MELBOURNE CULTURAL EXPERIENCES

 It's not that we think Perth is going to be a cultural desert. After all, we're relocating in summer, time of the Festival and the Fringe. But we did try to have some iconic Melbourne experiences in the last couple of weeks. 

I've hated the National Gallery of Victoria ever since I visited it as a teenager. There's something about the concrete, the physicality of the space, the challenge of working out where anything is. I much prefer the Art Galleries of NSW and South Australia. But if there's a good exhibition, I put aside my irritation with the architect and go. This time, it was to see the work of the wonderful Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. 


Loretta Hambly and I had seen some her iconic work on our 2023 Autumn Art Island Tour on the island of Naoshima where even the ferry to the island had some of her dots. Susan, Sebastian and I had also enjoyed one her interactive installations Obliteration Room in Auckland in 2018.

I just love the playfulness of her work and the physical spaces she enables you to experience. I admit I had no idea about the New York adventures of her youth or her mental health challenges but I am in awe of her on-going creativity in her 90s. 

She left Japan as a young woman because she found Japanese society "too small, too servile, too feudalistic, and too scornful of women." And given the content of one of the best films I saw in the 2024 Melbourne International Festival Black Box Diaries I suspect Kusama's latter comment might still be true. She returned to Japan in the 1970s, had a nervous breakdown, found a doctor who used art therapy in a hospital setting, moved in and stayed. 

Kusama writes as well as working in the visual sphere and as we stood in a queue for an installation of chandeliers, Residing in a Castle of Shed Tears was playing on a screen. Some beautiful phrases about the end of life.

In other words, if you get a change to see her work - do.

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