Yayoi Kusama by Jo Applin

Author:Jo Applin [Jo Applin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781846381133
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2012-09-24T05:00:00+00:00

‘Become one with your environment’

In 1967, the ‘abstract-erotic’ phallic carpet of Infinity Mirror Room — Phalli’s Field was redeployed to provide the backdrop for the series of what Kusama called her ‘naked body painting happenings’, in which she painted nude men and women with polka dots as they cavorted in front of a film camera under her direction. In 1968 the room’s cushioned floor panels were again repurposed, this time as wall panels before which naked performers participated in Kusama’s Homosexual Happening (fig.21). By introducing naked bodies into the room, Kusama was able to playfully literalise the abstract spotted ‘phallic field’. With this and other happenings, such as Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead at the MoMA — Featuring Their Usual Display of Nudes (1969), which took place in the New York museum’s sculpture garden, or Naked Protest at Wall Street, New York (1968), in which four naked participants danced to the sound of bongo drums while Kusama sprayed them with polka dots (the police quickly closed the event down), she revelled in the chaotic arrangement of nudes, clustering them together into groups as they ‘performed’ for the ever-present camera. Kusama privileged group participation in these events, parsed through a language of freedom, open expression and sexual liberation.

The Wall Street protest, in particular, offered her starkest political statement, with the accompanying press release denouncing the stock market as ‘capitalist bullshit’. As well as decrying the market’s financial support of the war in Vietnam, Kusama declared: ‘Obliterate Wall Street Men with Polka Dots on Their Naked Bodies!’91 Her 1968 psychedelic film Self-Obliteration includes scenes of painted participants dancing inside her mirrored room environments, offering a more raucous, collective experience of her enclosed spaces than those photographs she had taken of herself inside. This bringing together of groups of people inside rooms is in stark contrast to her earlier 14th Street Happening, in which Kusama presented herself shipwrecked on a phalli barnacled raft, an atomised alien subject interrupting the flow of New York City’s traffic and residents. By the end of the decade, her practice shifted decidedly in the direction of collective actions, as she acted as a master of ceremonies, orchestrating willing participants.

Throughout the 1960s, Kusama played fast and loose with contemporary political events; by the tail end of the decade, her work appeared to many as a series of publicity stunts involving her familiar repertoire of polka dots and nudity, but lacking her earlier seriousness. This led to articles and reviews in a wide range of media, from the contemporary art press to the so-called ‘girlie’ magazine trade, both locally and abroad. For example, she was featured in the Australian publication Man, which titillated viewers with tales of nudity and public orgies organised by ‘a pocket-sized, headstrong Japanese professional sculptress and occasional love goddess who hopes to revolutionise New York’.92 Kusama produced her own issue of a broadsheet titled Orgy, which mimicked the language and typography of porn magazines and also their more ‘cultural’ counterparts, such as Screw, in a somewhat unsuccessful bid to claim her own agency in the distribution process.

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