Generating animated public environments, Kusama’s work prefigured the social and self-reflections of later digital technologies
Illustrator: Elle Shivers
‘Grave, dignified, cool and tough’ were the adjectives the American artist and then critic Donald Judd used to signal his esteem for the abstract canvases and textile protuberances made by his friend and neighbour, Yayoi Kusama, in a 1961 letter in support of her visa application to the United States. Regardless of Judd’s endorsement, Kusama’s stature as a key voice in US postwar art was confirmed in the autumn of that year through five solo exhibitions and acquisitions by the Whitney Museum of American Art and Carnegie International. Since arriving in New York City in 1958 from Tokyo (after living in Seattle the year before), Kusama’s serial net patterns, dot aggregations and biomorphic forms remained purposely out of sync with the dominant language of Abstract Expressionism and the formal purity espoused by the minimalist paintings and florescent sculptures of her friends Frank Stella and Dan Flavin.
Instead, Kusama referenced mass media and popular culture in equal measure with motifs from the natural world and the built environment as she made generative use of mirrors, furniture, fashion, photography, public protest, dancers, film and electronic lights. Her decidedly diverse installations corroborated Judd’s ‘Specific Objects’ dictum that ‘the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture’, as he reverentially noted the ‘obsessive repetition’ of Kusama’s ‘strange objects’ in his now canonical 1965 essay that advanced art history’s investment in architectonic terms. Importantly, her work signalled contemporary art’s definitive shift away from the solitary viewing subject of Modernist painting towards collective, hands-on multisensory experiences using light’s innate characteristics of reflection and illumination in both material and metaphorical ways.
Credit: Yayoi Kusama
The Louis Vuitton display at Selfridges, London
With a 70-year career, Kusama still occupies a paradoxical position as an art world insider who – as a female artist of colour – remains an outlier, and whose infectious dots speak both to the one per cent and as the vox populi. During her lengthy career, her complex responsive works were often reductively interpreted in racialised and misogynistic terms by critics pathologising her artistic methodologies. A rare early exception was Judd, who noted in that same letter that ‘Miss Kusama … is not especially American, nor any longer obviously Japanese, and remains only international, transcending conspicuous and obsolete traditions’, a quality he would also strive for, noting that ‘she was a kind of model’ for his own art/life philosophy.
Despite having gained international recognition for her expressionistic Nihonga paintings that advanced a sense of jikohattatsu, or self-development, a practice that influenced her interest in blending myriad periods and global styles, Kusama was frustrated by the limitations of working as a woman in Japan. After seeing artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s The Black Iris at the house of John Denman, a Tokyo-based pilot for Northwest Airlines, Kusama traced O’Keeffe’s address via the US Embassy and solicited her advice on how to make it as a female artist in the United States. The two continued to exchange letters and despite O’Keeffe advocating on her behalf with the Betty Parsons Gallery, Kusama departed for the US in 1957 with no one waiting for her on the other side. She paid O’Keeffe’s kindness forward by recommending Judd to the gallerist Richard Hu Bellamy, who picked up him, but not her. This was a pattern often repeated, leaving her without the level of professional representation of her peers and precipitating her return to Japan in 1973, where she has resided since.
Yayoi Flower, 1952
Credit: Yayoi Kusama
Happening, 1968
Credit: Yayoi Kusama / photo by Bill Baron
Kusama’s singular and sustained engagement with an ever-expanding range of fabrication processes and materials – especially mirrors and lights – underscored a central tenet of contemporary art: that art must enact rather than simply depict its own transformational capacities and so, in turn, make visible those happening in its midst. Her groundbreaking net paintings in 1958 caused Arts magazine to exclaim ‘Miss Kusama would seem to possess the required patience and, ultimately, the flexibility to extend one of the most promising new talents to appear on the New York scene in years’.
But her agitprop public performances during the 1960s and ’70s revealed the hypocrisy of a transactional art world that recoiled at the sight of the artist selling her mirrored orbs from her Narcissus Garden directly to visitors to the 1966 Venice Biennale while standing next to a placard that read ‘your narcissism for sale’, skewering the commodity status of art. Her well-documented Anatomic Explosions on the Brooklyn Bridge and other monuments in New York City featured nude figures that Kusama had dotted with red spots as a means of ‘reclaiming their alienated humanity’, burning the US flag to protest against the Vietnam War. By ceremoniously presiding over a gay wedding, depicting interracial relationships and centring women of colour, Kusama’s early happenings challenged prevailing heteronormative, white definitions of love and family.
Narcissus Garden, 1966
Credit: Yayoi Kusama
According to the research of art historian Midori Yamamura, while Kusama was in New York, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg were well aware of her soft sculptures, collages of stickers, stamps and dollars, as well as her 1963 One Thousand Boats wallpaper installation. Despite Kusama’s works being well-documented, it was her male peers who were credited with these Pop Art innovations. What distinguished her among the Americans who mined the rise of postwar consumption was her connection to European-based collectives – Zero Group (Germany) and Nul (Netherlands) – who experimented with the mechanics of light as a means of dematerialisation. Kusama’s extraordinary Infinity Mirror Rooms melded the formal syntax of sculpture with the temporal dynamics of electronic media. Seriality, iteration and reproduction became themes and methods that she has finely honed since her first mirror room – arguably the first of its kind in contemporary art – was exhibited in Floor Show in 1965 at New York’s Castellane Gallery. Aptly subtitled Phalli’s Field in reference to the fabric protrusions covering the floor, Kusama’s mirror room focused on extreme exteriority – expansive surfaces that continue ad infinitum signalled by the descriptors ‘endless’, ‘forever’, and ‘infinity’, which she often incorporates into her titles.
Iterating on these subjects, Kusama’s Peep Show (1966) underscored how these rooms presciently introduced a sense of interplay with visitors and with the space itself. Instead of entering, viewers gazed through two windows cut into the work’s hexagonal exterior. Coloured bulbs lined the ceiling and pulsated in various programmed patterns as pop music blared above the electric buzz of the lights, creating a heated multisensory environment. The cut-outs encouraged viewers to make eye contact, while the mirrored walls replicated and refracted the registration of their faces. Though visitors literally animated these spaces, Kusama conceived of the rooms less as backdrops than as machines for generating connections and non-verbal communication – anti-isolation chambers.
Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show, 1963
Drawing of the hexagonal space for Kusama’s Peep Show, 1966
Credit: Zero Foundation Düsseldorf
This notion is exemplified through her instructions for Love Forever, proposed for Zero op Zee – a 1966 site-specific event planned for Scheveningen in the Netherlands. In her hand-drawn plans and detailed instructions for this unrealised work, Kusama specified that music by The Beatles should be piped into the room to signal her anti-Vietnam War sentiment. She emphasised how the work needed to be calibrated so that the arrangement of flashing coloured light bulbs would intermittently spell out ‘Love Forever’. Her early investment in using light to animate both bodies and spaces combined a renewed understanding of the strategies of the historical avant-garde to experiment with new transmission and recording technologies (audio-visual recorders, playback machines and projectors) that became the hallmark of ‘expanded cinema’.
The multimedia projects of Rauschenberg, Warhol and Oldenburg are recognised within the discourse of expanded cinema and its enculturation of cybernetics and communication theories into postwar art. Yet Kusama also engaged in similar live mixed-media experiments including Kusama’s Self-Obliteration, a light-projection performance presented at the Black Gate theatre in June 1967. Like many artist-run interdisciplinary performance spaces, the Black Gate theatre’s Electromedia events were intended to challenge the divide between audience and performer by prioritising collective experiences. Kusama’s Self-Obliteration was part-lecture, total light show, complete with dancers in silver bathing suits gyrating to the distorted sounds of frogs croaking, coaxed by Fluxus artist Joe Jones. Under black lights, Kusama painted fluorescent dots onto the dancers so that the dancer’s corporeal presence seemingly disappeared, leaving only the dots to hover in space among the packed onlookers. Kusama used her light performances to investigate the dialectical properties of creation and destruction that would become lifelong themes of ‘self-obliteration’ – a synecdoche for the trauma of war, the expansion of human consciousness, the dematerialisation of the human body and the use of light – as a tool to illuminate and to blind.
Infinity Mirrored Room - Filled with the Brilliance of Life, 2011
Credit: Tate / Yayoi Kusama
All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, 2016
Credit: Yayoi Kusama
I Want To Live At The Far End Of The Universe, 2016
Credit: Yayoi Kusama
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Kusama played on notions of scale and scalability as her signature motifs – pumpkins, flora and riotous palettes – slid between site-specific sculptures and licensed merchandise, equally at home in both milieux. After 2000, Kusama resumed work on environments that revolve around the social dynamics of her mirror rooms from the 1960s, creating self-replicating viewing systems that foreshadowed the way digital images now often warp our self-perceptions – so long before the launch of Instagram in 2010 – as solidified by the record-breaking attendance for Mika Yoshitake’s 2017 exhibition of five decades of Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms.
Emphasising perceptual shifts enacted through built space, these structures allude to more cosmological light sources, where mirrors perform Kusama’s analogical thought processes, joining the microcosms of human subjectivity with the macrocosm of the universe. Rather than repeating the emancipatory rhetoric of ‘activating the viewer’, these rooms operate as experience machines that rely on subjective multisensory moments, enacting the social dynamics that have come to condition the ways we interface with machines. Anticipating symptomatic behaviours – from the voyeurism of Kusama’s Peep Show to the distorted sense of validation sought by sharing selfies on social media – Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms’ decidedly analogue processes of reflection underscore the idea that communication itself remains visual art’s most vital endeavour.
