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Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama By Kusama Yayoi. Tate Publishing. 2011.£14.99 (hb). 256 pp. ISBN: 9781 854379658
Yayoi Kusama was born in 1929. She is, perhaps, Japan's foremost living artist. She has lived, voluntarily, in a psychiatric hospital since 1975 while continuing to produce her art and to write novels and poetry. She was a leading avant-garde artist in New York in the 1960s and counted as friends or colleagues such artists as Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, and Joseph Cornell, with whom she had a close relationship. This autobiography was published to coincide with her retrospective at London's Tate Modern in 2012.
The title, Infinity Net, refers to one of the two enduring characteristics of Kusama's art, nets. Her art is often described as obsessive because of the ceaseless preoccupation with nets and polka dots, a preoccupation that has endured for many decades. Speaking of the nets, Kusama wrote:
‘I would cover a canvas with nets, then continue painting them on the table, on the floor, and finally on my own body. As I repeated this process over and over again, the nets began to expand to infinity. I forgot about...