I have a question for a long time about the work of Yayoi Kusama and the new investigative publication Yayoi Kusama: from 1945 to today (2023) finally solved it.
In short, the answer is money, but I’ll back up a bit.
The volume features a panel discussion between notable curators and museum directors, and quickly the topic of Kusama’s commercialization is broached. The argument is that the mass production of Kusama merchandise – Kusama coffee mugs, Kusama figurine key chains, etc. – accelerated the democratization of art.
“We couldn’t have invented a better artist to be a sort of banner artist for the transnational and the transhistoric, and to improve the gender balance,” said Frances Morris, Director of Tate Modern, during the featured round table.
It’s the commercialization of Kusama itself is not presented as a “necessary evil”, but rather as an opportunity for a positive step towards equality. It’s an interesting framing that I generally agree with.
But what is not said is that [1945totoday[1945àaujourd’hui is himself part of an attempt to “invent a better artist” – a version of Yayoi Kusama who has used his art to contribute to racial solidarity.
This “Kusama” does not exist. In a article 2017 For Vice News, I pointed out that in his autobiography infinity net, originally published in 2002, Kusama has consistently written about black people as primitive and hyper-sexualized beings. But the part that confused me the most was a blank space on the page.
In her original Japanese edition, Kusama refers to the area of New York where she lived turning into a “slum”, with real estate prices “falling $5 a day”. She attributes this to “black people shooting each other and homeless people sleeping in it.”
When the English translation of infinity net came out in 2011, that phrase was missing. It was not a translation error. The rest of the paragraph was intact; only the sentence about blacks and homeless people was deleted.
At the time, I wasn’t sure what to make of this omission. However, after reading [1945totoday[1945àaujourd’huiI’m beginning to think this was the first sign of a strategy to subtly sanitize Kusama for Western audiences, reinventing it to improve its marketability.
In the very first test of [1945totoday[1945àaujourd’hui, we’re shown a 1964 photo of Kusama being physically carried through Washington Square Park in the arms of a shirtless black man. Above that, a clip from a Japanese magazine shows Kusama reading a newspaper, as a black man reclines beneath her stares at the floor. He is not named, and in the original quote for this magazine, Kusama refers to him not as a collaborator, or even as a human being, but rather speaks of “The head of that nigger”.
On the page facing these two images, curator Mika Yoshitake writes that Kusama used his work “as a means of community healing, to radically connect those who have lived on the margins of life, especially hippies, gays and people of color.
It’s unclear if Kusama is meant to be a “person of color” in this construct as well. But by starting the book with this framing of Kusama as an artist who intentionally produced art that would be inclusive and “healing” for black people, the authors concealed a clear pattern of banal racism in Kusama’s work.
Instead, in almost all cases where blacks appear in works referenced by the compilation, they seem to function primarily as tools to provide shock or story development. Christopher Street Hustler’s Cave (1984), his most critically acclaimed novel, is featured throughout the compilation. But nowhere is it mentioned that this book is full of grotesque, voyeuristic depictions of the smell and genitalia of black characters (white characters aren’t treated that way).
This tendency is present even in one of the few works exclusively available in this compilation: a partial scenario for a 1971 play entitled Tokyo Lee. Most characters are described by personality, or at most, as “handsome” or having “blonde hair and blue eyes”. But Kusama’s only black character is described as a “savage, hairy, coal-black savage.”
It is perhaps relevant to mention here that I, the author of this review, am also black. I would also like to say, however, that I don’t think it’s productive to be offended by these works or to refuse to buy or view them. I just want to say that it’s dishonest to suggest that Kusama has done anything drastic in terms of race, especially compared to some of his peers who deserve that recognition.
For example, Ariyoshi Sawako’s novel Not because of the color (非色; 1964, untranslated) made a whole-hearted effort to connect Japanese and black people, with a much more sympathetic and realistic depiction of black life in New York. Yoshida Ruiko, a Japanese photojournalist who lived in New York around the same time as Kusama, later posted Hot Days in Harlem (ハーレムの暑い日々); 1972, untranslated) which shows, in images and words, Black Harlem in all its complications. We see the joys and sorrows of Harlem, and in particular, we see black women. Kusama doesn’t usually talk about or represent black women, and instead focuses on black men, their labia, and their genitals, slyly boasting about the orgies she says she’s seen in Harlem.
Even his white contemporaries were doing more provocative work. The year before Kusama posted photos of herself being transported to Washington Square, Norman Rockwell painted ‘The Trouble We All Live With’ (1963), in which we are put at eye level with a young girl dutifully escorted to a new desegregated school by the United States Marshals.
In his attempt to [1945totoday[1945àaujourd’hui, curator Isabella Tam devotes pages to placing Kusama’s work in the context of ancient Chinese and Japanese traditions and forms. It’s fine as an artistic or intellectual exercise, but it might be easier to recognize that Kusama’s use of black people as props also places his literature as heir to a more disappointing tradition: American racism.
I’m really surprised how little critical writing on racism there is in Kusama’s work. How did the art world, which is nothing if not endless self-criticism, not have a discussion about Kusama’s use of black people? This is especially odd considering that racism in art is an issue that Kusama herself has spoken about. Towards the end of the same 2002 autobiography in which she laments that blacks drive down real estate values, she attacks the cult of white artists in her home country: “Just because their eyes are blue and their hair blondes, the work of foreign artists is sold at ten times the price of Japanese work. In any other country this would be unthinkable, but in Japan it is commonplace. This is ridiculous and we need to speak out against it.
The closest recent analog to this gap I can think of is hip-hop’s collective shrug of Kanye West. When Kanye started making increasingly bizarre tirades, culminating in anti-Semitic rants so obnoxious it made Alex Jones squirm, just about every rapper let it slide.
Although hip-hop is a genre predicated on shrewdly attacking others for the slightest perceived infraction, not a single consistent piece of diss from a major artist has come out about Kanye (RXK’s bizarrely hilarious Nephew “Yeezy Bootsis a rare exception). How come the same genre that brought us “Ether”, “Energy” and “The Bridge is over” – songs provoked by infractions as minor as allegations of copied lyrics, ghostwriting and swagger -jacking, respectively – turned the other way as a whole group of people were attacked?
It’s worth considering that maybe Kanye, and also Kusama, could somehow be immune to criticism due to their high-profile mental illnesses. It was certainly enough to put an asterisk on almost all reviews of Kanye’s outbursts. We have been led to ask ourselves: can someone be both mentally ill and bigoted? Can the first influence the second? Or is the latter a pre-existing condition, which has nothing to do with the former?
Freddie deBoer, a writer who himself bipolar disorderwrote about it, arguing: “To say that West’s behavior may not be entirely within his control does not mean that it is not his responsibility.” He goes on to add that we “must be willing to both conclude that someone is guilty of bad things while keeping in mind the complications of mental illness.”
It is certainly worth being cautious in our review of the two artists. But that does not explain why there was No peer criticism in the industries occupied by both Kanye and Kusama.
The only explanation for this that comes to mind is money.
In hip-hop, as in art, there seems to be a consensus that some artists are too big to fail. Each of these artists has a cottage industry built around them; there are thousands of people with a direct financial interest in ensuring that their artistic figurehead remains commercially attractive for brand investment and merchandising. As the book asserts, Kusama is one of the best-selling living female artists in the world.
As Jay-Z said on Kanye’s 2005 remix of “Diamonds from Sierra Leone”: “I’m not a businessman I’m a business, man!”
The concept of Kusama as consciously anti-racist seems to be a novel, and particularly Western-oriented, framework. Not all audiences were treated this way – while the 2022 Spanish edition of his autobiography also removed the “black people shoot each other” line, the 2021 Chinese edition left it virtually intact.
I wish we had had the same opportunity as the Chinese readers: to see Kusama’s work as she herself presented it to the world; appreciate the beautiful without ignoring the ugly.
But in this market, a collective decision seems to have been made to maximize profits, not only Kusama’s occasional racist remarks must be eliminated, but also a more acceptable artist must be “invented” in his place. This volume is just the latest effort in this exercise.
Yayoi Kusama: [1945totoday[1945àaujourd’hui devotes an entire essay to exploring and defending Kusama against accusations of “narcissism”. It’s thoughtful, nuanced and compelling. I would have gladly read a similar essay that truly engages Kusama’s gleefully uncreative embrace of American racism. Instead, the book pretends it doesn’t exist and subtly tries to convince us to see something that was never there.
