Yayoi Kusama Bass Museum of Art Miami Beach, Florida Exhibition dates: December 4, 2002 – May 11, 2003 Exhibition catalogue with essay ISBN: 1-880511-11-8 48 pp., color From the exhibition catalogue: Yayoi Kusama in front of Door to the 21st Century, 1988 Photograph: Duane Michals	SELECTED CATALOGUES & ESSAYS Yayoi Kusama – Exodus, Liberation, and Return / Mark Ormond In order to fully appreciate Yayoi Kusama's contribution to post-World War II art it is important to briefly outline some events and issues that provide context for understanding her work. In 1957, Kusama made the courageous and ambitious decision to leave Japan and after some twenty years she returned. It was in the artistic climate outside her homeland that she would experience acceptance and it was in this environment that she would come to terms with how issues of her life and work were interdependent. The essay that follows this brief chronology will discuss more specifically the issues of this integration and its manifestation in her work as it relates to psychology. Kusama grew up in a Japan where from the beginning of the twentieth century artists have struggled with how to be avant-garde, modern, and Japanese. In Asia, art traditions have been codified and in place for centuries, while Western European traditions are much younger, and American traditions younger still. It was in these younger traditions that Kusama would seek and find support. Kusama first arrived in Seattle, where she was encouraged by Mark Tobey to exhibit her work. [1] With her suitcase full of thousands of works on paper, she moved on to New York City where she knew no one. There she found an acceptance for her art among artists and the art world and in general a much greater encouragement for her desire to be an artist than she had ever experienced in Japan. The climate of New York and the connections she made throughout the world allowed her the opportunity to do what she wished. However, her years there were not always easy and she grew to depend on certain individuals to assist her in keeping everything in her life in balance. She brought with her to New York her discipline and focus. These helped her survive what must have been a challenging experience in a city where she hardly spoke the language. Her childhood and upbringing by an often absent father and unsympathetic mother were difficult and anxiety-producing years. Like the character of the young Japanese woman Shimako in Kusama's 1992 novella Foxgloves of Central Park, for Kusama, her art is about her identity. She claims that this was something it seems her mother never quite understood. [2] It is not clear whether Kusama was aware of the history of the modern art movements in Japan or elsewhere before she came to America. In twentieth-century Japan the avant-garde had significant moments before World War II. First, there was the inception of the avant-garde from 1910 to 1914. Some individuals who were well connected brought the modern movements from around the world to Japan. The Italian Futurists' manifesto was translated almost immediately and made available in Tokyo. Dada and Proletarian Art helped position artists from 1929 to 1941. In the late twenties Surrealism was another wave of new European ideas to sweep over Japan. Surrealism gave artists in Japan permission to paint about fantasy. In her work, Kusama seems to have taken from Surrealism the permission to affirm the subconscious image or gesture as inspiration for her obsessive and ordered work. The Japanese police increasingly came to see all avant-garde art activity as potentially subversive. By 1936, the Avant-Garde Artists Association was under surveillance by the Special Higher Police. [3] Kusama has said she "dispaired" during World War II and the post-war occupation by Americans from 1946–1952. [4] The year 1952 saw the passing of the controversial Subversive Activities Prevention Law that liberal intellectuals opposed as an infringement of artistic freedom of expression. [5] Japanese film created during the American occupation and after is highly charged. To watch the 1955 Kurosawa film "I Live in Fear" is to appreciate the horrifying long-term effects not only of the actual war but also the threat of war. In the film the main character–who wants to exchange his foundry for a farm in Brazil and move his entire family there–is judged mentally unstable after the intervention of members of his family who do not want to move. Considering this climate and Kusama's nature, it is not surprising that she would make the decision to leave Japan. In conversation with the present author in her studio in October 2000, Kusama revealed that throughout the fifties she maintained a conviction and belief in herself and her abilities. She saw the work of Georgia O'Keeffe in a book and wrote a letter to request her assistance in finding a place in the United States as an artist. O'Keeffe answered her letter, telling her it was not going to be easy and that she would do what she could. Kusama was also familiar with Andrew Wyeth's work. His painting "Christina's World" held a special fascination for her. [6] While not expressed by Kusama, it seems plausible that she would identify with the young woman surrounded by the pattern of grasses, remote from contact with others. After arriving in New York she started making paintings with repeated patterns. She has described these paintings as nets or veils that separate her from others. Her arrival seemed to coincide with a shift in New York away from the dominance of abstract painting. From 1958 to 1962 she showed in New York and Europe with artists including Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Alan Kaprow included her in his show on assemblages, and in her book on Pop Art from 1966, Lucy Lippard maintained that Kusama's work was more closely related to the European "new realists" than the American brand of Pop. Kusama exhibited in Holland with the group Zero by invitation of Henk Peeters. It has been much discussed how certain developments in her work have often previewed similar directions in the work of her contemporaries, including the soft sculpture of Oldenberg, the wallpaper in a gallery installation of Warhol, the mirror rooms of Samaras, and the art-as-commodity of Jeff Koons. Her contribution to the artistic dialogue of the post-World War II period has been profound. In 1962, the year she met Donald Judd, who lived in the same building as Kusama, she began appropriating pieces of furniture and other domestic items, covering them with handmade forms. She called these "aggregation sculptures" or "compulsive furniture." In one of the early examples, Accumulation #1 in the collection of Beatrice Perry who was her friend and dealer in Washington, D.C. in the early sixties, she covered a chair with stuffed phallic forms. In 1983, the detached white phallus appears as a principal image in Kusama's novella The Hustler's Grotto, a story about sex, drugs, and loveless relationships. Kusama has said that as a woman, the phallus is something she fears. [7] Her making of the phallic forms allowed her to focus on one phallus at a time. They are soft. She makes, manipulates, and controls each one. In this repetitive process she is not the object of sex but the maker of its shape. She controls the object of sex. Her creation of vast numbers of them diminishes their singular potency and they appear anonymous. In a 1966 interview in her New York studio, Walker Art Center curator Robert Murdock referred to these works as "aggressive." Some writers have suggested the phallic works express an outrage about male domination or are a way to overcome her fear of sex. She creates a member disengaged from the body and replicates it so it becomes a pattern of stimuli. Kusama calls these works "sex obsession." [8] In various photographs after the works were completed, Kusama is shown lying or sleeping on them. Kusama's Sex Obsession series has been interpreted by Alexandra Munroe as her "enraged protest against Japan's regime; by possessing the symbol of domination, she calms freedom from subjugation to insidious moralities." [9] Munroe also groups Kusama with the Japanese artists Mishima and Eiko Hosoe, maintaining that for them obsession was both an artistic style and a psychological state. "Consumed by thoughts of the void they were driven by fantasies of fragmentation and irrationality, repetition and endlessness." [10] Kusama chose to orchestrate her own image at a time when Hollywood was still creating screen "legends." Art photography had not reached its zenith of recognition in the art world. This would come in the eighties. The 1959 Kennedy presidential campaign had made clear that nothing exists if the media does not cover it. And Warhol's disaster paintings begun in 1963 crystallized our conscious awareness that the media's power lay in emotionally detached imprinting through repetition. In the years when Andy Warhol was obsessed with the camera and particularly the instant visual gratification the Polaroid camera provided, Kusama used the photographic medium too. However, Kusama never confused the two media, and unlike Warhol, she never used photographs as the foundation or under-drawing of her work. But like Warhol, Kusama understood and claimed this medium and later the television media for its power to announce, attract, and seduce an audience with a curiosity for what artists were doing. Kusama was brilliant at self-promotion on this level. She constructed opportunities for recognition. It was important for her to have the media chronicle what she was doing. Perhaps it was more important than the number who would actually have witnessed the demonstration, performance, or happening. Her projects drew attention to her issues with capitalism, materialism, political imperialism, and "uptight" sexual morality. Kusama liked the form of the body from the beginning, covering mannequins with macaroni in her food obsession pieces. By the late sixties, she found young people willing to strip naked for performances. She celebrated the naked body and painted dots on the participants. She never joined in as a participant at love-ins. The culminating documentation of these events is the film she made with Jud Yalkut in 1967 called Kusama's Self-Obliteration. This work combines footage from several happenings that were shot by Yalkut who later became a partner with her in these activities. During the sixties Kusama created two mirrored gallery installations that also became vehicles and "stage sets," as Lynn Zelevansky calls them, for Kusama to have herself photographed. [11] Within these spaces images replicate themselves in a manner that gave full expression to Kusama's interest in infinite repetition. [12] In 1966, she created a mirror installation called Kusama's Peep Show and gave away buttons that said "Love Forever." Kusama has said a compulsion that is unchecked goes on to infinity and also points out that stars go on to infinity. [13] A 1995 work (cat. no. 30) is called Infinity Stars. A later work from 1996 called Infinity Mirrored Room–Love Forever is a freestanding work. (cat. no. 31) For Kusama the mirrored rooms combined all her interests in obsession, accumulation, repetition, obliteration, and infinity. In addition, the spaces were constantly changing visually. In working with photographers she could capture and control the space for an instant, as well as her relationship to her own work and our perception of that relationship. The camera's record of the space created a ready-made collage. Kusama's Narcissus Garden of 1966, her unofficial entry staged in the Giardini at the Venice Biennale, was an unprecedented event. There in the gardens surrounding the officially invited artists exhibiting in the national pavilions she offered for sale at 1,200 lire each 1,500 mirrored balls. This was her sign to the art world that art was a commodity too. In 1999, she staged a photograph of herself lying amidst reproductions of these balls. (illus. 7) The death of Joseph Cornell, her dear friend and mentor, was a great loss, and for this and other reasons she left New York in 1973. In 1975, she returned to Japan permanently. Her life in New York had been a struggle and as the decade of the sixties closed she had little support from galleries since her new interest in performance art had negligible commercial value. From Japan she had brought with her a remote formality that she imbedded in her work. In the West she found freedom and options that she was then challenged to order and control. In the end she decided to return to her homeland and her roots. Perhaps Kusama realized she could not obliterate her past or her heritage. In Japan she has found acceptance and honor. And yet while she can connect with Japanese artists in her homeland, she travels the world to exhibit her work. Abstract Moments of Identity [14] Yayoi Kusama has painted on canvas, paper, and living flesh. She has made sculpture and created room-size installations. She has manipulated photographs and has also been photographed. She has designed, conceptualized, and orchestrated performances. She has written poetry and novellas as well as conceived and directed film. Whether Kusama is working alone or with collaborators, she is creator, participant, observer, and most importantly, often the observed. As with every artist's work, hers is concerned with communicating ideas about individuals living in the world. She has stated that her work is about "people and psychology." [15] For Kusama, the issues of her life are inextricably entwined with her work. Her impulse to create coexists with her anxiety about aspects of living. Her determination to succeed has pushed her work forward in new directions. Looking at the work created by Kusama over the past fifty years we are able to focus on the personally structured patterns in her work and find opportunities to confront our own issues. One challenge in looking at the work of Kusama is that the seductive nature of its formal presentation can veil the complex nature of its creator's issues. As Kusama's work represents an integration of many ideas, a focused study of her handmade objects can lead the viewer in many directions. We begin questioning why she has chosen certain words such as obsession, repetition, and obliteration to describe her works. These are terms we can associate with psychology. Realizing this, our reading of her work can become more analytical of her, as well as ourselves, in relation to psychological patterns and issues. It is in the confrontation of our nature and psyche while looking at the record of her experience and expression that we search for the affect of her work. It is here in the search that we dwell in contemplation. And perhaps it is here in the search for the core of our own nature that Kusama intends to direct us, since it is her focus on self and her nature that causes her to create her work in the daily maintenance of her psyche and her life. Kusama has said that her interest in such themes as obsession, repetition, accumulation, and obliteration relate to visions she has had. The red flower pattern of the tablecloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows and the walls, and finally all over the room, my body…I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space and be reduced to nothingness. [16] Individual marks composing Kusama's patterns and designs are never identical and yet it is difficult to discern each as entirely unique. Her memory supports a view of reality where she recalls nets and veils of patterns. On the first reading of one of her painted obsessions or sculptural accumulation works our eye gives our brain a summation of the whole pattern. It does not at first glance attempt to differentiate and discern the minute difference in the way Kusama has applied paint to the surface with individual brush strokes or marks. On the contrary, our brain seems to want to provide general or summary information to our mind. Some have found it too easy to dismiss repetition as an exercise rather than a process. Kusama is committed to each moment of creative activity and each mark is individual. We must consciously guide our eye to see the differences and the disparities in her mark-making. Being in the moment of discovering each mark, we appreciate the artist's ability to engage in the activity of that manner of focus. Kusama's patterns usually work themselves into or out of a center and with some concentration we can usually notice they have evolved to and from certain directions. It is, however, the impact of the whole that creates for us disorientation where space and depth and horizon are indistinguishable. To use Kusama's word they are obliterated. This is evident in Infinity Nets A, B and C from 1965. (illus. 8–10) In the sense that Kusama's work challenges the eye, her art was dealing with issues of optical art before William Seitz's 1965 landmark show of Op Art "The Responsive Eye" at the Museum of Modern Art. Op Art may create an almost perfect regular pattern and the juxtaposition or overlay of colors creates a kind of tremor in perception, while Kusama's work deploys our optic nerve to initiate a much more complex read and analysis. Her approach to painting as action and process is more like that of the abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Compartments and patterns are fundamental to Kusama's work. They provide a structure for her to articulate a vision. When Kusama's patterns appear perfect there is always an edge or a segment of the pattern that betrays the overall exactness and confirms the object having been made by hand. Sometimes her brushstrokes are very small, consciously individual and remarkably random. Our eye never tires of wandering the surface that seems to permit an infinite variety of paths for journeysÑtracking and backtracking. Looking at her work can remind us of the myriad patterns we structure into our lives hour-by-hour and day-by-day. Many of us are incredibly distracted and find it difficult to function when our pattern or routine is interrupted. For Kusama it is her commitment to translating her vision of patterns that offers her opportunities to work and live. Kusama grew up with an exposure to a wide variety of extraordinary patterns in the textiles and fabrics used especially for traditional Japanese clothing. Photographs from the fifties and sixties show Kusama in a traditional kimono. (illus. 11) In the 1953 film "A Geisha" by director Kenji Mizoguchi there is a line of dialogue noting how expensive and important the "dress" of the geisha is because it identifies her and makes her distinct. In this film these garments provide the most complex and diverse pattern on the screen. Kusama's patterns in her art established her identity. In a sense the patterns she creates also become her shield, her veil, and sometimes her garb in the world of art. In some photographs she becomes integrated and partially obliterated by the pattern. (illus. 13) Along with barriers Kusama is also concerned with self-exposure. She has been diagnosed with obsessional neurosis. Her condition causes her to desire to focus on details. Sometimes it seems that the details are on the molecular level and this may explain her interest in creating cell-like structures and honeycomb patterns. Kusama has stated that she fears obliteration and thus is concerned with obsessive compulsions lasting to infinity. It would appear that she successfully contains aspects of her trauma through repetition. Her work is a metaphor for being connected, alluding to the need to find a compartment and to compartmentalize. Seeming to reflect her internal psychological structure, her work creates a veil or wall or barrier to interpersonal contact. Not being able to connect is the paradox of writing about her art. We search for the affect of her work. If her emotional experience is in the act of creation, the viewer must be satisfied with the overall impression of her work. We can attempt to actively deconstruct the work, to unconstruct her process of creating it. Doing so we find the individual compartments or cells that allow her to create space in her mind through their articulation. She has built a painting with the making of each one. Deconstruction of her finished work provides us the opportunity to reverse her additive process in our own minds. As someone who had been a subject and participant in psychoanalysis, she knows how to focus on the self and is more in touch with her core structure than most viewers of her work. This challenges us to come to terms with how much we are in touch with our own core structure. Her work raises the issue of how we define reality. And the power of her work asserts the existence of many simultaneous definitions. It is interesting to ponder the irony of her connecting with others through the articulation and realization of a vision that has created a temporary disconnect with reality for her, the artist. For Kusama a perception of a real experience can trigger a reaction that encourages her to distance herself from the reality of the moment. This has been called a depersonalization disorder. Her creation of images and objects can help her focus on what has dominated her vision. The camera and what it produces–the photograph–play an important role in her work. At times she has chosen to appropriate fragments of photographs to become the material of her work. She also uses the camera held by another to document herself and her art. And although the record of the camera recording her with her work or as part of her work can become a tangible piece of paper, it in reality represents a fragment. It is a compartmentalization of her interaction with the work. Depending on the camera's shutter speed it may record a fraction of a second–maybe 250th of a second of experience. The camera acts to depersonalize its subject, that is to say, Kusama herself. There is an irony in this. Depersonalization is something Kusama fears as a real experience and yet she is very fond of photographs of herself and her work. Perhaps this is because the photograph is a kind of compartment, an encapsulation. It is a fragment and a compartmentalized static souvenir of an experience. It is manageable. In theory the camera records a moment for an infinite period of time. And infinity is an issue Kusama actively ponders as well. For Kusama the desire to be photographed would seem an obsession that in fact obliterates the dimension of time because it freezes the experience in a fraction of a second and holds it there. The camera allows Kusama to be part of the creation of an image where she is engaged with the viewer and completely detached physically. It provides a remote intimacy. The photographs taken of her with her Sex Obsession and Infinity Mirror works have elements of beauty, vanity, and seduction that we do not see in her other work. In these photographs she appears very conscious of her role in animating her work. Kusama appears to take pleasure in her own beauty and the camera's admiration of her. She confronts the viewer through the lens and controls the viewer's gaze. In photographs she allows herself to be surrounded, engulfed, and supported by her accumulations. While some of her art is about compartmentalization and reduction, it is also about formal structure and process. However, unlike the minimal art of the late sixties and later, Kusama's work has always been about being handmade. Perhaps to have made purely minimal work that eliminated her mark or her hand would have realized her anxiety about obliteration. At its core Kusama's work is concerned with fundamental issues of daily existence. Her work continues to seduce and please as well as raise questions and pose enigmas about the human mind and psyche. Endnotes 1 During a telephone conversation on August 14, 2001, Beatrice Perry remembered Kusama talking about how these patterns were first inspired not by nets but rather the pattern of the sea Kusama saw looking down from the plane on her way from Japan to the United States. Someone else suggested to her the idea of nets. 2 The artist has a diagnosed condition that includes obsessive-compulsion and fear. Kusama has been under a doctor's care for many years and since 1977 has spent her nights in a psychiatric institution near her studio in Tokyo. 3 Alexandra Munroe, Japanese Art after 1945: Scream against the Sky, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1994, 53. 4 Robert Murdock interview with Yayoi Kusama in her New York Studio, December 22, 1966, Archive of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minn. 5 Munroe, 127. 6 Murdock interview. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Munroe, 24. 10 Ibid., 189. 11 Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958–1968, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, Calif., 1998, 25. 12 Ibid., 26. 13 Murdock interview. 14 In George Frederick Hegel's series of lectures on the Philosophy of History he refers to the spirit "wedded to an abstract moment of identity." 15 Murdock interview. 16 Munroe, 195. ©Mark Ormond, 2002 Originally published in Yayoi Kusama Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, Florida Exhibition dates: December 4, 2002 – May 11, 2003 ISBN: 1-880511-11-8 The author is indebted to Yayoi Kusama for sharing her work and her ideas. For his assistance and coordination of endless minute details thanks to Isao Takakura. The author would also like to thank Diane Camber for the opportunity to assist with the exhibition and contribute this essay. For assistance with research he thanks Maxwell Anderson, Peter Blum and the staff at Peter Blum Gallery, Paula Cooper and Steve Henry and the staff at Paula Cooper Gallery, Lisa Corin, Christopher D'Amelio, Agnes Gund, Judith and Richard Greer, Joseph Jacobs, Betsy Wittenborn Miller, Robert Miller and the staff at Robert Miller Gallery, Duane Michals, Helen Molesworth, Hidenori Ota, Henk Peeters, Julie Saul, Lucien Terras, and Kirk Varnedoe. The author would like to express appreciation to the many individuals who work for and support the Bass Museum of Art. Thanks to colleagues who provided assistance with the manuscript and catalogue including Richard Castellane, Mitchell Merling, Tony Neuhoff, Laurie Ossman, Beatrice Perry, Gayle Williams, Sven Humphrey, and Robyn Voshardt.