Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on Kusama Yayoi's exploration of the connections between her works and the body, an aspect that became crucial in her New York (1958-1968). These years brought new experimenting energy to her production, during which Kusama realized solo and group performances in public locations.

Paper long abstract:

The second paper proposed for the "One thousand visions of self. Kusama Yayoi through art and literature" panel selected a specific aspect of Kusama’s practice, that is, the connection between her artworks and the artist’s body – a characteristic that became particularly evident during the period spent in New York.

From 1957 the artist relocated to Manhattan, where she lived for a decade. The choice was motivated by the intentions to find her own space on the international scene and had important echoes on her career: it brought new experimenting energy and helped her creating important connections with other artists.

Several photographs from the beginning of the 1960s portray Kusama in her studio, together with her canvas and often with outfits matching the paintings; the presence of the artist embodies the physical bond that connects the painter with her artworks, to the point that the body becomes an extension of the canvas itself.

This link is maintained also in later photographs, such as the famous nude portrait that shows Kusama from behind in her 1963 installation "Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show", a boat surrounded by its 999 identical photographic reproductions. The boat is entirely covered by phallus-shaped sculptures, which started appearing in Kusama’s work since the beginning of the 1960s, occupying objects, spaces, and obliterating items that are typically attributed to women. They symbolize the overwhelming male predominance on all aspects of life, to which Kusama opposes her own body: famous photographs depict the artist laying on the installations taken over by the soft sculptures and suggest reflections on the male gaze and its eroticization of the female, non-white body.

In the following years, Kusama started focusing on public performances that involved dancers and were set in New York famous locations, such as "Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead at MoMA" (1969), which took place in the fountain in front of the famous museum. The impulse of these years has been faithfully recorded in the documentary "Self-Obliteration" (1967) realized by Kusama with director Jud Yalkut, alternating natural environments and psychedelic rooms made by the artist.