On the Relevant Struggles of Yayoi Kusama: Midori Yamamura’s “Revisiting the 1960s” Lecture

           Yayoi Kusama, is not only the queen of whimsy, but also, as I learned at Midori Yamamura’s Grey Gallery accompanying lecture “Revisting the 1960s, Globalization, Monopoly, and Outlaws: Yayoi Kusama and the Rise of the Leo Castelli Gallery,” an activist for social equality and a spokeswoman against the rise of an increasingly capitalist artistic agenda. The artist was born in Japan in 1929.
              Midori Yamamura, MoMA lecturer, writer of Kusama’s biography Inventing the Singular, and one of my favorite professors at Fordham, began her lecture with an anti-Trump quote. With a warm, gamine quality uniquely her own, Yamamura said “New York is all about equality, which is the opposite of what Trump is trying to achieve.”
             The crowd, a sophisticated group consisting of mainly women, erupted into a chuckle. Little did we know we were about to learn that there is a relevant dualism between the 1960 male-dominated New York art scene and patriarchal culture.
            Leo Castelli, the antagonist of Yamamura’s narrative, represented a group of “young, white neo-Dadaists” who controlled the New York art scene. Castelli (born Krauss), a Hungarian immigrant of Jewish descent, opened his gallery in 1957 and quickly developed a proclivity for all things American. Yamamura claimed that he was “less a connoisseur, but more a consummate strategist of new American art.”
            One year later, in 1958, Yayoi Kusama, a young and effervescent Japanese woman assimilated into New York’s “downtown scene,” where she began experimenting with democratizing art and creating wild sensory experiments modeled after “psychedelic happenings.” As Yamamura explained, pieces like Manufacturing Narcissus (Kusama clustered 1,300 mirrored balls around herself) were really about social change through hallucinogenic and synaesthesia-inducing effects.                
              Kusama’s goal was to democratize art, and by countering Castelli’s capitalist agenda (representing artists like de Kooning, Johns, Kline, Warhol), she began to sell the balls from Narcissus for $2 dollars a piece to passersby. Her proclivity for polka dots (they began appearing in her work in 1967) was also a reflection of her desire for social equality. Yamamura stressed that Kusama’s signature motif was a metaphor for standing together; one polka dot always gave birth to a multiplicity.
             In the aftermath of World War II, Kusama had a particularly difficult time gaining notoriety in New York as both a Japanese immigrant and a woman. Another Japanese female performance artist of the 1960s and 1970s was Yoko Ono, and Kusama believed that “New York [was] too small for both of [them].”
             Yayoi Kusama’s real competitor, however, was Andy Warhol. Both artists were interested in mass production, installation pieces and exhibitionism, but where Kusama preferred “dreamy, psychedelic” experiences with LSD, Warhol had a penchant for sado-masochism and amphetamines. He also, Yamamura revealed, had a knack for popularizing Kusama’s work in his own name.
               After having her work copied by artists like Claes Oldenburg and Lucas Samaras, Kusama developed a sense of paranoia that would haunt her throughout her life. Warhol’s explosion of fame after blatantly copying Kusama’s repeated phallic motif in her 1965 show with his cow wallpaper in 1966 was particularly devastating.
            “The best spots in contemporary art galleries were reserved for young, male artists,” Yamamura said, quoting Louise Bourgeois. Indeed, when Green Gallery, who represented Kusama, closed, Castelli refused to take the artist on despite her popularity and obvious talent. “Pop art galleries are very nationalistic and exclusive,” Kusama later commented. Her most recent pieces, My Heart’s Abode and My Eternal Life were featured at the female-owned Victoria Miro Gallery in 2016.
              After the lecture, Yamamura gave thanked me several times for attending, and invited me to get Italian food with her and her friends. I was honored, but politely declined, lost in the realization that the New York art scene of the 60s and 70s is but a mirror of today’s society. Women still strive to gain recognition (both artistically and occupationally), and artists of color work twice as hard to receive the recognition that they deserve. Suffice to say, in a world of Warhols and Castellis, we need more Kusamas.

To learn more, check out Midori Yamamura’s book Inventing The Singular (MIT Press, 2015). Kusama’s works can be see at Inventing Downtown at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery which explores the New York City art scene from 1952 to 1965 (closes April 1st).

By Isabella LiPuma, FCRH ’17