On December 15, the major retrospective “Yayoi Kusama” opened at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Comprising nearly two hundred works dating back to the artist’s childhood, the show is among the most comprehensive retrospectives of Kusama’s art to date and the largest in Australia. To mark the momentous occasion, Artforum revisits “DOT DOT DOT: The Lifework of Yayoi Kusama,” an essay by Andrew Solomon published in the magazine’s February 1997 issue. Repetitive Vision, Kusama’s 1996 installation at Pittsburgh’s Mattress Factory, appeared on that issue’s cover.
—The editors

“In this Artforum Dossier, we have gathered texts that focus on artistic practices that reflexively engage with the specific materiality of celluloid—the transparent plastic that served as the most common substrate for moving images before the advent of analog and digital video. These practices typically focus less on storytelling than on the aesthetic possibilities of directly manipulating celluloid film stock, creating sequences of celluloid film frames, or running celluloid film strips through projectors. The results usually emphasize our perceptual experience of light, color, sound, pattern, movement, and space—that is, those elements that provide the language of all moving-image experiences.”
—Tina Rivers Ryan