Kusama: Infinity (2018) - full transcript

Kusama was born in 1929,

in Nagano Prefecture, in Matsumoto City,

which is a rural, provincial castle town.

She was the youngest of four children

born to Kamon and Shigero Kusama.

Kusama describes drawing as a child,

and her mother sneaking up behind her

and tearing the picture
out of her daughter's hands.

And that sense of
hysteria and panic, I think,

informs Kusama's own process of making art,

where she is working so fast and so furiously



to finish a work before it is torn from her.

There was a deal

that her mother made with her

that if she went to etiquette school,

she could also go to art school.

And Kusama made the deal,

and apparently she never
went to the etiquette lessons,

but did go to her art school,
and her mother was furious.

One senses a family that was, um

wracked with interpersonal problems.

Her father and mother did not
have such a great relationship.

Her mother would send

her daughter Kusama

to spy on him.



Witnessing her father
being with a different woman

must have been really traumatic
for a young, sensitive person.

She's talked to me about
being in this field of flowers

on her family's farm,
where she had wandered in.

Some kind of trauma happened in the field.

So much of Kusama's art

seeks to recreate that experience

in one form or another.

It is literally an experience of being lost

into her physical environment,

of losing her selfhood in this space

that is moving rapidly,
and expanding rapidly.

She came across Georgia O'Keeffe's work.

O'Keeffe engaged with the natural world

in a way that is sort of
fantastic and dreamlike

and deeply realist as well.

I think there was something about the work

and that here was a great
American female artist.

Something clicked in Kusama's head

and she thought, "This is
a person that I aspire to be.

This is somebody who can mentor me."

And so she wrote to Georgia O'Keeffe.

"Dear Miss O'Keeffe,"

Will you please forgive me to interrupt you

while you are very busy

and let me introduce myself to you?

I am a Japanese female painter.

There are very few opportunities
to see your work in Japan.

I've only seen one of your
original paintings, Black Iris.

It gave me a strong impression.

I felt that I had in me

something which seemed very related

to what lay at the bottom of Black Iris.

Some days ago, I thought
of finding your address.

I am going to send several
watercolor paintings to you.

I'm only on the first
step of a long, difficult life

of being a painter.

Will you kindly show me
the way to approach this life?

"Yours faithfully, Miss Yayoi Kusama."

Kusama was probably thrilled

when O'Keeffe wrote back to her.

"Dear Yayoi Kusama,"

Your two letters came to me,
and your watercolors also came.

They are interesting.
But I live in the country,

and the art world is in the city.

I'm not young, you know.

I have had all of the things
you wish to move toward.

In this country, an artist has
a hard time making a living.

You will just have to find
your way as best you can.

But I wish the very best for you.

"Sincerely, Georgia O'Keeffe."

O'Keeffe gave her advice
to come to the United States,

to bring her work with her,

to be unafraid to show it to anybody

who she thought might be interested.

The opposition of her family

and the challenges to
become an accomplished artist

must have driven this
notion that at some point,

she would have to escape.

Kusama is among the very first artists

in postwar Japan

to make her way to New York,

where she takes up residence in 1958.

She knew in herself that she had a will

and a vision that was enormous.

She had to smuggle money into the country.

She came to America with
dollar bills sewn in her kimono.

Kusama was coming into
the New York art world,

and she was a single woman.

Previous to that, women could
be included in group shows,

not one-person shows.

Even some of the women
dealers wouldn't show women.

I used to see her cry,

coming back from a visit to the galleries.

She was very aggressive.

She wanted so much to be in the galleries,

but couldn't even get through the door.

She was twice the other.

Not only was she a woman
in a male-dominated art world,

but she was also Japanese.

She was not taken seriously
by the establishment.

She's wearing current fashions,

and then she starts wearing
kimonos for special occasions.

There's a lot of mystery and
allure to being an Asian female.

She's trying to survive in this world.

There is a painting called
Pacific Ocean from 1958,

and Kusama said that
that is really the origin

of infinity net painting.

One of the reasons why Pacific Ocean

was so important for her is
because when she grew up

in the mountain province of Matsumoto City,

the people who were living there, you know,

their dream of life was really

to go beyond the mountains
to see the Pacific Ocean.

I remember a particular gallery opening

where Kusama and I were intensely engaged

in the potential development of her future,

starting with funds, and
that she wanted to know,

"Carolee, is there an important
man here in this opening?

I have to meet him."

And she was blatant and aggressive and overt,

and she was going to find a patron.

I would see Kusama at the next opening

with a handsome, conventional young man

following behind her,

who had rented her the
apartment or the equipment

or the materials.

She did everything there
was to do to get ahead.

She was trying to get into Sidney Janis.

That was the number one gallery at that time.

One day, one of the boys came and said,

"Ed, I think your friend just
sent some paintings over."

She had sent her paintings over.

Well, they refused it, so they sent it back.

About four hours later, here comes a lady

with one of these real minks,

and they said they'd
like to see her paintings.

She had told them that she's in the gallery.

That was Yayoi.

A lot of artists couldn't
get into the galleries,

so we started this co-op gallery, the Brata.

I arranged for her to have a show there.

See, that was the day of
the abstract expressionist.

When she showed, her work looked so different

because there was that air.

The paintings were quite tapestry-like,

but they had a wonderful tactile quality.

The impasto continued over the whole surface.

Donald Judd reviewed that show.

His first line in the review is,

"Yayoi Kusama is an original painter."

He went on to talk about the paintings.

He really praised them.

Don was a sculptor and a critic.

A very serious reviewer.

I had a gallery in Washington.

Kusama appeared one day,
completely unannounced,

with a young man.

He carried in one painting after another.

I'd never seen anything like it.

They had some kind of magic.

You couldn't stop looking at them,

and you didn't know where they were going.

They were hypnotic.

I was organizing an exhibition
of contemporary Japanese art.

Yayoi was not well-known. She was nobody.

And these other artists were all men

and were very well-known.

There was an altercation at one point.

She tried to destroy the whole show.

It was bloody hell.

I went into most of the galleries,

and I saw Yayoi's paintings.

The one that stood out was the yellow one.

I saw New York in terms of yellow and black,

the combination of the
taxicabs and the asphalt.

I just casually asked how much it was.

They said it was $75.

And I... You know, it seemed like a lot.

And the next week,

you know, it was preying on my mind, huh

'cause I really liked it and everything.

And after all, I said, "Okay, I'll do it."

And I paid $25 a week or something.

Joseph Cornell was a great, important artist.

Cornell was so inspiring and strange,

and deeply, deeply suppressed.

He was a surrealist,

and he lived with his
mother on Utopia Heights.

Cornell, during the
years after his father died,

from a very young age,

was supporting his mother
and disabled brother.

They would talk on the
phone and she would say,

"Joseph, I have to go now."

"And he said," No, Yayoi,
just put the phone down.

I'll wait for you to come back."

So Kusama would go out,
completely forget about Cornell,

come back a couple of hours later,

find the phone on her bed, pick it up,

and Joseph would say, "Hi, Yayoi."

When you do a painting of that size,

in some sense, it stops becoming a painting,

and it becomes a spatial universe.

Her health was always something

that she worried about a great deal.

And I suggested to her
that she see a psychiatrist.

There's some thought she might have had

some traumatic experiences as a child.

She describes coming across her father

in a compromising situation.
It's the sort of Freudian notion

that you respond to those kind of traumas

with kind of repetitive obsessional focus

on the object of your fear.

For Kusama, that fear, and
she talks about it very explicitly,

was a fear of sex.

Her diagnosis is
obsessive-compulsive neurosis.

Once something enters into her mind,

she cannot get rid of it.

She calls them the "penis chairs" herself.

She has a good eye for
what catches attention,

and if she'd called them the "banana chairs,"

they probably wouldn't
have been as interesting

to so many people.

Maybe so many people wouldn't
have wanted to sit on them.

But I can tell you,

we have to fight to
keep people off this chair.

You walk into this group show,

there was Rosenquist,

there's Donald Judd,

and Andy Warhol.

And yet your eyes always
return to Kusama's couch.

Nobody bought them, but
everybody was talking about it.

Claes Oldenburg had a stiff piece,

made out of papier mâché. And it was a suit.

Oldenburg's loft is a
factory where he works out

the problems of handling
new materials in new ways,

with the help of his wife
Pat and other assistants.

I don't think, until he saw Kusama's artwork,

he thought of actually creating
a sculpture out of sewing.

It's very unmasculine.

Suddenly, he was an international star.

This really discouraged Kusama so much

because, you know, she also
wanted to make her way up

with her soft sculpture.

That really made her depressed.

The installation of the
One Thousand Boats Show,

which is her first real installation work,

that was very innovative.

And what she does is she's
covered a rowboat and its oars

with these stuffed, soft
sculpture protrusions.

Then she has also photographed the boat,

and made a poster and covered
all of the walls of the gallery

with that photograph,

so the boat is sitting in the middle

of the photographs of itself.

The idea of covering all of the walls

and creating an installation
like that was very innovative.

She got very, very shocked.

She couldn't go out from her studio,

and she had to cover all her studio windows.

She didn't want no one to get her ideas.

She was living secretly

and creating a lot of sculptures.

Kusama was creating work of equal importance,

yet she wasn't getting the same backing.

Sexism plays a very major role in this.

And maybe racism as well.

She was taking away

your ability to focus,

breaking all boundaries of space.

The exhibitions that I had,
in particular, The Peep Show,

that did the job.

It was an octagonal room,

and there were openings where
you could stick your head in.

The ceiling of it

set up a series of lights.

The rhythm of that machine was, "Brrrrrr!"

When men started devoting themselves

to shooting rockets with themselves in them,

up into the stratosphere,

people became more conscious of infinity.

And she caught that.

There were many artists
from the Renaissance on

who were involved with
perspective and infinity,

but it was all a fake because you knew,

you the viewer, you were always
aware that you were the master,

that it was a painting that
was encompassed by a frame,

and the artist was playing with space,

but it wasn't enveloping you.

This was the great breaking point in art.

No longer are you, the viewer, the master.

She's the master.

Lucas Samaras was active in the avant-garde,

radical art scene of New York in the 1960s.

In 1966, about seven months

after Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirror Room,

Lucas Samara shows a
quite similar construction:

a room-like mirrored environment

at the far more established Pace Gallery.

That room was unlike anything
Samaras had ever made before.

I think it's fair to say, unequivocally,

that Kusama was the first
artist in New York or anywhere

to create a mirrored environment.

There is no question that she was not really

taken up by the establishment in the 60s

when she was doing all that
incredible, innovative work.

I became so depressed one day,

and the next day, I became more depressed.

Sometimes, she would
simply appear at the door,

and I would realize that she wasn't well.

And I'd take her upstairs and put her to bed

and look after her for whatever it took,

a week or ten days.

She needed to have somebody take care of her.

By the mid-60s, Kusama is showing as much,

if not more, in Europe.

Selling your art for a few dollars

to anybody who comes by

is a very subversive idea.

Art is supposed to be
expensive, precious, out of reach.

She begins in this kimono,

and then when she's asked to leave,

she gets rid of the kimono.

And she is dancing around
and lying amid the balls,

and there are all of these
photographs of her in leotards,

with her artwork.

She was always aware
of the publicity element,

and it gets a lot of attention.

In New York City, on 53rd Street,

stands the Museum of Modern Art.

Kusama presented this happening

in the sculpture garden of MOMA.

Their performance lasted until a MOMA guard

started to expel them.

But it was really successful.

My friend Billy told me that I could

stay at this loft

if I allowed her to paint me.

And I was quite excited
'cause I'm thinking "portrait."

It never occurred to me
that this literally meant

"paint you."

It's hard to define the
expression in her eyes.

She was not looking at you as
though you were a human being.

This was a thing that she
was going to manipulate,

to color,

to position to where
she thought it should be.

I was a runaway.

I felt much more comfortable with gay boys.

It was safer.

It's quite extraordinary to look back

and realize that Kusama
was performing gay marriages

about 40 years ago.

Now I am making a movie,

which is named Kusama's Self-Obliteration.

Kusama wandered into the Gate Theater,

and she came over and said,

"Do you want to shoot my
happening when it's going on?"

And I agreed.

She had won a prize in Belgium of this film.

She invited me to come
to celebrate the opening.

I realized when I got to the box office

that we were not properly dressed.

Everybody was in black leather jackets

and all kinds of hippie-type of clothing.

I felt a little bit
embarrassed, but we went in.

We had finished seeing the
film and were ready to leave.

"Kusama said," You can't leave now.

People are going to
undress." So I told my husband,

and he said, "Well, let's go home."

And then I turned to my
mother, and she said, "Let's stay."

And so we stayed.

♪ Love, love, love, love ♪

♪ Love is what you need ♪

♪ Love, love, love, love ♪

♪ Love is what you need ♪

♪ You can't buy it You can't sell it ♪

♪ You can't change its name ♪

♪ But you can share it You can send it ♪

♪ Give it all the same ♪

♪ Love, love, love, love ♪

♪ Love is what you need ♪

♪ Love, love, love, love ♪

♪ Love is what you need ♪

♪ Love is what you need
Love is what you need ♪

♪ Love is what you need
Love is what you need ♪

♪ Love is what you need
Love is what you need ♪

♪ Love is what you need
Love is what you need ♪

The threat of the draft was a big deal.

It was a big deal. Very
different than anything

we're experiencing today.

She said, "Nudity, it's
such a beautiful thing."

Why do we have to send this beautiful body

to the war as soldiers?

She's against the war because
of her wartime experience.

She wasn't absorbed

into this totalitarian government.

A lot of people were very much brainwashed.

When she did a lot of naked happenings,

and it's being written up
in Japanese magazines,

the family was so ashamed
that they went to every bookstore

on the day when the magazines were sold

and then bought everything,
and then hide it in their house.

Nixon was reelected president.

The country became far more conservative.

And I think it just became
more difficult for artists,

who were really pushing the
boundaries as Kusama was,

to find a place to work and to function,

both artistically and economically.

The system is set up to
support white male artists,

who were carrying on
the tradition of modernism.

But there's also elements of the marketplace,

who the collectors are,

who the curators and museum directors are,

and who they feel most
comfortable about promoting.

Kusama, who was a
marginal figure in every way...

She was a woman, she was Japanese,

she was completely outside of
this Western cultural sphere...

She did not get the same kind of support

that the male artists did.

The respect she had earned in the early 1960s

had been relatively dispersed

by her increasingly radical

and, I suppose, populist,
attention-seeking activities.

So she was, you know,
increasingly disorientated,

disillusioned and depressed.

She went home.

In 1973, I turned on the television,

and Channel 28 was having a fundraiser,

which was an art auction.

I saw this piece by Yayoi Kusama,

so I bid $75,

and I waited, and then I heard
that the next bid was $100.

About 20 minutes later, I got a phone call,

and they asked me if I was very serious

about purchasing this piece, so I said yes.

And it seems like the person who
did purchase the piece was not.

He was just making a joke.

And at that time, I would
be asking different curators

if they ever heard of Yayoi.

And most of them had not heard of her

or did not know what has happened to her.

To go back to Tokyo and
to start from scratch again

was quite extraordinary
because she wasn't known there,

and she hadn't been recognized,
and she was a middle-aged lady.

This was the time when she was suffering most

from rejection of the Japanese art world.

The family wasn't there to support her.

That became a very, very bitter experience.

At a time she's lost her father,

I think there were obstacles
of some mental health issues.

And so Kusama finds this hospital,

where the doctor is
interested in art therapy,

and she checks herself in.

And from the security of that environment,

she's able to work again.

There is a need to fill
the hours of every day

with activity,

and the activity that lent itself most easily

to her circumstances was collage.

From seeds to insects

to small, scary, supernatural creatures,

they're very dark.

And they come at a time
when she's lost her father...

They're full of this imagery
of natural life cycles.

She really had to start from scratch,

looking into galleries to exhibit her pieces.

What was very sad is

she had to rent this place in Matsumoto City,

where she exhibited her watercolors in 1952.

Over the course of the late '70s and '80s,

Kusama had been
obliterated from the histories.

What the Village Voice
called "her lust for publicity,"

simply fell out of critical favor.

No museums and no galleries in New York

had shown Kusama's work in over 20 years.

She showed at the Fuji TV gallery,

and it was my encounter with her work,

sculptural work of the early to mid-1980s,

that really inspired in me
the will and the conviction

that an exhibition of Yayoi Kusama

had to happen in New York.

We went to visit Kusama in Japan

and collected papers, documents,
photographs, and publicity,

which featured a lot of nudity.

When I was bringing these boxes back,

I was stopped at the customs

because they thought I
was carrying pornography.

And I had to argue with the customs guys

that actually this was art.

In 1989, I curated the exhibition

Yayoi A Retrospective

at the Center for International
Contemporary Arts, or CICA.

And it was a sensational exhibition.

Kusama had not been to the United States

since she had left in 1973.

We attempted a full retrospective

going back to her early
watercolors from the '50s.

I went to the Venice Biennale.

At first, I thought,
"Well, gee, look at that!

"That's Yayoi!" And there she was.

I was so glad to see her.

For her to have the exhibition

for the 1993 Venice Biennale Pavilion

was an huge, huge transformation

of how Kusama was received
and appreciated and recognized

within the Japanese art world.

So she went from crashing the party

and inserting her own work

without invitation or permission

to being the first Japanese woman

to represent Japan at the '93 Biennale.

Oh, I'm so glad to see you here.

The exhibition that we organized

by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

was called Love Forever,
Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968.

Sometimes you can feel something,

almost like a tidal wave under your feet

when you're working on something,

and you know that this
artist is gonna be big.

She's created this
amazing situation for herself.

The studio is two blocks from the hospital,

so she just walks to the
studio every day to do her work,

and then she returns
to the hospital at night.

Clearly, the strains and stresses of life,

the memories, have forced her to withdraw.

But what she's always done,

she has always managed
that process incredibly well.

And I think there's a sort of a
managing madness about Kusama,

which is so utterly sane.

She's used her trauma to
enormously productive ends.

She's celebrated all over the world,

so she has collectors all over the world,

and she has museum
exhibitions all over the world.

Her work transcends boundaries.

It really does appeal to a
very broad group of people.

Social media is, for sure, a
very specific phenomenon

as part of her success.

She has had five million
museum visitors since 2013.

And there's not one artist in the world

who has the same kind of audience.

She's officially the most
successful living artist.

♪ A stemless flower
Sitting on my windowsill ♪

♪ And from this vantage point It's dying ♪

♪ Time passes on ♪

♪ Time, it moves past her ♪

♪ A thousand more dawns ♪

♪ And mornings after ♪

♪ I've been waiting ♪

♪ Such a long time ♪

♪ Such a long time ♪

♪ Like a sunset Sitting perfectly still ♪

♪ You think you're moving But you're idling ♪

♪ Standing in line ♪

♪ Awaiting the answer ♪

♪ There's no one behind ♪

♪ And no one before her ♪

♪ I've been waiting ♪

♪ Such a long time, love ♪

♪ Such a long time, love ♪

♪ Such a long time, love ♪

♪ This moment I'll seize it ♪

♪ And this time You know that I'll mean it ♪

♪ La la la la la la La la la la la la ♪

♪ I've been waiting ♪

♪ Such a long time, love ♪

♪ Such a long time, love ♪

♪ Such a long time, love ♪

♪ I've been waiting ♪

♪ Such a long time, love ♪

♪ Such a long time, love ♪

♪ Such a long time Such a long time ♪

♪ I've been waiting ♪

♪ Such a long... ♪

How long have you all been waiting?

Few hours. - This isn't even

the end of the line. The
end's around the corner.

♪ Such a long time ♪