ABSTRACT
Through her obsessive artwork of infinite dots, the artist Yayoi Kusama has been expressing her depression and suicidal ideation for over eight decades. To this day, Kusama has chosen to reside by night in a mental hospital in Tokyo while during the day she continues producing her works of art with their infinitude of elaborate repetition which mirrors the loop of her depression and the monotony of her obsession with death. The title of this paper is borrowed from Kusama's book (2005) and poem. Suicide, according to the French philosopher and sociologist Emile Durkheim, is a result of both emotional and social factors and the two are inseparable. In his book Suicide (1897), Durkheim concluded that the more socially integrated and connected a person is, the less likely he or she is to commit suicide. He came up with the term anomie. Anomie is a state or condition of instability in individuals or in a society resulting from the breakdown or absence of social norms and values. He associated anomie with the influence of a loss of societal norms that was too sudden and too rigid. When this rigidity becomes normalised and obsolete as a result of the lack of connection to a sense of purpose and belonging to society, an increase in suicide is then predictable. We can see this in times of economic austerity as well as in periods of political and societal upheaval such as the one we are currently facing with the COVID-19 pandemic. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
ABSTRACT
Through her obsessive artwork of infinite dots, the artist Yayoi Kusama has been expressing her depression and suicidal ideation for over eight decades. To this day, Kusama has chosen to reside by night in a mental hospital in Tokyo while during the day she continues producing her works of art with their infinitude of elaborate repetition which mirrors the loop of her depression and the monotony of her obsession with death. The title of this paper is borrowed from Kusama's book (2005) and poem. Suicide, according to the French philosopher and sociologist Emile Durkheim, is a result of both emotional and social factors and the two are inseparable. In his book Suicide (1897), Durkheim concluded that the more socially integrated and connected a person is, the less likely he or she is to commit suicide. He came up with the term anomie. Anomie is a state or condition of instability in individuals or in a society resulting from the breakdown or absence of social norms and values. He associated anomie with the influence of a loss of societal norms that was too sudden and too rigid. When this rigidity becomes normalised and obsolete as a result of the lack of connection to a sense of purpose and belonging to society, an increase in suicide is then predictable. We can see this in times of economic austerity as well as in periods of political and societal upheaval such as the one we are currently facing with the COVID-19 pandemic. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)