Yayoi Kusama is one of the most prolific and successful artists of our time. This Japanese born creative genius was a major force on the New York art scene in the sixties, producing interactive installations, performance pieces, and a variety of other artistic offerings. Yet most people are probably more familiar with her contemporaries, like Andy Warhol. In this autobiography published in 2002 (English translation in 2012), Kusama provides some information about her childhood and upbringing, but this is mostly the story of her art and its development. It is a fascinating read if you are interested in New York’s art scene in the sixties, but it is also a window into the mind of a supremely talented individual who has endured significant mental health challenges. Her strength, resilience and creativity are astounding.
Kusama’s “autobiography” is actually a bit short on details of her life, but the information she provides about her youth is what she considers most important for her development as a person and as an artist. Kusama was born in 1929, which means she would have been an adolescent/teen during WWII, but she says almost nothing about the war. According to Wikipedia, she had to work in a Japanese munitions factory during that time. For Kusama, the most significant aspect of her youth had to do with familial relationships, which were incredibly dysfunctional. She came from a relatively wealthy family, but her parents’ marriage was rife with infidelity and emotional abuse. According to Kusama, her mother forced her to spy on her father and report his sexcapades back to her, leading to Kusama witnessing sexual activity that scarred her for life. Her mother also actively discouraged Kusama’s artistic creativity to the point of physical violence against her and her art. Kusama also says that when she was little, she began to have hallucinations. Her descriptions of these events are fascinating and clearly must have been quite frightening to a child whose parents would not have done much to help her. I would say that in general, no matter where one lived, the means to address these mental health issues (which sound like schizophrenia to me) would have been non-existent. At any rate, these hallucinatory episodes had dramatic effect on the development of Kusama’s art. As she grew up, after the war had ended, Kusama was determined to get out of Japan and away from the strictures of her family and culture. She was a great fan of Georgia O’Keefe’s art and felt that New York was where she needed to be. In 1957, Kusama moved to the US, where she spent the next decade creating some of the most provocative and boundary-obliterating art the world had ever seen.
Kusama’s descriptions of her art and philosophy of art are the most interesting part of the book. Due to her childhood trauma, Kusama developed an artistic form that she calls “Psychosomatic Art,” featuring repetition and “obliteration.” One of her first NY exhibitions was “Infinity Nets,” which involved covering walls and later entire rooms and the objects within in dots.
“My desire was to predict and measure the infinity of the unbounded universe, from my own position in it, with dots — an accumulation of particles forming the negative spaces in the net.”
These infinity nets also covered her body and the bodies of those involved in her exhibitions. She later added mirrors to these pieces, so that those witnessing the exhibit were themselves drawn into the net. (If you are interested in experiencing these works of art, The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh has two on permanent display; I haven’t been but it is now on my list to see). In this way, one’s self is lost, obliterated, which I think is what Kusama experiences when she has her hallucinations. She refers to those episodes as periods of “depersonalizations,” where her body and soul are separated.
Kusama also used her art as a form of therapy, as a way to confront the things she feared most and was most disgusted by. She specifically mentions sex/phalluses and food as sources of tremendous fear and revulsion for her. While in New York, she began to create soft sculptures of penises, again engaging in repetitive design that covered all the surfaces around her. She used macaroni in her sculptures because the idea of mass produced factory food was frightening and disgusting to her. Kusama describes this as “Psychosomatic Art,” and it sounds like a form of inoculation against that which upset her most.
“By continuously reproducing the forms of things that terrify me, I am able to suppress the fear.”
Kusama’s art and exhibitions were praised in art circles and by critics, and Kusama got to know some of the most significant artists of the time: Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Donald Judd, Georgia O’Keefe, and Joseph Cornell. She and Cornell had an interesting relationship, platonic at her insistence, but complicated by Cornell’s own mental health issues and his dysfunctional family life. Kusama makes passing reference to Warhol and Oldenburg stealing some of her ideas and getting enormous critical acclaim for it. This autobiography does not convey the sense of betrayal/loss that others believe she felt. The Wiki article links this artistic theft to Kusama’s mental health issues and attempts at suicide, which she does not mention at all. Kusama did, however, expand her artistic endeavors into a wide variety of other areas, including the written word, film, and “Happenings.” The Happenings are very interesting to read about and involved a lot of naked sexual content in public spaces.
In the 1970s, Kusama returned to Japan. Her star at this point seems to have dimmed, and while in Japan, she checked herself into a psychiatric hospital. She has lived there voluntarily ever since, but she also keeps an active art studio and still creates and holds exhibitions. Her polka dotted pumpkins are iconic. Retrospectives of Kusama’s work have been held all over the world, and based on what she writes in this book, she seems to have found some peace with her family trauma. If you are interested in Kusama’s life, this book might be a little disappointing but if you are interested in her art and the way her brain works, Infinity Net is absolutely worth your while.