The exhibition, in London until 5th June, is a retrospective spanning nine decades of this 83-year-old conceptual artist’s journey to success: from being a penniless debutante in New York to becoming an abstract expressionist of the highest calibre. Kusama’s life-long obsession and catalyst on this journey is simple: the dot. In this exhibition, Kusama appears to believe everything is made from dots. She works with paintings, sculptures, room installations, open air pieces and environmental art. Her dot pieces grapple with the meaning of life and death itself; hence the names of her main sets of work- accumulation, obliteration and infinity.

Rooms One and Two take us through Kusama’s early years. Born in 1929, she grew up in a mountainous provincial town in Japan. The daughter of wealthy farmers who harvested wholesale seeds, she began drawing at an early age, sketching budding flowers for hours on end despite her parents’ disapproval. In 1939, she drew a portrait of her mother covered in seed-shaped dots. Most of Kusama’s early works have specks painted on the canvas, and she created other shapes from nature like contorted eggs, stems and branches. One striking piece is the large painting ‘Zammu’ or ‘Lingering Dream’ (1951).

It’s withered muscle-red plants with teeth-like flowers look as equally destructive and parasitic as they are alive and growing. The young artist’s visions were already proving viscerally powerful and psychologically intense under her imaginary magnifying glass. Her brutal perception of the world didn’t match the expectations of a traditional young Japanese lady. Hence, she was determined to leave for the USA, saying, “My art needed an unlimited freedom, and a wider world.”

Kusama landed on the West Coast, USA in 1957, and then moved to New York in 1958 – determined to find fame and fortune. Room Three displays the work produced in those early years of her new life in NYC; where her passion for abstract expression really began. She created immense white canvases known as her ‘Infinity Net’ paintings. They’re minimal and meditative, and made using repeated semi-circles of white paint on a black surface, which is then whitewashed over. It is a neurotically vast blank space, as if representing the extent of her loneliness.

The sculptures Kusama made in the 1960s are perverse. As you step into Room Four, sofas, a TV, and even shoes are sprouting growths or phallus shapes. There are also dresses and handbags covered in raw macaroni pasta. Kusama calls these her Sex Obsession and Food Obsession series. She’s projected an inner fantasy onto everyday objects that alludes to surrealist art. These ‘Accumulation Sculptures’ (1962-68) caught the imagination of the avant-garde art scene, and were first exhibited in a show alongside Andy Warhol, George Segal and James Rosenquist.

In room six ‘Walking Piece’ (1966) is a series of colour photo slides on a projector. It documents Kusama’s feelings as an Asian female artist in the male-dominated New York art scene. The pictures have been clicked using fish eye lenses with the harsh city landscape as a foreboding backdrop. Kusama’s figure contrasts against the scenery, she’s wearing a bright floral patterned Kimono, and holding an umbrella decorated with flowers, thus making her look alienated from the city. Yet, soon it was to be the flower power generation of the late 1960s who would embrace Kusama and propel her to celebrity status.

Room Seven and Eight display posters and press releases from 1967 onwards; it’s the time that Kusama calls her ‘Self-Obliteration’ era. Yayoi gained psychedelic cult status amongst the experimental hippie crowd who were intent on rebelling against social norms. She threw herself into the movement by hosting art performances she called ‘Body Painting Festivals’ where naked participants were encouraged to paint each other in polka dots.

These ‘happenings’ were staged around New York including in Warhol’s Factory, on Wall Street and as a protest against the Vietnam War. Kusama used video footage by friend Jud Yalkut to create a film called Kusama’s Self-Obliteration (1967), and it was scored by rock band C.I.A. It all sounds like fragments from the oddball Project MKULTRA government conspiracy. However, rather than being a stooge to the authorities, Kusama was a consummate rebel. She invented the ‘Church of Self-Obliteration’ and staged gay rights protests.

In 1968, Kusama self-declared a marriage ceremony conducted by her, and officially announced it as, “the first ever homosexual wedding to be performed in the USA”. She even designed a polka-dot dress for the occasion, meant to be worn by two people at the same time. She proclaimed: “Both the bride and groom should wear an orgy wedding gown because clothes ought to bring people together, not separate them.”

The avant-garde artist also experimented with collages and media montages. Here, Yayoi’s repetitive pieces of public faces, airmail stamps and US dollars express a pop art response to the mass manufacturing and consumer culture that was booming in the USA. Kusama was now equally as famous as Andy Warhol. But the success turned sour; her partner, artist Joseph Cornell died. Still suffering from bouts of mental illness that haunted her life, Yayoi returned to Japan in 1974. By 1977 Kusama’s psychological health had deteriorated even further and she voluntarily admitted herself into a mental institution. She continues to live there 35 years later. Kusama has, arguably, produced her best work from the psychiatric hospital’s studio. Whatever the artist has been wrestling with all these years in self-incarceration, she’s produced magnificent art.

The exhibition’s last piece, ‘Infinity Mirror Room-Filled with the Brilliance of Light’ (2011) has thousands of ball-shaped LED electric lights hanging from the ceiling above a narrow pathway. Immerse yourself in the mirror-reflected space and it will envelop your being. The multitude of lights changes to different colours, like atoms lit-up. It’s evocative of the universe, and, almost feels like walking through an infinity of stars.

In the early works it’s clear Kusama’s hallucinations overwhelmed and terrified her. But by honing and mastering her obsessive disorder through her artwork, she discovered beauty and awe from her illness. Like the art or not, it’s still a spectacle to behold. Kusama uses regurgitated motifs of the simple polka dot, true. But her fixation is a relentless energy, engulfing her entire soul. As with stories of people who are irrationally in the grip of someone or something; it’s fascinating entertainment. I yearned to experience more of her room installations and large-scale sculptures in this exhibition: they are sublime.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

Photo credit: Lucy Dawkins/Tate Photography

Words: Jameela Oberman

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/yayoi-kusama

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfpolzUkLv8&feature=related

Aside from the disturbing and strange photographs, there were a few that showed very skilled photography, including a well-positioned photograph of a boat out at sea that could easily be mistaken for a floating construction site.

If this sounds like your taste in fine photography then you should definitely attend this exhibition because to be perfectly honest, it’s free and some people may enjoy these types of images. To advise any adults, if you don’t want your children asking awkward questions, I would suggest avoiding Level 5 in the Tate Modern until the end of March.

Millie Lockhart/Christie Goodchild

E.Tautz

Meadham Kirchoff

Jasper Garvida

Christopher Kane

Fred Butler

Inbar Spector

Sophie Hulme

Corrie Nielsen

Corrie Nielsen

Who wants to read the dusty old classics when you can read them updated with blood and guts being spattered all over the place?

Me Me Me!!! Yeaaaah!

What’s become known as mashups even had an imprint (Quirk Classics) to cater for the likes of ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’ or ‘Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters’, and ‘Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter’ is released this year in big screen movie format but is there room in the genre for a kiddie-friendly version?

Oliver Twist was ruined by that hideous musical film version. The book is dark and grim and unsettling. Fagin alone is enough to strike terror into the hearts of the young, Twist is gunned down, and Sykes meets his doom in a rather grisly manner. JD Sharpe didn’t really have to try very hard to make such a story any darker so instead she paints it with a supernatural brush.

There’s soul stealing, magical keys that strip a human’s free will, werewolves, zombies, cults, vampires, and buckets of blood sloshing about in abandonment. The story has been picked over and the gist remains – Oliver is an orphan, he goes to work for an undertaker, he meets the Artful Dodger and Fagin, is brought into the gang, Nancy and Sykes are still, respectively, flawed and a right bastard, Mr Brownlow is Twist’s savior – but Sharpe has created her own myth involving dark magic and Twist being the counterbalance to it in order to save the world.

It’s not a taxing read despite being nearly 300 pages, the language is ripe and there’s plenty of bloodthirsty description, and the spin given to the story is entertaining enough to keep both young adult and adult readers turning the pages. It would have been more interesting to see how far Sharpe could have pushed it had she been aiming it purely at an adult audience but, as it stands, she’s done more than enough to open the story up to a new generation.

OLIVER TWISTED by JD SHARPE is released 6th Feb.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Oliver-Twisted-J-D-Sharpe/dp/1405258179

Words by Dalia Black

The exhibition consists of two groups of works, corresponding to the first two albums by Band Of Skulls. The first series formed the artwork for their debut album, released in 2009, when Richardson’s paintings were photographed and then digitally manipulated to create the cover. The process was extended and developed for their forthcoming second album, for which Richardson worked with the designer Vincent Toi and the creative team at The PHI Centre in Montreal, Canada, who by turn enlisted glass artists Cédric Ginart and Karina Guevin to make a glass sculpture inspired by Richardson’s paintings. The resulting collaboration was photographed and became the cover image for the album.

Heavily influenced by painting masters including Cy Twombly and Lucian Freud, Richardson’s large-scale abstract paintings exploit the medium of oil on canvas to explore the nature of the human form, whilst making use of the visceral quality of the medium against the rough texture of the linen on which she works.

Richardson’s work is concerned with the ambiguous and the abstract, as well as the nature of symmetry and reflection. Music is a key part of Richardson’s life, and she acknowledges a strong link between her musical and her artistic outputs. The relationship between the two mediums is a reciprocal marriage of creativity, with the music informing and inspiring her paintings, and the paintings lending the music a visual identity.

Londonnewcastle Project Space, Redchurch Street, London
2nd – 12th February 2012

It made sense that I hadn’t heard of Superdoll Collectibles, it is part of an elite underground collectors scene after all. We were greeted by a long dining table of
miniature china dolls (known as Sybarites) wearing the most intricate mini couture gowns I’ve ever seen – not that I’ve seen that many but still, it was impressive. Each doll is around 17″ tall, matte white and made of resin, and can take up to 200 hours to make (yes…really) and sells from between $20,000 to $40,000 (yes…really).

The crowd was a mix of art dealers, journalists and stylists. There was a nice chilled mood at the event, if not a little weird by the fact it felt like we were gate crashing some well dressed doll’s dinner party. But we soon got over that and enjoyed the incredible presentation and champagne that just kept on flowing.

By Georgia Boal-Russell

MMA fighter, Roger Gracie, stars in 180NHM film fueled by Relentless Energy Drink.

The Brazilian jiu-jitsu champion and MMA fighter, Roger Gracie, talks about the pressure of coming from a fighting legacy and his motivations in exclusive interview footage in a 180NHM film. 180 seconds long, the film is an energetic yet thought provoking portrait of an athlete who personifies the Relentless Energy Drink “No Half Measures” ethos.

Roger Gracie is a man who knows a thing or two about not accepting compromise. Shot in Gracie’s Gym in New York, his film is a startling look at the vigorous psychical torment that Gracie puts himself through in order to be one of the world’s number one grapplers in both MMA and Brazilian Jiu-jitsu. Roger comes from a long line of Brazilian Jiu-jitsu masters, and in the field he is seen as a modern-day hero. He talks about the pressure this puts on him as a fighter and the weight his name carries with opponents in this revealing and action packed short film.

Relentless Energy Drink explains. “The 180NHM film is an intense and exciting project to be involved with. Our vision was to portray Roger as more than just a fighter, to go deeper into why he fights. It’s about creating a documentary that gets under the subjects skin as more than just an athlete and looks at their personality, drive and motivations.”

www.relentlessenergy.com now.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Skulls have long held fascination and dread for many, featuring in art and literature and film since the art forms began. From high culture (Hamlet contemplating the skull of poor Yorick) to popular (Skeletor in He-Man) and beyond, our heads stripped of flesh have symbolised much and our obsession with them show no signs of abating.

Faye Dowling has compiled ‘The Book Of Skulls in an effort to, presumably, give some idea of the span of their popularity and also a potted history of various skull-enthused movements. From the Crystal Skulls of Aztec/Mayan civilisations to The Grateful Dead and to modern artists like Dali and Damien Hirst, Dowling has kept the writing to a minimum and gone heavy with images. Some are lighthearted (skulls as cherries – below) to the more disturbing. She covers tattooing to spraypaint, oil on canvas to sculpture – it’s a short but essential exploration of this enduring human symbol.

Someone in Hollywood clearly thought so and thus we’re given a prequel, directed by Rupert Wyatt (known for not very much) and starring James Franco, John Lithgow, Freida Pinto, Tom Felton and Andy Serkis in motion-capture as the ape, Caesar (oh, how clever).

The premise is to show just how this ape-overtakes-human malarkey began and which provides an actual believable premise – the scientific workings of Will Rodman as he tries to find a cure for Alzheimer’s which his father (Lithgow) is struck down with. The experiment goes wrong, the test apes are put down except for one baby ape whose mother was a test subject. The ‘cure’ repairs brain tissue and increases intelligence and baby Caesar is going to be the lucky recipient of brain power that grows exponentially as he gets older.

Eventually Caesar grows too wily and too aggressive (he is a teenager, after all) and is put into a sanctuary run by cruel wardens where he meets and wins over his fellow inmates, and then all hell breaks loose.The main problem is that by the time that hell bit happens, you’re practically asleep in your chair as the set up into the action is paced slower than a wet week. Of course, Wyatt probably felt that to have a believable outcome from a credible premise the audience needed to be taken on the same journey as Caesar himself.

Lithgow, as the ailing father deep in the disturbing clutches of Alzheimer’s, provides the film’s only gravitas, leaving his co-stars fighting to give their one-dimensional characters any depth. Pinto and Franco are decent actors but the material they have to work with is flimsy and, at times, haplessly cheesy. Felton dials in a performance that’s every bit as camp and pantomime as Malfoy’s scowling theatrics and Tyler Labine (as a lab technician) chews through the scenery. His crucial to plot demise actually provokes a hooting cheer from the audience.

In fact, far too many scenes were greeted by laughter and the kind of whooping that normally accompanies films like Scream, where the helpless, dumb-ass cheerleader gets an axe through the head after shrieking like a banshee for 15 minutes. To say this is a camp film is making an understatement. The CGI (done by Avatar’s crew Weta Digital) is omnipresent and, to give credit, the humans work well alongside it, particularly Franco, when they could so easily be either upstaged or out of their depth.

However, things do get extremely silly in the third act. From Caesar’s first uttered word – a growl turning into thundering NOOOOOOO that would put Richard Burton’s gravelly tones to shame – which elicited howls of laughter in the cinema, to apes climbing over the Golden Gate Bridge and attacking helicopters. It’s so heavy on the CGI that most of the picture has that light haze which seems to appear when there are too many edges to define and by blurring by a millimetre means 20 less hours slaving over a hot computer. Andy Serkis/Caesar also gets sublimely ridiculous. In Tim Burton’s attempt, Tim Roth oozed malice and psychopathic tendencies so magnificently it was, at times, chilling to watch. Here, Serkis turns the cranky Caesar into a cartoon gangster and, at one point, Derek Zoolander with all that posing and preening atop of cars. Add in some kind of moral/ethical dilemma and police with really bad aim as they try to fell him with bullets and you’ve got an audience mostly sniggering to themselves.

This is by no means a summer blockbuster of worth – it’s neither a successful drama nor a cracking actioner. It’s dull, long winded and apart from some well done computerised monkeys, there’s so little to entice you to watch that this may actually make Burton’s Planet of the Apes that one step closer to good.

Page after page of blood on the sidewalks, pensioners being flung through the air by yummy mummys driving Chelsea tractors at breakneck speed to get little Tabitha to ballet on time, shopkeepers wailing on schoolkids with rolled up copies of The Sun, gutted pigeons….

Actually there is a dead pigeon in Patrick Dalton’s photography. But it’s poetic. And it fits right in with the strange and wonderful things Dalton has captured around the capital from eyebrow-raising shops to laugh out loud typo-filled signs. Londoners have a black sense of humor. Gallows humor. And Shit London encapsulates all that’s naughty, wrong and brilliant about our fair n’ filthy city.

Shit London is now available to buy. £8.99

www.shitlondon.co.uk

www.anovabooks.com