The Art and Politics of Artists' Personas: The Case of Yayoi Kusama (Persona Studies 1:1 (2015)) (original) (raw)
2015, Persona Studies 1:1 (2015): 131-165
This essay presents persona as a trajectory of contemporary art in the postindustrial art world, in which artists' "work" increasingly includes non-art activities such as networking and media publicity. After discussing pressing issues in art scholarship in regards to the disciplinary tradition and persona studies, I analyse the image of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) who has been operating in the Western-dominated international art world since the 1960s. Arriving in the U.S. in 1957, Kusama quickly became one of the most prolific and notorious artists in New York. However, by the early 1970s she returned to Japan and has since been living voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital. Art historical assessments of Kusama's work have generally been confined within the Western theoretical parameters of feminism and psychoanalysis. Here, I draw attention to her persona: a "non-art" topic that has largely been ignored within the modernist discipline of Art History, which insists on an object-based formalist methodology. I critique this tendency by demonstrating how an artist's persona can become a medium of art and politics, and how an artist's artworks can become by-products of the artist's larger-than-life public persona. I trace Kusama's effort at persona cultivation from New York in the early 1960s, and particularly explore her satirical and ironic use of the cultural, racial, and gendered stereotypes about Japanese women. Based on archival research and aesthetics analysis, I argue that Kusama exploited the commercial value of her Japanese body and identity at a time when escalating Cold War national pride and xenophobia jeopardised her career in New York. By discussing how she pursued selfpromotion and commercial success, this paper also portrays the commercialization of art and artists during the 1960s.
Sign up for access to the world's latest research.
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Related papers
Into performance: Japanese women artists in New York
Choice Reviews Online, 2005
This book, which derives from Midori Yoshimoto's doctoral dissertation submitted to Rutgers University in 2002, insightfully documents and historicises the long-time underrated and overlooked works and lives of five Japanese women artists involved in the New York avant-garde movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s: Yayoi Kusama, Yôko Ono, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi and Shigeko Kubota. According to the author, this is the first in-depth comparative examination of these artists to fill the gaps in both American and Japanese contemporary art history and illuminate the underrepresented intercultural dialogue between East and West in this revolutionary era for performance art.
Journal of Asian Humanities at Kyushu University, 2019
A rt and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan and The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art are both ambitious and original works that make important contributions to the fields of art history, social history, and cultural and media studies in postwar Japan. Both works build on groundbreaking studies of avant-garde art in Japan and raise questions about the "frame" of discourse on such art in English-language-based studies. 1 At the same time, the approach and methodology of the two authors differ in significant ways. Jesty looks at the period from 1945 to 1960 in an in-depth exploration of three movements in the early postwar era that set the stage for the emergence of what later came to be called gendai āto 現代アー ト (contemporary art). He argues that a clearer understanding of this dynamic and complex period is critically important, especially one that includes an analysis of critical forms of social engagement that are often associated with left-wing movements sometimes elided from later histories. This is not only for a more complete under
Yamamoto Kanae and the Search for Modern Japanese Artistic Identity
Writing for a Real World, 2023
In the summer of 1912, Japanese artist Yamamoto Kanae (1882-1946) traveled from Tokyo to Paris with aspirations of becoming a great Western-style painter. However, the academic style that he had devoted his career to had been outmoded in favor of Fauvism, Cubism, and other developments in Western Modernism. Confronted with art styles that he did not recognize - or particularly care for - Yamamoto was forced to reevaluate his artistic motivations and goals. Like many artists during this period of globalization, he faced the challenge of distinguishing modernization from Westernization and articulating a modern artistic identity that was distinctly Japanese. Examining the development of his printmaking technique and choice of subject matter arising from his pivotal experiences in Paris, Brittany, and Moscow, this paper argues that Yamamoto’s artistic evolution encapsulates the broader effort of Japanese society to assert their national identity in the midst of the increasingly global Modernist movement.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.