Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1849762139 ISBN 13: 9781849762137

Publisher: Tate Publishing, 2015

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) is one of the most talked-about artists working today. This remarkable memoir reveals her to be a fascinating figure, channeling her obsessive neurosis into an art that transcends cultural barriers. Kusama describes arriving in New York in 1957 as a poverty-stricken artist and later becoming the doyenne of an alternative art scene. She tells of her relationships with Georgia O’Keeffe, Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, and the reclusive Joseph Cornell. She candidly discusses the obsessive visions that have haunted her throughout her life; returning to Japan in the early 1970s, Kusama admitted herself to the psychiatric hospital in Tokyo where she lives today, and from which she has produced the seemingly endless stream of artworks and writings that have won her acclaim across the globe.

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)