Our Wellington City Gallery is running a wonderful exhibition of the work of the zany, crazy and obsessive Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. She is renowned for 'her life-long interest in visual perception and sensory experiences, her fixation with repetitive patterns and forms, her iconic use of dots and her dizzying installations'.
'Mixing Op Art, Pop Art and sculptural practice, her all-enveloping room-installations mirrored to infinity are hallucinatory, surreal and utterly unlike anything else you will experience in the art world'.
Well perhaps - unless you step back to the Cave Paintings of our prehistoric ancestors or sideways to those of, say, the Hottentots in the Drakensbergs, South Africa or the Aboriginal people of the Kimberleys, Western Australia.
Clottes and Lewis Williams have proposed that the walls of such caves were a portal into another dimension that could be accessed through ancient cave paintings.
'Perhaps the Otherworld was located behind, or inside, the rocks. The painter shamans appear to have entered altered states of consciousness in order to get in touch with the spiritual realm. They were the mediators between our reality and our needs and the Otherworld, the home of the gods who had been identified as responsible for the creation of this world.
The cave was therefore the first temple, where sacred space was created to allow contact with the divine. It was in its innermost recesses, in the belly of Mother Earth, that the Otherworld was closest – and where the darkness of the cave created a silence and solitude everyday reality did not offer'.
Well these ideas certainly have resonance when you step inside a Kusama artwork alone. You enter a cave and face challenges to your sense of reality.
Not altogether surprising then that the grim-faced little painter claims 'I, Kusama, am the modern Alice in Wonderland' - who fell and fell deep into the Earth.
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