MUSEUM VISIT Fondation Louis Vuitton ‘Being Modern: MoMA in Paris’

Yayoi Kusama     Accumulation No. 1, 1962     Sewn stuffed fabric, paint and chair fringe

Content: The artwork is a regular chair that has been affixed by sewn and stuffed phallic protrusions, later painted white. This piece of furniture becomes an unsettling and blatantly sexual object. The artist chooses to cover everyday objects with hand fabricated penises to show her obsession with repetitions.

Composition: The use of multiple white sewn and stuffed hand made penises is really successful as there is an addition of volume and embellishment to a regular and everyday use chair. The different sizes of the various elements help to create a sense of reality, by giving to the artwork a major scale. The artwork is displayed on a white base that is positioned in the middle of a room with a white light that is illuminating the chair from above, in order to make sure that the piece is clearly visible to the visitors. The scale is the actual size of a regular chair, so that the viewers could see themselves using this facility. The time spent to sew this hand made penises was extremely long and difficult because the work needed to be done on the chair base that served as the main composition to follow.

Context: The artist intention to make this kind of artworks was because she wanted to neutralise her idea of neurotic fear of sex and disguisement towards the male sexual organ. Thinking back at the extremely patriarchal society in Japan in the 1960s, Yayoi gives a wry commentary about this issue and, later, she discovers that this is a problem also in the New York art world.

Connection: I find really interesting how the artist chooses such a representative and commonly used organ to relate it to a more meaningful problem that led to fights and, still nowadays, represents major conflicts and stereotypes about the two genders. I think that this artwork is really successful as men prefer to use something else rather then their brain to think and analyse situations, so I believe that the piece displays effectively the way males think and behave.

Comment: I think that the artist complains about the majority of the societies around the world as they are ruled by males and females play a less important role in the population. The major strength is the amount of hand labour that has been putted into the creation of this artwork and the precision in which all those stuffed penises are overlapping with each other. A weakness could be the way that the piece is displayed as it is near another artwork that is attached to the wall so people tend to focus more on that one, rather than the chair that, as the surroundings are all white, it can be confused and not pop up to the eyes of the visitors.

Leave a reply

Skip to toolbar