Mika Yoshitake:
This mix of everyday objects, including shoes and chairs, look like they’ve been overrun by an accumulation of soft phallic sacs. Meanwhile, painted macaroni runs riot over the dress like a swarm of ants.
Kusama often uses her complexes and fears as subjects in her artwork. She says: ‘reproducing the objects, again and again, was my way of conquering the fear . . . that turns the frightening thing into something funny, something amusing’.
Mass-produced food is a particular stressor for Kusama. ‘The thought of continually eating something like macaroni . . . fills me with fear and revulsion,’ she has said, ‘so I make macaroni sculptures. I make them and make them and then keep on making them.’
Kusama is no stranger to this laborious and repetitive mode of working. As a fifteen-year-old conscripted by the Japanese Imperial Army in World War II, she would sometimes work twelve hour shifts at a factory making parachutes. We can also think of Kusama’s practice as elevating the idea of ‘women’s labour’, in this case sewing, from something repetitive and dull into a creative process that channels her emotions and fears.
These pieces are among the first examples of ‘soft sculpture’, an approach adopted later in the 1960s and ’70s by many artists who created three-dimensional forms with fabric and textiles.