The girl Yayoi Kusama witnessed a sexual act when she was still very young; the scene left her completely disturbed and she would return again and again to her mind, but she did not speak to anyone. It wasn’t just that those around her considered sex as something dirty, shameful, something she had to hide. There was also the matter of her parents, her father, who after their marriage continued to have relationships outside of it, frequenting geisha houses and disappearing with one, or several, prostitutes for weeks.
Family arguments were constant, in addition, the business that fed them belonged to the maternal grandparents, as the mother continually reproached the father before starting it with little Yayoi, whom she constantly scolded; no, this was not the time and place to treat what became a wound that would fester for the rest of her life. She would ooze pain, estrangement, rejection, also art.
In her autobiography The Infinite Network, written when she had already become an acclaimed creator, Kusama (1929) refers to her traumas, obsessions, and mental problems as the material from which her weakness and strength emerge, turned into paintings, installations , happenings. Like the castle that dominates their hometown, Matsumoto, in the Japanese Alps, it is capable of deceiving those who look at it from the outside: the fortress has five floors seen from the outside, but seven inside, thus they managed to confuse the enemies when they assaulted her
“When an American thinks of a Japanese girl, he sees a hothouse flower; that’s why Kusama surprises. We are talking about a strong and tough woman, ”wrote an American critic following one of her first samples, according to the artist in her autobiography, from which all the quotes from her have been taken.
Strong and tough. It took him eight years to convince his mother to allow him to travel to the United States to pursue art, an activity that in his provincial bourgeois family, and throughout the country, was considered “little more than an entertaining pastime, if not an activity.” extravagance”. And for extravagances they already had her father. In addition, there were the hallucinations that she began to suffer at the age of eleven, she saw auras around some objects, she heard plants and animals speak.
One day, the mountains surrounding Matsumoto began to flash and sparkle; Kusama ran to his house, where, of course, he couldn’t talk to anyone about it either. In his notebook he drew what he had seen. “ I had several notebooks full of those hallucinations and recording them helped me soften the shock and fear of those episodes. This is the origin of my paintings”.
(After her return to Japan in 1973, the artist entered a hospital for the mentally ill. She continues to live there, voluntarily, at the age of 94).
“Artists don’t usually express their psychological complexes directly, but I do use my fears and my complexes as themes for my works”. In New York, her first canvases were filled with infinite and repetitive black and white networks that disconcerted the observer and kept the artist’s stomach empty.
Those were still years of action painting: on one occasion Kusama loaded forty blocks with a canvas much larger than herself, to offer it to the Whitney Museum. She had to carry it the forty blocks back after they turned it down. She sometimes had no more than a crust of bread for dinner, but she was comforted by the support of the great Georgia O’Keeffe, whom she introduced to her own dealer.
Those were times of action painting, yes, but without knowing it yet, everyone, critics and the public, were already waiting for something new. Kusama’s first New York exhibition was a smashing success with just five works, layers of dried white paint, “an endlessly repetitive rhythm, and a monochrome surface” acting as soothes. It was time to suppress some of those fears.
Psychosomatic art, as he has referred to his creations on more than one occasion. After the soft phallic sculptures came his happenings in search of a sexual liberation that in the sixties was a possibility, or so they wanted to believe: men and women, heterosexuals and gays, naked and with their bodies painted with moles, sometimes by the artist herself, in public spaces, touching, kissing. Then times changed.
His characteristic moles had already appeared, repeated in the infinity of his obsession and restlessness. Because although their fame was already worldwide, although they have become a fetish for large fashion companies, although there is a kusamanía, the suffering is still there.
“Let Picasso come, let Matisse come, whoever comes! I would face them with a single mole”, the artist had written in her New York years. Those who came were the bags, the dresses, the merchandising. If before the cities all wanted a building by certain star architects, now they all want one of the brightly colored pumpkins that make the creator immediately recognizable.
The Infinity rooms, rooms where mirrors and plastic balls project their moles in all directions, so Instagrammable that they have become an attraction in themselves, leaving the creator in the background. Maybe it’s the obliteration she’s always wanted. In the meantime, she will keep looking for “new ways to turn my obsessions into concrete forms.”
Yayoi Kusama: from 1945 to today. Guggenheim museum. Bilbao. www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus. From June 27 to October 8.
Yayoi Kusama. The infinite network. Trans.: Beautiful July. Editions B. 283 pages, 18.90 E.
