33 Artists in 3 Acts (41 page)

We retrace our steps, stopping near the entrance to the show next to a pot called
The Frivolous Now
(2011). The duck-egg blue vase with an ancient Greek shape is covered in graphically rendered expressions such as “LOL,” “tagging,” “improvised explosive device,” “phone hacking,” “privileged elite,” “stunning 3-D,” and “cute YouTube clips” (the latter is next to a childlike drawing of a cat). “Ceramics are very much my signature dish, but I only make pots about half the time,” he says. In addition to making tapestries and sculptures, Perry writes and presents television programs. He’s currently working on a three-part series
for Channel 4 on taste, a theme that is also inspiring his next series of artworks. “I’m only going to have shows with TV tie-ins now!” he says, with the cackle of a pantomime witch.

Perry is mindful that such moves could undermine his credibility among art-world insiders, but he sees their version of “seriousness” as an unappealing set of conventional behaviors, sprinkled with jargon and somber tones. In any case, the “inherent ridiculousness” of his transvestism, as he puts it, excludes him from that club. A journalist once asked Perry, “Are you a lovable character or a serious artist?” The artist has since been fascinated by the dichotomy. “Apparently, serious artists are rude, difficult to understand, and unconcerned with popularity,” he says with incredulity. “The very opposite of lovable.”

Yayoi Kusama

Obliteration of My Life

2011

SCENE 8

Yayoi Kusama

Y
ayoi Kusama is gazing at an image of herself. Glenn Scott Wright, director of Victoria Miro Gallery, has just handed her a copy of Sotheby’s quarterly magazine. On the cover is a photo of the artist wearing a shiny red wig and a red polka-dot dress. Today, she is wearing the same synthetic bob and similar garb. While the Kusama on the magazine poses in front of a pulsating red-and-black spot painting, the artist here sits at a table on the third floor of her Tokyo studio, with bookshelves on one side and a glass-brick wall on the other. Takako Matsumoto, a documentary filmmaker who has been shadowing the artist for the past eleven years, logs the self-reflexive moment.

Kusama was famous in New York in the 1960s, but she was almost forgotten as an artist after she moved back to Japan in 1973 and checked into the psychiatric hospital where she still lives. Since childhood, Kusama has made art to help her deal with her psychological problems. These include terrifying hallucinations in which she experiences the sudden melting of the boundary between herself and the universe. But if there is one thing that Kusama has never feared, it’s the limelight. The artist often starts her working day by reviewing her press. Media presence would appear to be an instant, if short-term panacea for fears of annihilation.

“I’m very excited to show you my new paintings,” says Kusama. She
understands English but doesn’t speak it well, so one of her assistants translates. Scott Wright needs to select thirty or so works to show at Victoria Miro in the spring, when the artist’s retrospective is on display at Tate Modern. Kusama refocuses on the magazine. “This is fantastic. Is it Morandi?” she exclaims, pointing at a beige still life by the Italian modernist. “And Richard Serra?” she says, regarding a large metal sculpture by the American artist on a subsequent page.

Kusama has always been highly aware of art history. In the late 1950s, shortly after moving to New York, she made abstract paintings in which white loops of hand-painted mesh float over black backgrounds. With prolonged viewing, these “Infinity Nets,” as she called them, become undulating oceans of dots. The “Nets” deliberately one-upped Abstract Expressionist works, such as Jackson Pollock’s “drip” paintings; the compositions were more radically all over the canvas and the process of producing them was more intense. They also coincided with the arrival of the next notable art movement, Minimalism. Perhaps most importantly, these paintings acted as psychological safety nets, protecting the artist from her fear of melting into the void. In 1961, she created an “Infinity Net” that measured thirty-three feet, an unusually large abstract work for the period, which betrayed the scale of both her obsession and her ambition. Kusama has never stopped making “Net” paintings; they are an “endless” series.

Kusama peers up at Isao Takakura, her studio director, who wears a white-collared, short-sleeved shirt and polka-dot shorts. “Brother,” she says, “where’s the two-page article about our exhibition at the Reina Sofía?” The retrospective was initated by the chief curator of Tate Modern, but it has opened first at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. The show will go to Centre Pompidou in Paris before London and then finish up at the Whitney Museum in New York.

Takakura returns with a double-page spread from
Asahi
, a high-circulation Japanese daily. Kusama shows it to Scott Wright, promising to have a translation sent to him soon, and again becomes captivated by her press. She turns the page and examines an article about Francis Bacon, whose work has made a high price at auction. “He died a few years ago, didn’t he?” she comments. Twenty years ago, in fact. An
assistant emerges with two copies of a new catalogue raisonné of her prints, which are gifts for Scott Wright and me. Kusama autographs them for us, but looks inquiringly at an assistant when it comes to writing the date. “Two zero one one,” says the young woman patiently.

Although Kusama clearly has difficulty keeping track of time, she has demonstrated near genius when it comes to her sense of space. In 1963, she created one of the first fully realized instances of installation art.
Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show
features a rowing boat filled with phallic sculptures installed in a room papered with 999 black-and-white photographic reproductions of the very same work. Three years later, Andy Warhol imitated her treatment of walls with his
Cow Wallpaper
(1966). About Warhol, Kusama has said wryly, “We were like . . . enemies in the same boat.”

Kusama went on to make masterful “Infinity Mirror” rooms. When I first experienced one of these works, titled
Fireflies over the Water
(2002), almost a decade ago, I found myself moved to tears by its godlike view of a sublime universe. These dark rooms contain hundreds of tiny lights that are reflected by mirrored walls and ceilings, and a black pool of water that covers the floor. With such spellbinding spaces, Kusama translates her existential terrors into works that inspire feelings of awe, elation, and plenitude.

Another assistant—apparently there are eight of them—suggests they show Scott Wright “the products.” I am told that they are “very, very secret” and I promise not to write about them until after their release. She leaves and returns with three Louis Vuitton handbags over each arm. “Aren’t there more? Please bring them all,” says Kusama. She sips water from a yellow-polka-dot glass while a few more bags are loaded onto the table.

Your average polka dot tends to be identical to its mates, lined up mindlessly in equidistant rows. A Yayoi Kusama spot, however, is a living, breathing thing that throbs with a sense of purpose. Louis Vuitton has superimposed a couple of Kusama patterns over the brown LV monogram on their handbags: a psychedelic galaxy of small, medium, and large spots and an arrangement that the artist calls “nerves,” which assembles multisized dots into snakelike forms.

Kusama has long been interested in clothes. In the 1960s, she made unwearable sculptures in the form of gold shorts covered in macaroni and white stilettos stuffed with phallic lumps. At that time, she also had a fashion company that made outfits for the sexual revolution, including pieces with strategically placed holes, dresses for two people and orgy robes. “All my creative selves live together harmoniously within me, no matter whether it is art or fashion,” she explains.

“Brother, shall we go downstairs and look at art now?” says Kusama to Takakura, who looks like he could be her son or grandson. We pile into a small elevator with Kusama, who sits in a polka-dot wheelchair, while others, including Matsumoto with her camera, descend the stairs. Kusama tells me that she has trouble with her legs because, for years, she painted on her knees. She can’t bear it when anything gets in the way of making art because it alone stops her from obsessing on suicide. I ask how often she thinks about dying. “Almost every night,” she says. “Particularly these days because I am an insomniac.”

The second floor of this three-story building houses a painting studio with racks for storage at one end and a large sink surrounded by an array of paints and brushes at the other. In the center is the low table where Kusama paints. It is currently empty, but marked with multicolored straight lines that are the phantom edges of many canvases. As two assistants pull paintings out on rolling tracks, Scott Wright tells me that the announcement of the retrospective somehow “flicked a switch in her” and Kusama has made over 140 paintings in eighteen months. “Death is just around the corner and I am not yet sure I am a great artist,” she explains. “That is why I am absorbed in painting.”

Kusama’s new canvases synthesize the history of her art—her preoccupation with infinity and omniscience along with motifs such as dots, nets, snaky “nerves,” and eyes. Painted on the table from all four sides, the series bears witness to a fantastic variety of compositions using a limited range of unmixed colors. Some of the pictures have strong optical effects; others look like primitive topographical maps.

“I’ve been working very hard, devoting all my energies to them. I did it alone without any assistance. It’s all Kusama,” says the artist, as her assistants continue to shuffle paintings in and out of view.

“Yes, I can see that,” says Scott Wright. “They’re great. Very vibrant. Very beautiful. I love their aura. They have tremendous energy.”

“Thank you,” replies Kusama. “Now, we will show you some much better ones.” The artist tells us that many of these paintings made their debut on TV in Matsumoto’s most recently broadcast documentary film. “It’s quite difficult to get airtime and the program was three hours,” she observes.

Women artists often wait a long time for their accolades. The advantage of late recognition is that it can spur them to new heights. Louise Bourgeois did some of her best work in her eighties. At eighty-two, Kusama clearly aspires to do the same. What are your tips for staying creative for so long? I ask.

“My life has always been thoroughly devoted to art. And I’m mesmerized by encounters with remarkable people like Glenn,” she says of the dealer by her side. Kusama is a celibate who has written about her aversion to sex, but she seems to have a schoolgirl crush on Scott Wright, a handsome British Asian gay man.

Why is Glenn so important? I ask.

“I like his willingness to understand my art. He’ll never know how much I’ve been longing to see him,” she says. Scott Wright’s previously scheduled visit was cancelled because the Tōhoku earthquake closed the airport. “In art history, we find many great artists who always had a sponsor or a dealer,” she adds. More than just showing and selling the work, a gallery puts an artist on the map, makes her relevant, gives her a reason to be.

We descend to the ground floor, which is principally a storeroom with rolling racks, full of larger paintings. A table has been set with a Kusama-patterned cloth, cold bottled green tea and individually wrapped cookies. Frances Morris, the curator of Kusama’s retrospective, and a dozen or so people, most of whom are members of the Tate’s Asia-Pacific Acquisitions Committee, will be arriving any minute. Stacked in a corner of the room are some recent yellow-and-black dotted pumpkin paintings, which I assume were made with stencils, given the firm, fine detailing, which is not characteristic of Kusama’s hand nowadays. In her youth, Kusama experienced hallucinations in which
pumpkins spoke to her in a “generous unpretentious” way, and pumpkins were the subject of her first exhibition of paintings, for which she won an award in 1948.

Members of the Tate committee file into the room, wiping their feet on the mat, as the streets are still wet from a typhoon that hit Tokyo last night. After the artist shakes everyone’s hand, her assistants unveil some of the new paintings that are stored on the ground floor. Morris gives a running commentary, itemizing their “iconographic” and “decorative” elements. She doesn’t ask any questions directly to Kusama, but glances respectfully in her direction with almost every statement. The artist zones out, overwhelmed by the interaction and Morris’s quick, clipped British speech.

The group is ushered upstairs to the painting studio, where a canvas with a base coat of shimmering silver now lies on Kusama’s table. An assistant helps her into a red swivel chair, hands her a paint-splattered smock and then brings her a bowl of acrylic paint that is exactly the same shade of fluorescent vermilion as her wig. With her left palm firmly planted on the canvas, she draws an arc confidently with her right. She then gives it triangular prongs, so it looks like the spine of an iguana. She paints a large spot beside it, then a border of triangles or waves along the edge of the painting. Her audience watches in silence. “It’s almost like automatic drawing. There is no hesitation,” whispers Morris, as if she were a sports commentator describing a tense moment on the eighteenth hole. In the sixties, Kusama made a foray into performance art with “happenings.” Today, the artist delivers a more intimate bit of theater—an oddly moving demonstration of her power over an aesthetic domain.