SLEEK speaks to curator Stephanie Rosenthal from Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau ahead of the gallery’s Yayoi Kusama retrospective.
SLEEK: What impresses you about Yayoi Kusama?
Stephanie Rosenthal: There are two factors that play an essential role in the making of an exhibition. For one, you have to make a selection. Of course, the significance of female artists on the history of art plays an important role. We choose artists who have changed fundamental elements, and Yayoi Kusama is definitely one of them. With her works which she made in the Sixties in New York and later on in Europe, she made a very great contribution to space-consuming, body-emphasising work. One can definitely classify her as a leader. Because of her own constitution, she has really fulfilled the ‘being embedded in art’ [category] and thus provided her answer to what that even means. This is extremely topical and contemporary. Today, we can do exactly this ourselves with our presentation on social media. By that I mean that we constantly have the opportunity to embed ourselves in images, spaces and contexts.
SLEEK: Is this where you see Kusama’s relevance?
SR: She is an artist who has changed and challenged the visual greatly. It’s about her ambition and exploring installation art and performance. Such important questions, like how much you can generate yourself as a woman, especially as a Japanese woman, are fundamental. So many issues arise from this: discrimination, racism, misogyny. All things that she has experienced and that are reflected in all of her work. The strong point of her work is her permanent drive to connect with something and to make contact. That is tremendously important, and characteristic of her.
"Her art is an expression of how she experiences life and how she sees the world."
SLEEK: Kusama was familiar with the feeling of isolation.
SR: She moved to America by herself, without any knowledge of the language, and by that automatically isolated herself. Because of her constitution, she is a woman who had to avoid certain stimuli. She simply couldn’t have a full-blown social life. She describes this very vividly in her autobiography [Infinity Net, 2003]. Art was always the most important way for her to deal with all these feelings. For this reason, Kusama is an example of how art can help you with our own survival. She is no exception; many artists would say that about themselves.
SLEEK: The positive momentum stands out.
SR: Absolutely. When she expresses herself ‘about’ the world, when she formulates wishes, this is based on very positive and constructive thinking. Also, the idea of community, which is so vividly reflected in her dots. The dots stand for humans, for stars, and she creates a lot of hope with it.
SLEEK: What else did you consider when preparing the show?
SR: For us it was especially important, in regard to her activity in Europe, to integrate and relate this aspect of her life. She is often still seen as someone who made her career in America and then returned to Japan. During the late Sixties, Europe was the main platform for her art. We found it incredibly interesting to emphasise that in our exhibition as well. We sifted through a lot of new documents for the exhibition, which allowed us to describe a whole new picture of her art and its connection to Europe.
SLEEK: Could you draw a common thread between Yayoi Kusama and ‘desire’?
SR: Spontaneously, I personally would not connect desire with her art. Interpreting desire as of “passion” or “obsession” – I could say yes. But I have a feeling that with Kusama it is almost more intense. Desire, in terms of hinting at sexual themes and lust, plays a big role in Kusama’s art. When we talk about “lust for life” or “being desired”, I don’t see that. It’s really more of a way of delimiting thinking, a whole other level on which Kusama functions. I perceive her as a very determined, focussed person who clearly knew that as a woman she had it much harder than her male counterparts all throughout her life. She also appeared as a very confident woman, who was aware of what she was doing and stood up for it. Her life is her art. Her art is an expression of how she experiences life and how she sees the world.
SLEEK: If you and I were able to arrange a visit to this exhibition, where would you begin our tour together?
SR: There is a new, very impressive installation that we will present in the atrium of the Gropius building. It consists of huge tentacles – incredibly impressive. Everyone will immediately be drawn right into the center of Kusama’s world. This work conveys the feeling of what Kusama is able to trigger with her art. That’s exactly where I would want to begin the tour with you. The first room is very important to me personally: I’m a big fan of her early works, which are often overlooked. In the first room we are presenting beautiful watercolours and oil paintings by Kusama. They are poetic, but not at all still, simply different from the ones she became famous for.
SLEEK: And where would we end our tour?
SR: Actually, in the last room. There we will present paintings in a salon-style hang, which will occupy the whole room. One will feel and experience themselves embedded in a world of colours and forms. I feel that the first and last rooms symbolize the “beginning and end”.
Yayoi Kusama
A Retrospective @ Gropiusbau
19 March to 1 August 2021