts.” Kusama was, as previously mentioned, not committed to lines, not a storyteller, and her images never stopped testifying to this fact. In splendid colors she placed her design of no designs before us to our shared pleasure — and to our individual dread.

And if we may add just a single observation that pertains exclusively to Kusama’s personal life: diseases are frightfully meaningless. Anyone who suffers from disease knows as much. There is no “stork” at the end of neither physical nor mental disorders — no more meaning to cancer than to psychosis or OCD. Perhaps, also for this reason, was it impossible for Kusama to ever have faith in storks.

NOTES

1. Karen Blixen, Out of Africa, New York: Random House, 1938, p. 201.

2. Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives — Storytelling and selfhood, London: Routledge, 2000, p.

3. Claude Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1971. 

4. Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, p. 31.  

5. See: https://www.tate.org.uk/kids/explore/who-is/who-yayoi-kusama

6. Vilém Flusser, Writings, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, p. 40.