Obsession Under Control. The interview with Frances Morris, the curator of Yayoi Kusama exhibition at Tate Modern

: Function ereg() is deprecated in /includes/file.inc on line 649.

[PL] The exhibition focuses on moments when Yayoi Kusama first worked in particular idioms - how would you describe her constant evolution? what was the reason for so many radical shifts?
Her career does obviously go in what we call fits and starts. What's interesting I think is that each moment is so intense, so it's not as if she does something and then moves on, it's full immersion in painting or sculpture or performance and then it seems to be a swift change from one to another stance. When you make an exhibition you have a lot of questions you set out to answer. And one of the questions I am left with is what drives this radical change. Kusama is hugely ambitious and a risk taker. I am certainly not psychologist but it seems that as soon as she becomes comfortable with an idiom or as soon as she masters particular way of working, she needs that taste of risk taking again. Think of mountain climbers - it's not enough to have done Mount Everest you have to do K2, then Matterhorn and so on and so forth. I think Kusama is driven in that way, but she is also very able. She always has incredible skill and intelligence. And for somebody who is as intelligent and as able and as ambitious, you see she needed take these challenges.

Yayoi Kusama, Kusama posing in Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show 1963, Installation view, Gertrude Stein Gallery, New York, © Yayoi Kusama and © Yayoi Kusama Studios Inc.
Yayoi Kusama, Kusama posing in Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show 1963, Installation view, Gertrude Stein Gallery, New York, © Yayoi Kusama and © Yayoi Kusama Studios Inc.

But in the same time there are common elements, in terms of repetitive motifs, vocabulary of forms etc., aren't they ?
One of the interesting things we did with the exhibition is create a circular narrative. If you walk round the exhibition, before "Mirror room" which is the final immersion, you walk from paintings of the 1950s through a sequence of works to the recent paintings and you can see a "conversation" between her inner visions of the 1950s and her inner visions of 2000s. The show demonstrates an enduring obsession, a fascination with her vocabulary of forms. But it's more than a vocabulary of form, it is also a way of working, seen in her various procedures - repetition, covering the surface, obliteration, obsession, expansiveness made of small accumulation etc. There are really strong continuities between things that look very different. This is what stops the story from feeling one of fits and starts. That is what provides the underlying continuity which comes from inside Kusama's head and inside her heart and from her determination.

Yayoi Kusama, Yayoi Kusama 1965, Courtesy of Victoria Miro Gallery, London and Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo, © Yayoi Kusama, courtesy Yayoi Kusama studio inc., Photo: Eikoh Hosoe
Yayoi Kusama, Yayoi Kusama 1965, Courtesy of Victoria Miro Gallery, London and Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo, © Yayoi Kusama, courtesy Yayoi Kusama studio inc., Photo: Eikoh Hosoe

Kusama's body of work is on one hand psychedelic and obsessive and in the same time we have impression that the artist keeps everything perfectly under control. How do you find this tension?
Absolutely, I find that so fascinating. It's like this opposition of things, so seems to be in control and then she seems maybe to lose control. She is very skilled and then she seems to embrace the idea of a kind of deskilling. She is in a studio, in the art world and then she is on the street. She very deliberately pursues the lack of skill, lack of control. It's almost a strategy. She obviously experienced it psychologically through these, undoubtedly true, hallucinatory moments, panic attacks, feeling lost, anxiety, but I think in her art the way she tries to access all those representations through the appearance of lack of control is a very controlled strategy.

Yayoi Kusama, Self-Obliteration No.2 1967, © Yayoi Kusama and © Yayoi Kusama Studios Inc.
Yayoi Kusama, Self-Obliteration No.2 1967, © Yayoi Kusama and © Yayoi Kusama Studios Inc.

Kusama's work is about the space - the obsession to depict infinitive space, marking the territory, searching for the limits of the space, bringing the space under control. The arrangement of the show features that really well, how did you work on the installation?
I wanted where possible, without historical reconstructions, for the rooms to evoke the feeling of the way Kusama would herself install her work or the way the work might have been in the studio - to achieve the good fit between the presentation and the origin of the work. I also wanted to create that feeling which I imagine must have been inside her head, as she is filled with one obsession - I didn't want to mix up time frames of different works, as she didn't really mix them in a way she worked. I wanted to show that she was completely absorbed in what she was doing at particular time. So that idea - one gallery with one type of thing and each one laid out as far as possible to evoke or have sympathetic inclination of her working method or her working place.
She didn't engage hugely with the installation. One area she was really interested in was the selection of recent paintings and that's the only way she intervened. But she was very interested in the catalogue, so I think she is interested in her legacy, particularly about the essayists - she wished to know who was going to write for the catalogue and what they would write. We translated every essay, she read them and in every case made her made comments, which in terms of level of detail is extraordinary, she is 82 now.

Yayoi Kusama, I'm Here, but Nothing, 2000/2012, © Yayoi Kusama, Photo credit: Lucy Dawkins/Tate Photography
Yayoi Kusama, I'm Here, but Nothing, 2000/2012, © Yayoi Kusama, Photo credit: Lucy Dawkins/Tate Photography

You mentioned that for many reasons this exhibition was for you a completely different experience from any previous collaboration - why?
Language barriers, distance - she is in Tokyo and I'm in London, culture differences and also more than any other artist I ever worked with, her complete focus on the present. She was more keen than anything that her contemporary work should be shown. In her mind that was the most important thing, which is interesting because most of the artists I have worked with have a sense of restrospectivity. Kusama is completely absent, in that sense of wanting to engage to the past. I think she even finds it difficult, she doesn't want to return, memories are not particularly helpful to her and partly because since she wrote a biography, she doesn't want to come back to the past. She really didn't want me to pick up the works from 1960s for example from the time in NY. Having said that, once she saw the show she was really quite interested in it, she was quite surprised.

Yayoi Kusama exhibition runs until 5 June 2012 at Tate Modern, London.

Yayoi Kusama, Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show, 1963, © Yayoi Kusama, Photo credit: Lucy Dawkins/Tate Photography
Yayoi Kusama, Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show, 1963, © Yayoi Kusama, Photo credit: Lucy Dawkins/Tate Photography

Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room - Filled with the Brilliance of Life, 2011, © Yayoi Kusama, Photo credit: Lucy Dawkins/Tate
Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room - Filled with the Brilliance of Life, 2011, © Yayoi Kusama, Photo credit: Lucy Dawkins/Tate