Yayoi Kusama

KCET Public Television, Benefit Auction, Los Angeles, circa 1975
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

This work is in very good and sound condition overall. The fabric has sustained some wear over time, resulting in some areas of paint loss. The metal shelves and silverware have oxidized and also exhibit paint loss in areas, as is expected from found objects. There are mild dust accretions throughout.
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Throughout Kusama’s career, she continually returned to the theme of her identity as an outsider. The Accumulation series, beginning in 1961, simultaneously addressed her role as a female artist in a male dominated world as well as a victim of her own neurotic obsessions. In the early sixties, Kusama moved away from the flat surface and began to cover various found objects, such as ladders, shelves and couches with small sewn phallic protrusions, which are both absurd and threatening through their radical transformation of everyday objects. “Soon the nets went beyond the bounds of the canvas to cover the desks, the chairs, and the floor, and I realized... the dream of ob-sessional art I experienced in my childhood.” (Kusama quoted in Micheal Cohen, “Yayoi Kusama: Love Forever,” Flash Art, no. 175, March/April 1994). The soft pillowy protuberances of the Accumulations envelope and immobilize the support objects in a parody of phallic power. The penile forms provided a device with which the artist confronted her own deep-seated sexual anxieties. At the same time, in the present work, Untitled from 1963, Kusama has covered a shelf structure, laden with kitchen utensils – bottles, silverware and bowls – with her phallic forms, a comment on the sterotypical role of women in the home, where even the most conventional female utensils have been made ineffectual by male dominance.

 

With her fanatical working nature, the Accumulation sculptures multiplied, accumulating to the point that, by the time of Kusama’s 1964 exhibition Driving Image Show, they constituted a complete environment. That exhibition presented virtually all of the artist’s Accumulations to date, crowded together to create a single installation, an environment indistinguishable from the medium of the exhibition itself, immersing the viewer in her own obsessive visions and psychological states. These works are the artist’s first foray into immersive environments and are an important precursor to the Infinity Mirror Rooms that Kusama would first present the following year at the 1966 Venice Biennale and the prevalence of immersive installations in the artist’s practice.