Original subtitles

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 Kaman and Shigeru 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 art school.

And her mother was furious.

One senses a family that was racked 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 different women must

have been really traumatic for a young, sensitive person.

She has talked to me about being in this field

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

Some kind of trauma had 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 have 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'm going to send several watercolour 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 watercolours also came.

They are interesting.

But I live in the country, and the art world is in the city.

I am 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 post-war 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...

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, 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 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."

She had sent her paintings over.

Well, they refused.

So they sent it back.

About four hours later, here comes a lady with one

of those 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.

That was the day of abstract expressionism.

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, it 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.

They 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 organising 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, and the combination

of taxi cabs and the asphalt.

I just casually asked how much it was.

They said it was $75.

And, you know, that seemed like a lot.

And the next week, you know, it was preying on my mind.

Because I really liked it and everything.

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

And I paid $25 a week, or something.

Joseph Cornell was a great and 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 that 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 had called them the

banana chairs, they probably wouldn't have been as interesting

to so many people.

Maybe... 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!

We were walking to 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 then everybody was talking about it.

Claes Oldenburg had a stiff piece, which was made out of papier-mache.

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 the sculpture out of sewing.

It's very un-masculine.

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 1000 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's 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 peepshow,

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...

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 in perspective and infinity.

But it was all a fake, because you knew, you the viewer,

you're always aware that you were the master.

That it was a painting, it 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 Samaras 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.

Sometimes she would simply peer at the door, and I would realise

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 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 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 St, stands the Museum of Modern Art.

Kusama presented these happenings in sculpture garden of MoMA.

Their performance lasted until 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, cos 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 colour,

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 realise

that Kusama was performing gay marriages about 40 years ago.

Now I'm making a movie, Kusama's Self-Obliteration.

Kusama wandered in to the Gate Theater and she came over and said,

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

And I agreed.

She had won a prize in Belgium for this film.

She invited me to come celebrate the opening.

I realised when I got to the box office that we were not

properly dressed.

Everybody was in black leather jackets, and all kinds of hippy

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

# 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 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 is 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 are very much brainwashed.

When she did a lot of naked happenings,

and it being written

up in Japanese magazines, the family was so ashamed

that they went to every book store on the day when the magazine

was sold, and they bought everything and they hide it in their house.

Nixon was re-elected 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 are 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 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 have 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 recognised 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's interested in art

therapy and she checks herself in.

And from the security of that environment,

she's able to work again.

There was 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 there comes 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 watercolours 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 favour.

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 that 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 Kusama: 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 watercolours

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 Biennial

Pavilion was a huge, huge transformation of how Kusama

was received and appreciated and recognised 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!

The exhibition that we organised 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 going to 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's had 5 million museum visitors since 2013 and there's not one

artist in the world who has that same kind of audience.

She's officially the most successful living artist.

# A stillness flowers sitting on my windowsill

# And from this vantage point it's dying

# Time passes on

# Time it moves past her

# A thousands more dawns

# And mornings after

# I've been waiting

# Such a long time

# Like a sunset sitting perfectly still

# You think you're moving but your idling

# Stand in line

# There's no-one behind

# No-one before her

# I've been waiting

# Such a long time

# This moment

# I'll seize it

# And this time you know that I'll mean it

# La-la-la-la

# I've been waiting

# Such a long time

# Such a long time. #