Yayoi Kusama – who has died at the age of 97 – was 10 when she first started experiencing vivid hallucinations consisting of visual and aural disturbances, which she described as “flashes of light, auras, or dense fields of dots”. A drawing from 1939, of a woman in a kimono assumed to be her mother, shows her obliterated by those dots; they would become Kusama’s artistic obsession. She hallucinated flowers, too.
I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live”, she said in a 2012 interview. In so doing, she became one of the most acclaimed and admired contemporary artists, staging happenings and influencing the pop art movement as a pioneering figure in the New York avant garde. Her exhibitions and major retrospectives draw huge crowds.
In 2022, due to enormous public demand, Tate Modern in London extended her Infinity Mirror Rooms show for a whole extra year (it ended up running until 2024). Kusama leaves a planet that is far more enlightened about mental illness and neurodivergence than that which she entered. Different ways of seeing are increasingly embraced by the art world, which is beginning to understand how the brilliant, beautiful diversity of the human brain can feed into groundbreaking artistic practice.
Neurodivergent, disabled and autistic artists are nominated for major prizes, and last year Nnena Kalu, who is autistic and has a learning disability, won the Turner prize. Furthermore, artists such as Louis Wain, who was schizophrenic, and Andy Warhol – who had traits consistent with autism – are increasingly viewed through the lens of neurodiversity. Processing the “obliteration” she experienced involved repetitive ways of working – those signature dots and flowers covering everything including her own clothing – while her extraordinary infinity rooms installations of mirrors and lights took the concept of sensory overload and turned it into something magical and all-encompassing.
In this way, we were granted a powerful glimpse through Kusama’s eyes. Adams points out that mental illnesses such as OCD are not necessarily the same as neurodivergence – we should be wary of grouping them all together. There can be parallels though, in Adams’ words “when anxiety overwhelms wellbeing”.
Often diagnoses can overlap. This is true of my brother, who is profoundly autistic: non-verbal, with OCD. Although he is unable to tell me, I have always instinctively known that he sees the world differently.
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