Yayoi Kusama. Floor Show. Instalación. Castellane Gallery, Nueva York

Yayoi Kusama

Conversation with Frances Morris

martes 17 mayo 2011
4:02
Painting
Modernity
Visuality
Space
Action
Experimentation
Sculpture

This conversation with Frances Morris, curator of the Yayoi Kusama exhibition and Head of Collections at the Tate Modern, bases itself on the importance of biography in the work of this Japanese artist but, in order to avoid the clichés that usually characterise this historiographical method, it focuses on travel as the most significant factor in her work.

Kusama made her first trip from Japan to New York, from a country defeated in the Second World War to the victor, and from the particular type of capitalism adopted by an ancient vanquished empire to the triumphant imperialist capitalism of the new empire. Moreover, this trip entailed going from a singular, local aesthetic to the aesthetic of the new hegemonic centre, the distributor of a homogenisation of art, in which expressionist painting was the consumption style, calming consciences and decking out offices and hotels in the financial district with enormous canvases.

The lack of understanding of her performance language brought about the second trip, from New York to Tokyo, leading her to return to her native country where she dedicated herself to more discrete art, small in format or only written.

Finally, the third trip took her back to central modernism. Now that museums in western capitals have admitted the advance of globalisation into their diversity of registers, making them a driving force in the narrative of the history of art, her work once again tours the capitals of these art centres that repudiated it more than 30 years ago.

Production

José Luis Espejo

Locution

Vanessa Alonso

License
Creative Commons by-sa 4.0

Yayoi Kusama

Conversation with Frances Morris

Yayoi Kusama. From 11 May to 12 September 2011

First trip from Tokyo to New York

Frances Morris, curator: [That’s a great question.] But she’s been very resistant to allowing interpreters to really explore that, and has deliberately adopted a more independent stance. In a way, one of the reasons for doing this exhibition is to allow us to really have a good look at that period again. And I think as we are beginning to really re-appreciate just how central Kusama was. Having said that, she was an artist who didn’t want to join groups; she didn’t want to sign joint manifestos and she was fiercely independent.


She was never represented by a mainstream dealer in New York, so there are all sorts of reasons why her centrality was not perceived at the time and has not been recognised.


It’s interesting to see how Kusama’s work changed in America and obviously the influences (partly one of the artists that she was encountering in the work she was seeing in galleries), but I think there was also a response in her work to a different kind of social and economic context, and particularly the radical shift from making paintings to making objects, in a way, post-war affluent culture of excess in America. And it would be really interesting to see how that plays out across her work. But not only in the density of the accumulation pieces, but also there’s a number of the collage works where she’s beginning to take things like, for example, the toy money, the roll of bills, the references to money and then to mass production and the endlessly repeated sticker works, for example.

The 1970s. Second trip, from New York to Tokyo

I think that when Kusama went back to Japan in the mid/early-1970s, I think that she found that she was going back to a place that was very, very unlike America. Tokyo of the 1970s was not New York of the 1970s. And the way she had been operating, particularly in relation to performance, for example, was simply absolutely intolerable socially, and so she returned to a studio practice, almost to an office practice.
The first thing that she really begins doing is she begins writing. The work also is – for the first time in a long time – very small-scale.

The third trip or the return of the prodigal daughter to central modernism

I think it’s the return and triumph of the prodigal daughter really. I think certainly when you look at the London art world community and you think of people like Damien Hirst and the way the YBA generation propelled themselves onto the stage, taking command of their own lives, working without dealers, finding spaces, creating their own trajectory. Kusama was doing that in the 1960s and I think there’s widespread acknowledgment within the younger generation that Kusama is really maybe not the prodigal daughter, but she’s a mother figure for those artists.