We dogs understand hallucinations: you might think we are staring blankly into empty corners; in reality, we are keeping vigil against phantom possums, vibrating pumps, and the lingering scent of a fox that snuck past three nights ago. We are on alert most of our waking hours.
Kusama, who recently departed this earth at the grand age of 97, took a far more creative approach. When her world began to misbehave, she simply put a leash on it and took it for a walk.
Her troubles began early in the seed nurseries of Matsumoto, run by her philandering father and draconian mother, who insisted she spy on and report her father’s love affairs.
She said the pumpkins on her grandfather’s farm seemed to talk to her, and by age 10, she started seeing “flashes of light, auras, or dense fields of dots”.
Most people would have bolted under the porch. Kusama instead grabbed ink and paper. She would paint these dot fields — which she called infinity nets — and they lay at the heart of her 80 years of painting, sculpture and soaring installations. She found calm amid their recurring forms.
When dogs feel anxious, we chew. We dig a hole with rhythmic, furious devotion until the dirt yields cool comfort. Kusama did precisely that with a paintbrush. Her acres of repetitive, hypnotic loops and dots were the artistic equivalent of circling three times on a rug until the turbulence inside matches the tranquillity outside.
Back when I was a young dog, The Boss returned from a visit to Oslo with tales and pictures of his immersion in one of Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms, and neither he nor I have forgotten it. She had an exhibition at the NGV a couple of years ago, among many installations around the world.
Against her mother’s wishes, she attended art college in Kyoto, then escaped the restrictive Japanese society in 1957 to Seattle, then New York, where she found supporters and joined the minimalists and the avant-garde with the likes of Andy Warhol.
When New York became too deafening in the late 1970s, she checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo, where she has lived ever since. Most days, she woke up, trotted across the street to her studio, painted for eight hours, and returned for supper. It is the sort of daily routine that would make any working retriever weep with envy.
She turned what could have been a debilitating psychic haunting into a joyful global empire. Where others saw madness, she saw polka dots — and then persuaded luxury fashion houses and half the world’s museum-goers to queue around city blocks just to stand inside her mirrored rooms and dissolve into light.
She called this state “self-obliteration” — the idea of shedding the fussy ego and melting into the cosmos. I do something similar every afternoon around two o'clock when the patch of sunlight hits the living room rug. You close your eyes, let the boundaries blur, and realise that you, the spots and the universe are all made of the exact same warm dust.
The Boss tells me younger Australians are increasingly adopting the North American habit of having a therapist on retainer — around 12 per cent of Australians now spend a small fortune attempting to chase away their private shadows.
Kusama simply painted bright yellow polka dots on hers, shaped them like stout, cheerful pumpkins, and invited everyone over to admire the view. It was an elegant solution, and one worth remembering next time the fridge makes a strange noise.
