I first came across Yayoi Kusama in my collection of books on Pop Art and the Infinity Room was featured which as a precocious teen I wanted to see more than anything! She was a featured artist of one of the last exhibitions [her first one person show 1989] I worked at MOMA Oxford under the auspices of Director David Elliot and still treasure the catalogue
Troubled her entire life by her complex mental health (she lived in a Mental Hospital for the last twenty something years of her life) she still managed to creat a massive following amongst the public who seems to take her to their hearts wherever her work appeared
Why Yayoi Kusama formed a troupe of naked, gay dancers in 1968
With the passing of Yayoi Kusama, the art world finds itself several shades darker than it was yesterday.
Kusama seemed like an easy enough figure to understand on the surface. She was polkadots and neon colours, the family-friendly face of conceptual art who brought joy to a joyless world. However, the reality of the Matsumoto native is one a lot more complex.yous, and lots of it is the kind that a more cerebral kind of new family will show their kids as a way of introducing them to art in a way that can be genuinely understood and felt by a child. However, that’s not to say that the woman herself was childlike at all.
For one thing, Kusama spoke openly about how her art came from a place of pain. She was plagued by mental health difficulties for her entire life. Thus, Kusama’s bright, colourful art came not from her reflecting her mental state, but rather creating the work she needed to see to keep going. For another, Kusama wasn’t someone who created joyous work for the sake of spreading simple joy.
Especially in her late 1960s heyday, Kusama spread joy as a form of activism, hitting back against a world that, much like it does today, felt like it was coming to an end back then too.
After making a name for herself in the same conceptual art circles that Yoko Ono was frequenting earlier in the decade, the late 1960s saw Kusama expand her reach with a set of works that she called ‘Happenings’.
These were performance art pieces that saw her draw attention to the evils of the world via a series of attention-grabbing and ludicrous stunts. Some of these saw Kusama herself take centre stage, like the time she wrote an open letter to then-president Richard Nixon offering to have sex with him in exchange for ending the Vietnam War.
However, for a number of these happenings, Kusama needed backup. Lots of it. After all, these involved stunts like disrupting the New York Stock Exchange with a large number of dancing people clad only in polka dots painted on their bodies. For these, Kusama needed support, and she found it in the form of the Kusama Dancing Team, a group of young gay men who were happy to take part in these happenings. Both as a way of rebelling against the system and finding a foothold in the world of conceptual art.
They would also get bed and board out of it to a certain degree. As the 1960s became the 1970s, she offered out her studio to the Kusama Dancing Team as a place to live. Since this was an era of free love and the Dancing Team consisted entirely of very attractive gay men, they would also regularly engage in group sex with each other. Kusama adapted this into a form of art as well, inviting news crews to film her studio just as these orgies would begin. Why do you think she called this studio the Kusama Omophile Kompany, or KOK for short.
Again, it would be easy to write this off as hippy-dippy, peace and love nonsense. However, beneath the polka dots and the ludicrous stunts was a burning social conscience. Yes, she got a bunch of her friends to dance outside the New York Stock Exchange, but she also promoted these happenings with fliers that said, “STOCK IS A FRAUD! STOCK MEANS NOTHING TO THE WORKING MAN! STOCK IS A LOT OF CAPITALIST BULLSHIT!”
These weren’t excuses to see a bunch of cute twinks in the buff, after all, Kusama was famously asexual. These were acts of anti-capitalist art. Hell, these were acts of praxis.
So yes, the world is a duller, less magical place without Yayoi Kusama in it. Partially because it’s got fewer polka dots in it, but also because it has lost a powerful, brave voice that never stopped fighting against systems of oppression.
Just because that was a fight fought with polka dots and butts doesn’t mean it was any less fought.
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