Infinity Net The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama (Hardback) /anglais - Hardcover

KUSAMA YAYOI

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1854379658 ISBN 13: 9781854379658

Publisher: TATE, 2011

Synopsis

Yayoi Kusama is one of the most significant contemporary artists at work today. This engaging autobiography, published in English for the first time, tells the story of her life and extraordinary career in her own inimitable style, revealing her as a fascinating figure and maverick artist who channels her obsessive neuroses into an art that transcends cultural barriers. Kusama describes the decade she spent in New York, first as a poverty-stricken artist and later as the doyenne of an alternative counter-cultural scene. She provides a frank and touching account of her relationships with key art-world figures, including Georgia O'Keeffe, Donald Judd and the reclusive Joseph Cornell, with whom Kusama forged a close bond. In candid terms, she describes her childhood and the first appearance of the obsessive visions that have haunted her throughout her life. Returning to Japan in the early 1970s, Kusama checked herself into a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo where she resides to the present day, emerging to dedicate herself with seemingly endless vigour to her art and her writing. This remarkable autobiography provides a powerful insight into a unique artistic mind, haunted by fears and phobias yet determined to maintain her position at the forefront of the artistic avant-garde. In addition to her artwork, Yayoi Kusama is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and fiction, including "The Hustler's Grotto of Christopher Street", "Manhattan Suicide Addict" and "Violet Obsession".

About this title

About the Author

Yayoi Kusama is an internationally acclaimed, widely exhibited Japanese artist.
 
Ralph McCarthy is a literary translator.

Review

“Like her paintings, veiled with a lively yet chilling surface of dots, [Kusama’s] book evokes the intensity and ‘insanity’ of her life only remotely, through vivid, unsentimental descriptions. . . . Focusing on the facts and employing an impersonal tone, she writes as though she were presenting someone else’s biography rather than her own. In this rather paradoxical way, the book brings us subtly closer to Kusama, who remains, in both her private life and her work, extremely self-absorbed and self-expressive yet stubbornly evasive and mysterious.”

(Art in America)

“There is something restorative, refreshingly sincere, even magical about [Kusama’s] work. It speaks for itself, suggesting that it’s not so much whether she’s an outsider or an insider that matters but how her story dispenses with that distinction altogether.” (Sharon Mizota Los Angeles Review of Books)

“In Infinity Net, esoteric musings are interspersed with art-world gossip, creating an eccentric mix that is part manifesto on artistic form, part juicy tell-all.”

(Bookforum)

“[Infinity Net] reminds us that Kusama’s abiding, driving energy, which has found compelling expression in her work’s love-sexy titillations, despite—or because of—her magnificent obsessions, is and has been the real, central subject of her art.”

(The Brooklyn Rail)

“A fascinating, self-absorbed recitation that spans 70 years.” (ARTnews)

 “Even with its mix of real and created memories, Infinity Net is valuable as it suggests many blind spots in the way official history is constructed, blind spots that can spur art historians to uncover specific historical fragments and destabilize the art-historical status quo. Only within such a context can an artist such as Kusama be fully appraised—and appreciated.” (Women's Art Journal)

Edition details

• Publisher: TATE
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1854379658
• ISBN 13: 9781854379658
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1