“I decided long ago that one must paint terror as well as beauty from life.” So says the titular character in “Pickman’s Model”, a short story by HP Lovecraft about how artists make monsters — or become them. Pickman’s paintings are the stuff of nightmares, rendered so vividly that the narrator of the story, a friend and fellow artist, can barely stand to look at them. “Only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible,” the narrator shudders. “When we saw the pictures we saw the daemons themselves and were afraid of them.”
Yayoi Kusama creates demons too, although they don’t look like the fictional Pickman’s. Her pet horrors are all the more frightening for their ordinariness. She is afraid of sex, and men, and war, and food. Most of all, she’s afraid of disappearing into the endless white noise of the universe — or, in her parlance, of “Obliteration”. The polka dots she’s been famous for since the Sixties obscure the physical boundaries of whatever form they’re applied to, human or otherwise. Walk through one of her mirror rooms and the singular you disappears. In her autobiography, Infinity Net, Kusama describes watching helplessly as a net-shaped pattern spills off one of her canvases and begins to cover the table, the walls, the contours of her body; it’s difficult to say where the hallucination ends and the art — or the artist — begins.
While her work flirts with the concept of suicide — the ultimate obliteration of the self, by the self — Kusama’s career has been astonishingly long-lived: today, she is a 94-year-old grande dame of the art world. This year saw the publication of a retrospective essay collection, Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now, as well as the opening of yet another solo show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the first two months of tickets for which have already sold out. Kusama has not yet been obliterated.
She might, however, be cancelled.
“Yayoi Kusama Apologizes for Past Racist Remarks”, reads a recent headline from the New York Times, while the San Francisco Chronicle laments Kusama’s upcoming show at the city’s modern art museum: “Japan’s Yayoi Kusama, one of the world’s most prominent creators, has produced work that objectified and demeaned Black people. Does the art community care?”
The allegations of racism centre largely on the autobiography, which came out in 2002, and details Kusama’s fraught relationship with her family, her struggle to be taken seriously as an artist in her native Japan, and the mental health issues that eventually resulted in her voluntary residence at the Tokyo hospital where she has lived since the Seventies. The most damning line from the book, though it does not actually appear in the English version of Infinity Net, is one in which Kusama describes the real estate values of her NYC neighbourhood tanking due to “black people shooting each other out front, and homeless people sleeping there”.
Although the New York Times describes Kusama’s problematic commentary being “surfaced” by the website Hyperallergic in June this year, it would be more accurate to identify this cancellation attempt as the particular obsession of just one man, a writer named Dexter Thomas.
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