yayoi kusama is often described as Japan’s greatest living artist.
More than that, she is without doubt one of the most intriguing
and contradictory figures of the global artworld. She is considered
a proto-feminist icon, who from the 1950s onwards has created
an entirely idiosyncratic oeuvre that has included environments,
sculptures, paintings and performance pieces, instantly recognisable
for her signature use of obsessively realised patterns, dots and penile
protrusions. Notoriously, compulsion born of mental illness has fuelled
her practice, and she has described childhood hallucinations in which
patterns encompassed the universe, so that she and everything else
was obliterated. Indeed, while her performance work, where she
vanishes into her surrounds, her body masked in dotty costumes
that blend into dotted environments, is a disappearing act, she rose
to notoriety through a campaign of determined self-publicising.
Such performance work was perfectly tuned into the burgeoning
psychedelic, ‘free love’ era, notably her famous naked ‘orgy’ pieces that
were so seized upon by the mainstream media at the time. Her work is
paradoxically inseparable from her image, and regularly appears in both
art and fashion magazines worldwide. And yet following the deaths of
her father and her close friend Joseph Cornell, Kusama fled the New
York highlife, ensconcing herself in a Tokyo psychiatric hospital, where
she has lived since 1977. Following a period of withdrawal from the
international stage, she was selected to represent Japan at the Venice
Biennale in 1993, and has since expanded on this grand return with
major solo exhibitions worldwide. In this exclusive interview, as Kusama
prepares for her first show at London’s Victoria Miro Gallery in almost
10 years, she reflects on her extraordinary life and work.
Naked Happening Orgy and Flag-burning, 1968, Brooklyn Bridge, New York
ArtReview:
You’ve said that ‘if it were not for art, I would have killed myself a long
time ago’. What is it about making art that makes life easier?
Yayoi Kusama:
I have lived my life putting my all into the path called ‘love forever’.
Has the process of making art changed as your career has progressed?
Or is it the same as it always was?
I have spent every day, step by step, always struggling with art.
This straight path has helped me grow as a constant process for making
art.
Do you think the art you make in Japan is different from the art you
were making in New York? How much is your location and environment
a factor in the outcome of your art?
Regardless of where I make art, be it in Tokyo or in other parts of
the world, the art I create has always stayed with me as ‘Kusama’s
philosophy’. My thought stays with love that covers the whole world,
and life and death.
You are often described as Japan’s greatest living artist. To what
extent do you think of your work as being ‘Japanese’?
Rather than being a Japanese artist, I consider myself as an artist who
is in the forefront of art in the world. It is my earnest wish that love is
Beyond My Illusion (detail), 1999 (installation view, MOMA Contemporary, Fukuoka) forever infinite in the universe.
Yayoi.indd 4 12/9/07 18:48:45
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