Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama E-Book

Yayoi Kusama

• Herausgeber: Tate Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 250

Beschreibung

I am deeply terrified by the obsessions crawling over my body, whether they come from within me or from outside. I fluctuate between feelings of reality and unreality. I, myself, delight in my obsessions.'Yayoi Kusama is one of the most significant contemporary artists at work today. This engaging autobiography tells the story of her life and extraordinary career in her own words, revealing her as a fascinating figure and maverick artist who channels her obsessive neuroses into an art that transcends cultural barriers. Kusama describes the decade she spent in New York, first as a poverty stricken artist and later as the doyenne of an alternative counter-cultural scene. She provides a frank and touching account of her relationships with key art-world figures, including Georgia O'Keeffe, Donald Judd and the reclusive Joseph Cornell, with whom Kusama forged a close bond. In candid terms she describes her childhood and the first appearance of the obsessive visions that have haunted her throughout her life. Returning to Japan in the early 1970s, Kusama checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo where she resides to the present day, emerging to dedicate herself with seemingly endless vigour to her art and her writing. This remarkable autobiography provides a powerful insight into a unique artistic mind, haunted by fears and phobias yet determined to maintain her position at the forefront of the artistic avant-garde. In addition to her artwork, Yayoi Kusama is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and fiction, including The Hustler's Grotto of Christopher Street, Manhattan Suicide Addict and Violet Obsession.

Leseprobe

INFINITY NET

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF YAYOI KUSAMA

Translated by Ralph McCarthy

Tate Publishing

Contents

Prologue

Part 1To New YorkMy Debut as an Avant-garde Artist1957 / 1966

Part 2Before Leaving HomeAwakening as an Artist1929 / 1957

Part 3No More War: The Queen of PeaceAvant-garde Performance Art for the People1967 / 1974

Part 4People I’ve Known, People I’ve LovedGeorgia O’Keeffe, Joseph Cornell, Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, and Others

Part 5Made in JapanWorldwide Kusamania1975 / 2002

Prologue

In Year One of the new millennium, from 2 September to 11 November, the city of Yokohama became the stage for a groundbreaking art festival.

The main venues were the Pacifico Yokohama Exhibition Hall and Red Brick Warehouse No. 1, but the entire city was involved. Exhibitions were held at museums, public halls, and galleries throughout the town, and some hundred and ten artists from thirty-eight countries around the world participated. YOKOHAMA 2001: International Triennale of Contemporary Art was Japan’s first-ever large-scale festival of this sort. And it was to be held every three years from then on.

Since the 1960s, when I was based in New York, I have exhibited my work all over the world, circling the globe many times. And I have always wondered why Japan lags so far behind. Japan has the money and the facilities but no real interest in or understanding of contemporary art. I was shocked, when I first returned from the USA, to find that my country seemed a good hundred years behind the times.

Subsequently, whenever I have returned from a trip abroad, it has felt as though it is to a new Japan. But we’re still behind the times, even today. There is so much room for improvement in every facet of the art world and the museum system here. During the years of Japan’s economic bubble in the late 1980s, for example, money was wasted on all sorts of frivolities while art museums across the country were struggling for funds. Such foolishness is never seen in America, even during the leanest of times. Americans and Europeans have a more deeply rooted understanding of the importance of the arts. In Japan, art is thought of only as an amusing pastime, if not an extravagance. This creates an environment that suppresses any real progress and gives rise to a purely superficial view of the arts.

But now, in 2001, the country was lending its support to a huge international exhibition of contemporary art—a happy development indeed. The main theme of the exhibition was ‘MEGA WAVE – Towards a New Synthesis’. All conceivable genres of contemporary art were being brought together – painting, sculpture, photography, film, installation. The dream was to create a tsunami of art capable of swallowing the entire world. How wonderful it would be for Yokohama, Japan to be the epicentre of such a mega-wave!

I presented both indoor and outdoor installations at this our historic first Triennale. My indoor installation was called Endless Narcissus Show. Inside the Pacifico Yokohama Exhibition Hall I constructed a mirror room. Ten enormous mirrors lined the interior surfaces of the room, and suspended from the ceiling and covering the floor were some fifteen hundred metallic mirror balls. Walking into the room, viewers found themselves reflected in the countless surfaces and transforming endlessly as they moved. This was an immersion experience in Repetitive Vision.

The outdoor installation was titled Narcissus Sea. I floated two thousand mirror balls, each exactly 30cm in diameter, in the canal alongside the train tracks in the New Port district. As I installed the work, each ball met the water with a joyful sploosh! I found it extraordinarily moving. The mirror balls bobbed and rolled in the waves. Light glinted off them, and their perfectly spherical surfaces reflected the sky and the clouds and the surrounding water and landscape. Onlookers watched an endless, silvery sea of mirrors bubble into existence. The ceaseless movement of the water pushed the globes together and pulled them apart with gentle clicks and squeaks, constantly transforming the shape of the work. It was a startling but dazzling sight: a mysterious sort of entity reproducing endlessly at the water’s edge.

It is said that the Japanese still think of art as something far removed from daily life. And it is certainly true that contemporary art has yet to fully blossom here.

Historically, the port of Yokohama was the first location in Japan opened to foreign influence, and clearly it still leads the way in that respect. It is extremely significant, I think, that Japan’s first major international exhibition of contemporary art was presented here, and on such an unprecedented scale. I wish we could see it happen not just triennially, but every year.

I wanted to celebrate a new beginning for contemporary art in Japan with that sea of shining mirror balls. And to celebrate, as well, the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Thinking back, I have travelled a long road to get here. My constant battle with art began when I was still a child. But my destiny was decided when I made up my mind to leave Japan and journey to America.

Part 1

To New York

My Debut as an Avant-garde Artist

1957 / 1966

Reckless Journey

I landed in America on 18 November 1957.

Like others of the generation that grew up during the Pacific War, I had not studied any English at school; yet I felt no trepidation whatsoever about my first trip overseas. I had been dying to leave Japan and escape the chains that bound me.

In those days, however, there were still limits on the amount of foreign currency you could take out of the country. I had therefore decided to take sixty silk kimonos and some two thousand of my drawings and paintings. My plan was to survive by selling these.

I shall never forget my very first flight, on that aeroplane to America. The cabin was empty except for two American GIs, a war bride, and me.

Back then, no one travelled abroad in the lighthearted spirit you find today. There were all sorts of obstacles, many of which seemed almost insurmountable. First among the obstacles for me was my family’s opposition. It took me eight full years to convince my mother to let me leave Japan.

My hometown is Matsumoto City, in Nagano Prefecture. Matsumoto is surrounded by the towering peaks of the Japanese Alps and the sun hides behind the western mountains early each afternoon. I used to wonder what lay beyond those daylight-swallowing mountains. Was there just a sheer precipice, and nothing else? Or was something there after all, something I knew nothing about? If so, what?

This childhood curiosity about unknown places developed eventually into a desire to see with my own eyes the foreign lands that were said to lie far beyond those rugged mountains. One day, I addressed a letter to the president of France:

Dear Sir, I would like to see your country, France.

Please help me.

I hardly expected the short but kindly reply that soon arrived:

Thank you for your interest in our country. There are various organizations devoted to cultural exchange between France and Japan. I have arranged for information to be sent to you. Your first task, however, is to study our language and pass the examination. I wish you every success.

And, indeed, the French Embassy later proved most generous with information and advice. But, oh, what headaches that infernal language gave me!

After much fretting and indecision, I turned my attention to the other country I was dying to visit back then: America. I recalled the exotic face of a little black girl with braided hair I had seen in a picture book. I envisioned America as a land full of these strange, barefooted children and virgin primeval forests. That was the place for me!

Deeply transparent blue skies over fields of more grain than anyone could ever eat; green meadows soaking up the sunlight; empty spaces extending endlessly in every direction… How I longed to see such things with my own two eyes! I wanted to live there. If I had trouble making a living, maybe I could become a farmer and paint on the side. Come what may, I decided, I would go to America.

How to get there, though? How to get to a country where I had absolutely no connections? America had its own laws limiting the expatriation of dollars, and you could not even enter the country in those days without a sponsor’s letter guaranteeing your livelihood. I pondered this problem and then pondered it some more.

Soon after the War ended, in a secondhand bookshop in Matsumoto, I found a book of paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe. I have no idea why such a book was available in a provincial city like Matsumoto, but my discovery of it was the thread that led me all the way to America. Gazing at O’Keeffe’s paintings, I somehow felt that she was someone who might help me if I went to the United States. She was the only American artist I knew anything about, and until this point all I knew was what I had heard from a friend – that she was the most famous painter in the USA. And yet, right then and there, I decided to write her a letter.

A six-hour train ride got me to Shinjuku, in Tokyo. I went straight to the American Embassy and leafed with trembling hands through their copy of Who’s Who, looking for O’Keeffe’s address. I was thrilled when I found it. (I never dreamed that one day I myself might be listed in the same book.)

With Zoe DusanneDusanne Gallery, Seattle1957

Georgia O’Keeffe stood at the pinnacle of the American art world. She was considered one of the top three female artists of the twentieth century, and she was the wife of Alfred Stieglitz, one of the pioneers of American photographic art. She had fled the hustle and bustle of New York and retreated to a mountain ranch in the mysterious rock-strewn region of New Mexico, where she painted pictures of scattered cattle bones and lived like a spiritual recluse. It was to her that I wrote, as soon as I got back to Matsumoto, of my desire to go to America at all costs. I enclosed several of my watercolours, even as I told myself I was mad to think she might ever reply.

Astoundingly, though, Georgia O’Keeffe wrote back to me. I couldn’t believe my luck! She had been kind enough to respond to the sudden outburst of a lowly Japanese girl she’d never met or heard of before. And this was only the first of many encouraging letters she was to send me.

Her reply made me all the more determined to go to the USA, but I still needed to find an American sponsor. This was no easy task. As a last resort I contacted a distant relative, a former Minister of State and Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs named Etsujiro Uehara, asking if he could introduce me to someone. He put me in contact with an old friend of his, the widow of a Mr Ota who as a first-generation immigrant in the USA had established a bank in Seattle and consulted for hotels and other businesses. Mrs Ota agreed to be my sponsor. With the invaluable cooperation of many people, not least the eminent psychiatrists Dr Yushi Uchimura and Dr Shiho Nishimaru, I was finally able to obtain a visa. My official ‘purpose’ in going overseas was to hold a solo exhibition of my art in Seattle.

To help cover travel expenses I changed a million yen into dollars at the Tokyo branch of an American company called Continental Brothers. This was of course against the law. In those days, a million yen was enough money to build several houses. I smuggled those few thousand dollars out of the country by sewing some of the bills into my dress and stuffing others into the toes of my shoes.

Seattle was the first American city I set foot in. The owner of Seattle’s Zoe Dusanne Gallery, who had helped debut such artists as Mark Tobey and Kenneth Callahan, had offered to exhibit my work.

I knew no one in Seattle apart from Mrs. Ota, whom I had met previously in Tokyo, and George Tsutakawa, a sculptor who taught art at the University of Washington. I knew that I had sealed a very challenging fate for myself. I was starting out on a crazy new life and was bound to run into trouble at every turn. But the joy I felt at finally arriving in America, after painstakingly piecing together every possible connection, far outweighed any anxiety about the hardships ahead.

In December 1957 the Dusanne Gallery staged my first solo show in the USA. Included were twenty-six watercolours and pastels, including Spirit of Rocks, Ancient Ceremony, Ancient Ball Gown, Fire Burning in the Abyss, Flight of Bones, and Small Rocks in China. I was featured on a radio programme called Voice of America to talk about the exhibition, as well as my impressions of the United States.

The exhibition was a resounding success. But I thought of Seattle as only the first step in my reckless journey. My final destination had always been New York; having reached the foot of the mountain, I wanted to climb to the top. The people in Seattle urged me to stay, but I felt I had no choice but to leave them behind and set out on the next adventure.

A Living Hell in New York

The aeroplane was tossed by heavy rain and lightning. Things got so rough flying over the Rocky Mountains that I was sure it was the end. As the plane bounced and shuddered, I reflected that somewhere down below was New Mexico and the quiet ranch Georgia O’Keeffe had invited me to visit. When at last we landed at the airport in New York, I felt as if I had narrowly escaped with my life. Almost unconsciously, I found myself reciting the prayer my friends in Seattle had said before every meal and every cup of coffee: ‘Dear Lord, we thank You for blessing us with this sustenance, and for Your loving guidance in preserving the happiness we feel today.’

The first place I stayed in New York was the Buddhist Society, a hostel for foreign students who supposedly practised Zen. I was there about three months before going out on my own, renting a room in a house and later a loft. Rent was cheap, but this was at the beginning of a decline in America’s fortunes. By the time President Kennedy made his call for a ‘New Frontier Spirit’, the tremendous cost of the Vietnam War had set the country on a downward spiral. Food prices went up and up; and unlike post-war Matsumoto, New York was in every way a fierce and violent place. I found it all extremely stressful and was soon mired in neurosis.

Compared to Seattle, this city was hell on earth. Spending all my time on my work and studies, I soon burned through what dollars I had. And before I knew it I was living in abject poverty. It was one struggle after another: getting enough food to make it through the day; scraping together cash for canvas and paints; problems with Immigration about my visa; illness… Many of the studio’s windows were broken. My bed was an old door that someone had left out on the street, and I had just one blanket. The loft was in an office building in the business district, and the steam heating was turned off at six o’clock in the evening. New York is almost as far north as Sakhalin Island, and I froze to the bone and developed pain in my abdomen. Unable to sleep, I would get out of bed and paint. There was no other way to endure the cold and the hunger. And so I pushed myself on to ever more intense work.

One day someone knocked at my studio door. Standing there was a not-yet-famous Sam Francis, who lived in the next building. I made some coffee and when I served him a cup he asked if I had any milk. I blushed, not knowing what to say. I had no food of any sort, and had not eaten since the previous evening. In fact, it was something of a miracle that I even had coffee.

Dinner in those days might be a handful of small, shrivelled chestnuts given me by a friend. Sometimes I would gather discarded fish heads from the fishmonger’s rubbish and carry them home in my rag bag, along with the rotting outer leaves of cabbages tossed out by a greengrocer. I would boil these into soup in a ten-cent pot from the junk shop and thus fend off starvation for another day.

Sometimes, when I felt miserable, I would make my way to the top of the Empire State Building. From there the vast, dazzling panorama of New York, the citadel of capitalism, with its glittering jewels and grand, swirling drama of praise and blame, still retained something of America’s golden age, the pre-Vietnam era of prosperity and abundance. Looking down from the world’s greatest skyscraper, I felt that I was standing at the threshold of all worldly ambition, where truly anything was possible. My hands are empty now, but I shall fill them with everything my heart desires, right here in New York. Such longing was like a roaring fire inside me. My commitment to a revolution in art caused the blood to run hot in my veins and even made me forget my hunger.

One day about this time, an elderly woman came to call on me at my studio. Georgia O’Keeffe, visiting New York, had been concerned enough to take the trouble to stop by and see how I was getting along. Face to face with the legendary artist whose painting of cow bones I had discovered in a secondhand bookshop in provincial Japan, I wondered if I was dreaming.

O’Keeffe was determined to help me and introduced me to Edith Halpert, her own art dealer, with whom she had worked throughout her career. At her Downtown Gallery, Halpert had debuted such eminent artists as Yasuo Kuniyoshi, John Marin, and Stuart Davis. She bought one of my works.

Pouring virtually every penny I had into materials and canvas, I painted and painted. I set up a canvas so big that I needed a stepladder to work on it, and over a jet-black surface I inscribed to my heart’s content a toneless net of tiny white arcs, tens of thousands of them.

In my studioNew Yorkc.1960

I got up each day before dawn and worked until late at night, stopping only for meals. Before long the studio was filled with canvases, each of which was covered with nothing but nets. In time my friends grew uneasy and peered at me with anxious blue eyes. ‘Yayoi, are you all right?’ they’d ask, genuinely concerned. ‘Why are you painting the same thing every day?’

In fact, I often suffered episodes of severe neurosis. I would cover a canvas with nets, then continue painting them on the table, on the floor, and finally on my own body. As I repeated this process over and over again, the nets began to expand to infinity. I forgot about myself as they enveloped me, clinging to my arms and legs and clothes and filling the entire room.

I woke one morning to find the nets I had painted the previous day stuck to the windows. Marvelling at this, I went to touch them, and they crawled on and into the skin of my hands. My heart began racing. In the throes of a full-blown panic attack I called an ambulance, which rushed me to Bellevue Hospital. Unfortunately this sort of thing began to happen with some regularity, until I was arriving at the hospital in an ambulance every few days. The doctors would see me and roll their eyes as if to say, ‘You again?’ Finally I was told that they did not treat illnesses like mine at Bellevue. They advised me to get psychiatric help and said I would have to enter a mental hospital.

But I just kept painting like mad. Even eating became secondary to painting. Living in the most expensive city in the world, which seemed to devour any money I could get my hands on, I often lacked even fifteen cents for a bus fare, and sometimes my stomach did not see food for two days in a row. But still I painted for all I was worth.

Anxiety felt like flickering flames in my bones… A female Bodhidharma sitting cross-legged on this great rock called New York, the bastion of Americanism… At times I wished I had a bright red sports car to race down the highway at a crazy speed beneath the deep blue sky. I wouldn’t care if I crashed into a tree. Give me enough crisp dollars, and I would buy a boundless expanse of grassy plains somewhere in Texas, just for myself.

That was not all I dreamed of. I wanted to have fun the way that some of my friends did, night after night, with one boy after another, all with different faces and skin colours – black, white, yellow, brown. I kept dreaming these dreams, thinking how desperately I wanted to be rich and muttering to myself that fame would not be bad either. As far as such longings went, I was no different from the throng of nameless youths who had made their way to New York.

But reality was the hard crust of bread on my table, the torn stuffed dog on my couch. And the ‘white nets’ that led me all the way to the mental institution – what good were they doing me? Any number of times I thought of putting my foot right through those canvases.

One day I carried a canvas taller than myself forty blocks through the streets of Manhattan, in order to submit it for consideration for the Whitney Annual. The Whitney is cutting-edge now, but in those days it was hopelessly conservative, and even as I lugged my painting along I was telling myself that there was no chance the director of that museum would understand my work. As expected, my painting was not selected, and I had to carry it forty blocks back again. The wind was blowing hard that day, and more than once it seemed as if the canvas would sail up into the air, taking me with it. When I got home I was so exhausted I slept like the dead for two days.

Action Painting was all the rage then, and everybody was adopting this style and selling the stuff at outrageous prices. My paintings were the polar opposite in terms of intention, but I believed that producing the unique art that came from within myself was the most important thing I could do to build my life as an artist.

Taking my Stand with a Single Polka Dot

In October 1959 I achieved my dream of a solo exhibition in New York. The show was titled Obsessional Monochrome and held at the Brata Gallery, downtown on 10th Street. 10th Street was where De Kooning and Klein and other leaders of the New York School, whose influence is still so strong today, had their studios. The show consisted of several white-on-black infinity net paintings that ignored composition and had no centres. The monotony produced by their repetitive patterns bewildered the viewer, while their hypnotic serenity drew the spirit into a vertigo of nothingness. These pictures presaged the Zero Art movement in Europe as well as Pop Art, which originated in New York and was to become the dominant trend of abstraction there.

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. How deep was the mystery? Did infinite infinities exist beyond our universe? In exploring these questions I wanted to examine the single dot that was my own life. One polka dot: a single particle among billions. I issued a manifesto stating that everything – myself, others, the entire universe – would be obliterated by white nets of nothingness connecting astronomical accumulations of dots. White nets enveloping the black dots of silent death against a pitch-dark background of nothingness. By the time the canvas reached 33ft it had transcended its nature as canvas to fill the entire room. This was my ‘epic’, summing up all that I was. And the spell of the dots and the mesh enfolded me in a magical curtain of mysterious, invisible power.

One day an artist who had found success in Paris and become renowned around the world called at my studio. This ebullient Frenchman, a savvy self-promoter who had gained and maintained popular success thanks to his agility at leaping from trend to trend, seemed to live only to win all the awards he could get his hands on. He berated me. ‘Yayoi! Look outside yourself! Don’t you want to listen to Beethoven or Mozart? Why don’t you read Kant and Hegel? There’s so much greatness out there! How can you repeat these meaningless exercises, day and night, for years? It’s a waste of time!’

But I was under the spell of the polka dot nets. Bring on Picasso, bring on Matisse, bring on anybody! I would stand up to them all with a single polka dot. That was the way I saw it, and I had no ears to listen. I was betting everything on this and raising my revolutionary banner against all of history.

Even so, it was hard to believe the sensation this first solo exhibition in New York created, or the sudden success it brought. A number of respected critics were generous with their praise.

Yayoi Kusama at the Brata Gallery, 89 East 10th Street, is a young Japanese painter currently working in New York. Her paintings are puzzling in their dry, obsessional repetitions. They are huge white canvases, lightly scored with gray dots and partly washed over again with a white film. The results are infinitely extending compositions utterly dependent on the viewer’s patient scrutiny of the subtle transitions in tone. Her exhibition is without question a striking tour de force, but disturbing none the less in its tightly held austerity.

(Dore Ashton, New York Times, 23 October 1959)

This stunning and quietly overwhelming exhibition is likely to prove and remain the sensation of a season barely a month old … The observer will encounter vast meshes of white which form a net over a darker ground whose contrast has been stopped down by a final diluted coat of white. The net is written in over the surface in small, roughly rectangular movements, with modulations in its porosity and the texture of the paint setting up as many subtle variations of movement and pattern as the eye wishes to compose. A gentle radiance imbues the surface with great dignity … Having labored for ten years over many ‘tests’ to arrive at this moment, 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.

(Sidney Tillim, Arts Magazine, October 1959)

In my studioNew Yorkc.1960

Donald Judd was my first close friend in the New York art world, and he was the first to buy one of the pieces in the exhibition. He was kind enough to write that

Yayoi Kusama is an original painter. The five white, very large paintings in this show are strong, advanced in concept and realized. The space is shallow, close to the surface and achieved by innumerable small arcs superimposed on a black ground overlain with a wash of white. The effect is both complex and simple … The total quality suggests an analogy to a large, fragile, but vigorously carved grill or to a massive, solid lace. The expression transcends the question of whether it is Oriental or American. Although it is something of both, certainly of such Americans as Rothko, Still and Newman, it is not at all a synthesis and is thoroughly independent.

(Donald Judd, Art News, October 1959)

But allow me to revisit, in my own words, the works I exhibited at Brata.

In these paintings a static, undivided, two-dimensional space adheres to the flat canvas in the form of contiguous microscopic specks that follow one another endlessly, forming a tangible surface texture that expresses a strangely expansive accumulation of mass. The layers of dry white paint, which result from a single touch of the brush repeated tirelessly over time, lend specificity to the infinity of space within an extraordinarily mundane visual field.

The endlessly repetitive rhythm and the monochrome surface, which cannot be defined by established, conventional structure or methodology, present an attempt at a new painting based on a different ‘light’. Moreover, these pictures have totally abandoned a fixed focal point or centre. I originated this concept myself, and it had been prominent in my work for more than ten years.

Deep in the mountains of Nagano, working with letter-size sheets of white paper, I had found my own unique method of expression: ink paintings featuring accumulations of tiny dots and pen drawings of endless and unbroken chains of graded cellular forms or peculiar structures that resembled magnified sections of plant stalks. During the dark days of the War, the scenery of the river bed behind our house, where I spent much of my disconsolate childhood, became the miraculous source of a vision: the hundreds of millions of white pebbles, each individually verifiable, really ‘existed’ there, drenched in the midsummer sun.