This has been a terribly sad week. Now departed are individuals who have broadened the culture while making their individual marks. Of these, the passing of artist Yayoi Kusama at 97 hits closest to me. Although I only became aware of her art world reputation in the early 2000s, I knew her, so to speak, when she was a young audacious “happening” artist in New York during the late 60s.
I had no knowledge of what became of Kusama until contacted by a filmmaker who was working on a documentary about her life as a international art phenomenon: She wanted to interview me on camera about those early days in New York. What could I contribute to the film? Not much, as it turned out. But to pay tribute to her incredible body of work and personhood, I have reposted an adaptation of my essay “Yayoi and Me” from March 17, 2010.
I had a great opportunity to meet a slew of curiously notable Sixties characters, including one who has since earned fame and fortune, much to my amazement. Yayoi Kusama is an art world luminary known for her esoteric soft sculpture, immersive happenings, and obsessive polka dot experiences.
Unbeknownst to me she became Japan’s most internationally revered living artist. With art that strides the abstract and bizarre, this orange wigged living doll is the consummate Avant-gardist. She resides in a self-contained bubble of spacy illusions and ephemeral visions and for the past almost five decades, has lived voluntarily in a Tokyo psychiatric hospital across the street from her painting studio. Frequent exhibitions at MoMA, Whitney, and Tate London museums, prestigious gallery shows, mountains of published monographs, a graphic novel/biography, and dozens of products bearing her imprimatur attest to her colossal global appeal.
I met Kusama in 1968. I had no idea she was part of the “happenings” and Fluxus art scenes, to me she was merely an eccentric du jour, one of many the sixties had given rise to—a kook among kooks—a narcissist among narcissists. I was the rookie art director of Screw and I fielded almost daily phone calls from Kusama aggressively hawking photographs of the orgiastic happenings she had choreographed throughout New York City. She was the inexhaustible obsessive orchestrator of throngs of naked hippies, some wearing masks of President Richard Nixon and FBI director and cross-dresser J. Edgar Hoover, among other betes noir of the era, while covered in polka dots and scampering through undulating piles of potato-shaped phallic soft sculptures (and on one occasion occupying the Alice in Wonderland monument in Central Park for a photo that I published as a centerspread in the New York Review of Sex and Screw magazines). Kusama routinely appeared in these photographs as ringmaster, wearing a polka dot covered leotard. She also published her own tabloid, Kusama Presents an Orgy: Nudity, Love, Sex & Beauty for Adults Over 21. I was assigned to be her conduit.
The phone calls were annoyingly routine. “I come now, bring photos,” Kusama announced in such a fast clipped, heavily accented English, I almost believed that she was speaking and I was understanding Japanese. Moments later, as though she had been in a phone booth down the street, she’d arrive at the door bearing a stack of poorly printed black and white prints. Usually, she’d stay for an hour or so, explaining the hidden meanings of every single shot. Listening to her was torture.
I’d never met anyone as self-promotional as Kusama. But like Woody Allen’s joke about the guy who had a brother who thought he was a chicken and when asked why he wasn’t committed to a mental asylum, the punchline was: “Because we need the eggs!” Well, at Screw we needed her photos—and Kusama kept the underground sex press well-stocked—and as I recall they were free (most stock porn pic suppliers charged a fee).
It was a 2010 blog post where I mentioned Kusama’s hijinx that brought me to the attention of Heather Lenz, a filmmaker making the documentary, “Kusama Princess of Polka Dots”, a seven-minute version which was cut for Kusama’s Tate exhibit. I was surprised to learn that this person, reduced to a lone blip in the corner of my memory, had become such a renowned artist—said to be the most widely sold female artist in the world. If only I saved those files full of prints, I might be rich.
Lenz was introduced to Kusama’s work in the early nineties, when she was studying for degrees in Art History and Fine Arts, and her textbooks seldom contained any mention of women artists. “Then one day, a sculpture professor showed me a photo of Kusama’s sculptures. It was love at first sight,” she told me.
Some years later Lenz decided to make the film. First it was conceived as a biopic but she decided a documentary was a better fit: “it would be more interesting to have Ms. Kusama tell her story in her own words while she was still alive, and while that was still an option.” Lenz is now an expert on Kusama’s life in Japan and during the sixties as a struggling artist in New York.
By the time I met Kusama “her work had already taken many forms,” Lenz explained. Her early works included small paintings made with ink and watercolor on paper. When she moved to New York in 1958 she started making larger paintings on canvas. Then she began making sculpture and later installations that included her sculpture, paintings, and other random elements, such as mirrors and macaroni (which in some cases, covered gallery floors and required guests to walk over the crunchy pieces of pasta.) Then she moved onto the happenings she was conceiving when she became our persistent photo supplier. “During that era, she also made ‘orgy clothes,’ with strategically cut holes,” Lenz added. Then, after moving back to Japan in the seventies she made collages and wrote semi-autobiographical novels and poems. Since then, she has made paintings, sculptures, installations, and a variety of objects including furniture, purses, puzzles, stickers and limited edition phones shaped liked dogs.
“Respect for Ms. Kusama’s work has increased dramatically in recent years,” Lenz said about the first woman to represent Japan at the prestigious Venice Biennale in 1993. “Like many artists who are ahead of their time, she was misunderstood in her hometown for decades but now there is a museum there with the largest permanent collection of her art.”
Lenz posited that part of what makes Kusama so compelling is that she was willing to go to great lengths to pursue her passion to make art. “I think a lot of the art she created in the sixties was really ahead of its time and that makes it important. Personally though, I’ll always have a soft spot for the collages she produced in Japan after returning there.”
The Kusama film was released as Kusama Infinity: The Life and Art of Yayoi Kusama. The segment with my interview was cut out. But I was grateful to re-appreciate the artist who I considered as simply a symptom of our crazy times.
