From Tokyo based artist Yayoi Kusama's new exhibit: "I Who Have Arrived in Heaven." The first four are from her "Infinity Mirrored Rooms"
Love is Calling, 2013. Wood, metal, glass mirrors, tile, acrylic panel, rubber, blowers, lighting element, speakers, and sound.
The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013.
The last Is the artist in the midst of her work, "Yellow Trees."
Kusama was a minor visual citation with those polka-dotted poofs in Lear, she intrigues me in relationship to Machinal for the way these spaces engulf the visitor and the way she builds herself into these scapes. Her biography, esp. the mental hospitalization, shares a bit of overlap with Treadwell's.Â
From a 2012 profile of the artist in The Financial Times (London):
Kusamaâs story begins in the conservative, not to say quasi-fascist, surroundings of rural Japan in 1929, where she was born in Matsumoto, Nagano prefecture, into a family of seedling merchants. One early photo, taken at the age of about 10, shows a serious, rather beautiful girl with short hair, holding an enormous bunch of chrysanthemums. So upstanding was her motherâs family, that her father, a philanderer who spent much of his time in the company of geisha, adopted the Kusama name as his own. At around the time the photograph was taken, Kusama was already producing pencil sketches featuring dots and a net-like motif. Even a portrait of her mother, whom she hated for her strictness and prudish values, is covered in dots as though she were suffering from chicken pox. âMy parents were a real pain,â she tells me. âI couldnât stand it. They were very conservative. My family had been running the business for 100 years. My parents had old customs and morals.â
From early childhood Kusama experienced âvisual and aural hallucinationsâ. In her autobiography, a document that, one suspects, is better treated as artistic statement than faithful record, she writes of her experience sat among a bed of violets. âOne day, I suddenly looked up to find that each and every violet had its own individual, human-like facial expression, and to my astonishment they were all talking to me.â On other occasions, âsuddenly things would be flashing and glittering all around me. So many different images leaped into my eyes that I was left dazzled and dumbfounded.â Whenever these hallucinations occurred, she would rush home and draw what she had seen.
In 1948, after the war had ended, she began a formal course in Kyoto where she was instructed in Nihonga, a style of Japanese painting. She hated the rigidities of the master-disciple system where students were supposed to imbibe tradition through the sensei. âWhen I think of my life in Kyoto,â she says, âI feel like vomiting.â
She began to absorb the influences of cubism and surrealism, gleaned from magazines. In these styles she was almost entirely self-taught. Her artwork started to attract attention in Japan, where she staged several exhibitions. Some time earlier she had discovered a book by Georgia OâKeeffe in a second-hand bookshop in Matsumoto. Something connected and she sent OâKeeffe a letter, enclosing several of her watercolours. To her astonishment, one she continues to express six decades later, OâKeeffe wrote back with words of encouragement. It was the first of several letters the great American artist would send the âlowly Japanese girlâ.
In spite of OâKeeffeâs warnings that New York would be a tough place for a single Japanese woman, Kusama decided she belonged in the art scene of Americaâs greatest city. It was difficult to travel in those days. Japanese were restricted in the amount of foreign currency they could take out of the country, and Kusama had to sew bundles of notes into the lining of her clothes. Eventually, she made her way to New York, via Seattle, where she had persuaded one gallery to stage a small exhibition.
Her first years in New York, where she was to spend more than 15 years, were financially and psychologically traumatic. Winters in her unheated apartment were so cold she stayed up all night painting. She called it a âliving hellâ. But it did not lack for excitement. This was the era of Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothkoand Philip Guston and of pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Kusama, a frenetic experimenter, absorbed everything she could. Though she played on her exotic qualities as a Japanese women, often wearing a kimono, she became very much an American artist. âAmerica is really the country that raised me, and I owe what I have become to her,â she wrote. Within a year she was ready to strike out on her own, telling a Japanese magazine, âI am planning to create a revolutionary work that will stun the New York art world.â
The revolution came in the form of lace-like paintings that she called âinfinity netsâ. She filled huge canvases, sometimes more than 30ft-long, with endlessly repeated white loops of paint. Though it must not have looked that way at the time, the âinfinity netsâ were to become her defining creation. She sold some for as little as $200. Fifty years later, two months after Lehman Brothers went bust in 2008, one of her âinfinity netâ paintings, No. 2, was auctioned at Christieâs. It fetched $5.1m, a record sum for a living female artist.
By the early 1960s, Kusama had moved on to so-called soft sculptures in which she covered everyday objects â sofas, ladders, shoes â in white sausage-shaped objects. The motivation was supposedly her distaste for the male organ, which she associated with her fatherâs extra-marital adventures. âI donât like sex. I had an obsession with sex,â she tells me. âWhen I was a child, my father had lovers and I experienced seeing him. My mother sent me to spy on him. I didnât want to have sex with anyone for years.â
Much as with her dots, which she describes as helping to âobliterateâ her anxieties through repetition, the rationale for sewing endless phalluses was to overwhelm her fears. âI make them and make them and then keep on making them, until I bury myself in the process. I call this process âobliterationâ,â she says. She once told an interviewer, âI donât want to cure my mental problems, rather I want to utilise them as a generating force for my art.â
Art became a way of working through these obsessions. In one sculpture, shown in the Gertrude Stein Gallery in 1963, she covered an entire rowing boat in sprouting penises and displayed it in a room surrounded by photographs of the same phallus-enveloped boat. She was photographed by her creation, naked with her back to the camera. She called the piece, âAggregation: One Thousand Boats Showâ, though another critic later named it, perhaps unkindly, âAlice in Willylandâ. âThe sexual obsession and the fear of sex sit side by side in me,â she said.
In 1966, heart problems now compounding her psychiatric afflictions, she went uninvited to the Venice Biennale. There, dressed in a golden kimono, she filled the lawn outside the Italian pavilion with 1,500 mirrored balls, which she offered for sale for 1,200 lire apiece. The authorities ordered her to stop, deeming it unacceptable to âsell art like hot dogs or ice cream conesâ. Andrew Solomon, writing in Artforum many years later, said Kusamaâs âlust for fameâ had to be put into context. Comparing her to Andy Warhol â whom Kusama claimed had copied her â he wrote, âIt should not be forgotten that she was less readily accepted since she was a woman; and battling for ground in a foreign tongue; and living in a society recovering from aggressive wartime prejudice against Japan.â
Around this time, she began to stage ânaked happeningsâ. It was perhaps the height of her fame, but a low point in her reputation. Bands of Kusama followers, whom she recruited through newspaper advertisements, would descend on a public place such as the New York Stock Exchange. There they would disrobe and cavort around to the sound of bongo drums, while Kusama, the Japanese sorceress, would daub polka dots on their naked bodies. They were called orgies, though the amount of actual sex that went on may have been minimal. Certainly, Kusama herself, still revolted by the male organ, never took part. Most of the happenings were, in any case, quickly curtailed by the police. One of the events â a sort of psychedelic pre-configuration of Occupy Wall Street â took place in the famous New York financial district. Kusama issued a press release in which she suggested, in capital letters naturally, that her aim was to âOBLITERATE WALL STREET MEN WITH POLKA DOTS.â In this, as in many things, she was ahead of her time.
There followed a series of stunts designed to create the maximum publicity. In one, she wrote an open letter to Richard Nixon offering to have sex with him if he would stop the Vietnam war. âLetâs forget ourselves, dearest Richard,â she wrote, âand become one with the Absolute, all together in the altogether.â Nixon turned her down. Still, for a brief period she was more written about than Andy Warhol, appearing on the front page of the New York Daily News, and launching her own (short-lived) magazine, Kusama Orgy.
Artforumâs Solomon, an expert on psychology as well as culture, writes, âBy this time it was difficult to tell the difference between Kusamaâs authentic obsessions and the affected ones that she manifested in order to increase her own hype! ⊠She herself could no longer tell where an actual illness trailed off and the constructed personality began.â By 1973, depressed, broke and facing a media backlash after her five minutes of uber-fame, she returned forlorn to Japan. The reception was hostile. She knew no one and belonged to no Japanese art movement. âIt must have been deeply humiliating for her to come back to Japan,â says Morris, the Tate curator. âShe had a breakdown, she needed surgery, she had no money. It was burnout.â
Kusama checked herself into the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill and eventually took up permanent residence. She has lived there ever since. In the 1970s and 1980s she drifted into semi-obscurity, though she wrote poetry and fiction that won her a cult following in Japan. Only in 1989, when New Yorkâs Center for International Contemporary Arts staged a retrospective was interest revived in her art. She became more active again, mounting several one-woman shows in the US. In 1993, she went to the Venice Biennale, this time officially, where she produced a mirrored room filled with the pumpkin sculptures that are now central to her repertoire. Today, her silver pumpkins fetch around half a million dollars each. Kusamaâs revival gained even greater force in 1998 with a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. That was the same location where she had been stopped from staging an unauthorised protest 30 years before, âGrand Orgy to Awaken the Dead at Moma.â Her career had come full circle, or to borrow the language of Kusama, it was repeating and obliterating itself.
The fog seems to lift, however, when it comes to how she wishes to be regarded as an artist. She does not want to be associated with other commercially successful Japanese artists, such as Yoshitomo Nara or Takashi Murakami. âSuch Japanese art is categorised as kawaii culture,â she says, wrinkling up her nose at the word for âcuteâ that has come to define an entire genre. âI have never seen my art as kawaii like that. I donât want to be seen as a Japanese artist. I just want to be able to explore my art freely in an international context.â In case I have not got the message, she adds, âI am not happy being put in that kawaii category. If I do something that is considered to be like that, I want to scratch it out.ââMy main message is please stop war and live out the brilliance of life. I want to keep my profile as high as possible even after I have died.â
Until then, there are obsessions to obliterate and
