In the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco there is a small, exquisite »Japanese Tea Garden.« And, of course, in this exotic location blossom all the symbols that enlightened Westerners have associated with Japanese culture since Roland Barthes at the latest. However, zealous culture fans are kept from looking for private solutions à la Barthes in this realm of symbols by a small sign. It commemorates the Japanese family that looked after the garden until 1942. The »penetration of the real« is linked to the question of what happened to these people after that. But not only the fate of this family is uncertain, but also the whole unsolved - that is, still relevant - problem of the internment of fellow citizens of foreign origin, or »one's own people, yet foreigners.«

But let us put the question of the cultural basis of a political status like citizenship to one side. Let us take a look at Yayoi Kusama, who during her lyrical performance »Walking Piece« (ca. 1966) walked through the city of New York under a flowery umbrella and wearing a kimono. The slides documenting the performance have been photographed with a fish-eye lens - a perspective emblematic of Kusama's poetics. She is either positioned too centrally, drawn in towards the camera, or she is banished to the periphery in an over-exaggerated gesture. But not only the performer is subjected to these fish-eye dialectics, but also the relationship between the figure and the background. And this relationship, as has already been suggested, is constantly in a state of imbalance. There is no levelling out of regular dimensions through perspective, but an exponential hyperpresence or miniaturisation. The reception of Kusama is also affected by a similar imbalance. In the '60s, she was a key figure in the New York scene. The art critic Donald Judd was not the only one to comment perceptively on her truly pioneering formal solutions at the start of the decade. Later, as the anti-Vietnam movement reached its height, she had her ways of creating a stir in the gossip columns with nudist guerrilla happenings (in Wall Street, among other places) or obscene hippie fashions. At the start of the seventies, however, she broke with America: Kusama went back to Japan, disappearing completely from the contemporary reception of the minimal and performance movement - that is to say, she does not appear in any anthology on the subject.

An oeuvre that does not fit in with any canon is seized on as welcome prey by historical, that is, present-day reception. The everyday terror behind forming a canon is objectified over long periods of time, and these established values positively beg to be recycled into historiographic perspectives. The various articles in the exhibition catalogue ¹ all head in this direction. The exhibition itself, which is primarily composed of contemporary works that, however, are simultaneously remixes of early works, draws a confusing picture. I do not like this picture, because I find it to be forced - too little Japanese garden culture -, but the works exhibited make one want to reconstruct their complex history. So let us once more go back to the beginning.

Kusama, born in 1929, had come to the USA in 1957 for the opening of a personal exhibition, but with the intention of staying in New York. In 1959, in her first gallery exhibition there, she showed tableaux of Newman-like dimensions: monochromes overlaid with stripes of paint as thick as a thumb forming irregular net patterns (»Infinity Nets«). Pictures from this series were shown in 1960 in Udo Kultermann's exhibition »Monochrome Painting« in Leverkusen, Germany (alongside works by Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Lucio Fontana, Günther Uecker, Otto Piene and others). Kusama, like many others, was also led on to assemblage and then to environment by the interrogation of painting with regard to the possibilities of literal representation. One of the first high points of her environments was doubtless the exhibition »Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show« in December 1964: a rowing boat, covered with small phalluses made of material, that was extended over the walls of the gallery in multiple copies of the motif, like wallpaper In 1966, Kusama organised her first happening during the Venice Biennale. On the lawns in front of the main building, she scattered a large number of balls covered with reflective paper, selling them for a handful of dollars until the Biennale organisers protested (»Narcissus Garden«). Kusama had already worked with the mirror motif in gallery environments: for example, in »Kusama's Peep Show - Endless Love Show« (1966), an eight-cornered room two metres across that was completely lined with mirrors and in which a concentric arrangement of red, yellow, green, blue and white light bulbs flashed on and off to music by the Beatles. Viewers were able to see into it through two openings at head height; that is, they could, in a dizzying visual experiment, identify themselves as/and/or another. As opposed to a classical peep show, the specific object was missing - a naked female performer. Young people undressing then became the focus of attention in the above-mentioned »scandal happenings,« during which Kusama dabbed paint on naked bodies in the well-known »allover.« However, although the young people may have become the focus of attention, this focus was very certainly already there: »Kusama, whose greed for publicity leaves no room for taste, has done it. She has put on the most boring freak show of the year for the press. [...] Without any doubt, Kusama suffers from over-present presence,« the Village Voice wrote in 1969. ² Let us keep in mind the category »taste,« with its subtle class connotations.

When Michael Fried was lamenting the demise of American modernity in »Art and Objecthood« in that year of crisis, 1967, he denounced Minimal Art as »theatrical« because it emphasises the phenomenological dimension, the appearance of the material world, and thus also the role of the viewer. Fried held the experience of »an object in a situation« to be incompatible with the modernistic artistic imperatives of »autonomy« and »unity.« Today we know that Fried's hysterical sensibility had mapped out the framework for everything to come; only the circumstances had to be changed. If Kusama does not appear in the success story of theatricality - together with her heroes Carolee Schneemann, Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, Adrian Piper and the rest - it is probably because she did not even implicitly adopt Fried's gesture of rejection.

What does that mean? - Well, modern, post-war American art corresponds, to put it concisely, to the attempt at consolidation by a middle class that put the petty bourgeois mob on a leash at the cost of its being allowed to bark undisturbed. In the fifties, McCarthy yapped away (and even broke loose for a while). The list of names that joined him is a long one. When, at the end of the fifties - the time of Kusama's arrival in the USA -, Abstract Expressionism was borne to its grave, this meant the end of an artistic style that addressed these petty-bourgeois philosophies and myths. What followed was pure - that particular mixture of spirituality and morals composed of Protestant ethics, the Puritanism of the Founding Fathers, the Bhagavad Gita, yoga, vegetarianism and so on. Pure middle class. Kusama was foreign, not because she came from Japan, but because she was politically exotic. With her openly displayed megalomania as the source of her ideas, her predilection for fairground noise and lights, cheap porn, and above all senseless effects - in short, with all her tastelessness - she did not join in with the modernistic cordoning off of the middle class. This is what makes her example so valuable in an era of populism. She takes away the tasteless fear our political, middle-class art has of making mistakes.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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