Yayoi Kusama

Almost a half-century after Yayoi Kusama debuted her landmark installationInfinity Mirror Room--Phalli's Field (1965) in New York, the work remainschallenging and unclassifiable. Shifting between the Pop-like and the Surreal, the Minimal and themetaphorical, the figurative and the abstract, the psychotic and the erotic, with references to"free love" and psychedelia, it seemed to embody all that the 1960s was about, while atthe same time denying the prevailing aesthetics of its time. The installation itself was a roomlined with mirrored panels and carpeted with several hundred brightly polka-dotted soft fabricprotrusions into which the visitor was completely absorbed. Kusama simply called it "a sublime,miraculous field of phalluses." A precursor of performance-based feminist art practice, mediapranksterism, and "Occupy" movements, Kusama (born in 1929) was once as well known as heradmirers--Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, and Joseph Cornell. In this first monograph on an epoch-definingwork, Jo Applin looks at the installation in detail and places it in the context of subsequent artpractice and theory as well as Kusama's own (as she called it) "obsessional art." Applinalso discusses Kusama's relationship to her contemporaries, particularly those working withenvironments, abstract-erotic sculpture, and mirrors, and those grappling with such issues asabstraction, eroticism, sexuality, and softness. The work of Lee Lozano, Claes Oldenburg, LouiseBourgeois, and Eva Hesse is seen anew when considered in relation to Yayoi Kusama's.