The Dazed Yayoi Kusama interview from March 2000 has returned to circulation following the news, reported by The New York Times, that Kusama died on 14 August in a Tokyo hospital. She was 97. The interview, conducted for the March 2000 issue of Dazed & Confused and now republished as part of the magazine’s Archive Pull series, is a brief, elliptical document: Kusama speaks in fragments, in images, with the offhand authority of someone who has been explaining herself for decades and has not yet found a listener adequate to the task.
‘I see thousands of cows in the pink sky,’ she says, when asked whether she still draws compulsively, ‘and I quickly draw them in my notebooks so that I never forget an image.’ It is the kind of statement that, in a different mouth, would be affectation. In hers, it is simply description.
A life conducted as art, and as survival
The piece that surrounds the interview is a substantial essay tracing the arc of Kusama’s career, from a childhood in Japan defined by hallucinations so acute they threatened to dissolve her sense of self, to her emergence in New York in the 1960s as one of the more genuinely singular figures in contemporary art. It was a career built not out of ambition in any conventional sense but out of necessity. ‘By her early 20s,’ the essay notes, ‘painting had become her last refuge, a safe place in which to control the rampant excesses of her mind.’
The New York years are rendered in vivid detail. Kusama developed her Infinity Net paintings, monochromatic fields of obsessively repeated dots that she described as being about ‘an infinite repetition’. She staged happenings in city parks, sent an open letter to Richard Nixon in 1968 urging peace in Vietnam by means of polka dots, and sold mirrored balls at the Venice Biennale for 1,200 lira a piece until the authorities banned her from the event. She was, by 1967, receiving more column inches than Andy Warhol.
Her account of the hallucination that gave rise to the Infinity Net is taken from her 1975 book The Struggle And Wanderings Of My Soul, and it is worth reading slowly. Aged ten, she looked at a red flower-patterned tablecloth and watched the pattern spread to the ceiling, the window glass, the posts, her own body. ‘My self was eliminated, and I had returned and been reduced to the infinity of eternal time and the absolute of space,’ she wrote. The repetition in the paintings was her answer to this: if the world insists on proliferating without limit, you proliferate back at it, you cover the canvas, you hold your ground.
Recognition deferred, then global
By 1970, exhausted and largely forgotten, Kusama returned to Japan. In 1977, her mental illness became acute enough that she entered the Seiwa Institute in Tokyo as a long-term patient, working there daily from 9am to 9pm on new paintings and sculptures. She has, the essay states, never left.
Recognition, when it finally came, was extensive. In 1993, she represented Japan at the 45th Venice Biennale, the first woman invited to do so, exhibiting a fusion of two mid-1960s works in a piece called Mirror Room: a mirrored cubicle containing what appeared to be an infinite field of papier-mache pumpkins. At the private view, she wore a long sorcerer’s robe and peaked cap, both painted to match the installation. The boundary between artist and work, already porous throughout her career, here appeared to dissolve entirely. As Frieze notes in its obituary, the 1993 Biennale representation marked a turning point in international recognition of her legacy.
That recognition deepened considerably over the following decade. In 2001, she was awarded the Asahi Prize, given in recognition of outstanding cultural, academic and artistic contributions in Japan, according to the BBC. A decade after that, between 2011 and 2012, a large-scale retrospective of her work travelled to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Modern in London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, cementing a canonical status that her Dazed interview, conducted in the middle of that long journey toward mainstream consecration, only obliquely anticipated.
The Yayoi Kusama Dazed interview 2000 and what it actually records
What is most arresting about the 2000 interview, read now, is its flatness. Kusama is not performing. Asked if she ever feels at ease in her life, she replies: ‘Only when I take the drugs prescribed for me by my doctors. I actually took some a few moments ago as I have not been feeling well today.’ Asked about Japan’s changed reception of her work, she is briefly contemptuous: ‘They suddenly started respecting me after I had a major retrospective.’ Asked what kind of leader might have stopped her leaving for New York in the early 1960s, she closes the line of questioning entirely. ‘I’ve never followed leaders.’
The essay notes that all quotes are drawn from Akira Tatehata’s interview with Kusama, published in full in the Phaidon monograph on the artist. That interview, and this one, form two nodes in a larger portrait of someone who treated her own inner life as raw material with the same rigour she applied to canvas. The work and the person were, in her own understanding, inseparable. ‘For Kusama,’ the essay concludes, ‘painting and sculpture meant much more than a simple, intellectual exercise. They became the difference between life and death.’ The Frieze obituary confirms that she kept working at the Seiwa Institute until the end.
