BBC Newsnight Yayoi Kusama Interview

ruticker 07.03.2025 23:38:58

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was in London today at the start of an exhibition of her work at Tate Modern. For the last more than 30 years, Yayoi Kusama has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric institution. Her work is obsessive and often overwhelming, and since she's now well over 80, there's an awful lot of it too. Steve Smith has been to see a sample; his report contains some flashing lights and nudity. **Extraordinary** is a much abused word in the world of contemporary art, but I think we might dust it off for Yayoi Kusama, an octogenarian in a wheelchair who somehow conquered both the art scene and the fashion world from her base in a Japanese psychiatric hospital. News Knight met the doyen of the polka dot before her big new show at Tate Modern in London. **What is your interest in polka dots? Why do they crop up so often in your art?** "Please ask that to my hand. I've drawn lots of dots since I was a child and covered my fashion and my notebooks with dots. Dots are a symbol of the world. The cosmos, the Earth is a dot. The moon, the sun, the stars are all made up of dots. You and me, we are dots." Her work is highly colorful and playful, but Kusama herself is a sober and serious presence, especially for someone in a throbbing red outfit and matching wig. She says she remains committed to her long-standing campaigning for peace. **What ideas are you exploring here?** "These are my works about my life, the deep emotion of being born human and the various movements of space as we know them. We can find out all sorts of things about these three dots." **Kusama, UK Takata Desa, I wonder how you feel about this big retrospective here at Tate Modern?** "This is art that shines out from the bottom of my heart, full of human love, and I really wanted to display it in this country that I love, England." Kusama collaborated with musician Peter Gabriel on this video. **What did he see in her work?** "A really original point of view, passionate intensity that was on the one hand very childlike and on another very smart adult and quite disturbing. We had a few days just recreating some of her work and her sort of boat full of phalluses." **Did one of your people say, 'Peter, we're going to need to spend some more money. We're going to have to go down to Wicks and just see what's... how did that all go?** "It's quite hard to locate a boatload of willies, so we definitely had to do it yourself." **I'm glad you brought those up. The male member is to Kusama what the tree trunk is to late career Hockney. Dare we ask what's that about?** "I was very afraid of sex. I haven't had sex as a child. I suffered a lot because my father led a very divorced lifestyle, and I came to hate sex. As a kind of art therapy, I created lots of sex, filled a room with them, and I lost my fear." The psychiatric hospital where Kusama lives became a refuge of her own choosing after a bout of illness many years ago. "For three, three or four days, I didn't eat. I just painted and collapsed. Then I went to the psychiatric hospital. The doctor said that I had to be admitted." The critics are sympathetic to Kusama's plight, of course, but that doesn't mean they all love her art. "It's fun, like a fizzy drink with all these spots. They're like bubbles. It's got this endless fizz; it's effervescent. Obviously, we're told that it's driven by deep pain and psychological illness, but that doesn't really come through in the art for me. I don't find it some kind of disturbing hypnotic ecstasy in this art. I find it just a fizzy pop cultural style." **Well, the show's been fun, but I'm really looking forward to this place, the obliteration room they call it.** "It's not the bar, by the way. This Orwellian sounding obliteration room is pristine at the moment, but the idea is that visitors to the show can come in here and completely cover its surfaces with brightly colored polka dots." "I've got to pack him drinking this BBC coffee." Kusama also writes, makes films, and sings. This one's a lament for her late parents. "Bra fantastic! Thank you. Thank you very much. Very nice to meet you." "Me too." Well, you'd hardly have failed to notice that the England manager Fabio Capello resigned a few hours ago in protest at the FA's decision to strip...

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