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The obliteration room 2011 revisits the popular
interactive children’s project developed by Yayoi Kusama for the
Queensland Art Gallery's ‘APT 2002: Asia Pacific Triennial of
Contemporary Art’.
In this reworked and enlarged installation, an Australian domestic
environment is recreated in the gallery space, complete with locally
sourced furniture and ornamentation, all of which has been painted
completely white.
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While this may suggest an everyday topography drained of all colour and
specificity, it also functions as a blank canvas to be invigorated — or,
in Kusama’s vocabulary, ‘obliterated’ — through the application, to
every available surface, of brightly coloured stickers in the shape of
dots.
As with many of Kusama’s installations, the work is disarmingly simple
in its elemental composition; however, it brilliantly exploits the
framework of its presentation.
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The white room is gradually obliterated over the course of the
exhibition, the space changing measurably with the passage of time as
the dots accumulate as a result of thousands and thousands of
collaborators.
Interactivity became an important component of Kusama’s work in the mid
to late 1960s, when her solo public performances expanded into
participatory happenings. A product of the postwar Avant-garde, which
almost immediately crossed over into popular culture, or at least
underground counter culture, happenings developed as unconventional
performance events increasingly relying on audience reaction and direct
participation.
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Kusama’s happenings, known as ‘body festivals’ — or ‘orgies’, as they
were often sensationally reported in the mainstream press — typically
provided platforms for spontaneous and improvisatory behaviour within
conceptual and aesthetic frameworks determined by the artist. Often
involving public nudity — the artist hoped to contrast the beauty of the
youthful human body with the violence of the US–Vietnam War — they
challenged prevailing moral frameworks.
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