[Audio Guide]
Covered with protrusions of various sizes and painted entirely white, this chair seems to reject potential sitters, and its surface appears to have been eroded and transformed into something else. Its intense impact is such that it may provoke feelings of unease or alarm in the viewer. The term “soft sculpture” is used to describe three-dimensional works such as this one, in which pieces of furniture are covered with clusters of fabric protrusions, produced while Kusama was living in New York around 1961. Due in part to the customs and historical background of the old, upper-crust family in which she was born and raised, Kusama harbored strong feelings of fear and disgust toward men. “I hate the terror of violence and war... in the end, men’s urge to fight comes down to the fact that they possess phalluses.” Kusama sought to overcome this fear by replacing symbols of violence and power with soft fabric protrusions, and created a series of works in which these densely occupy surfaces.
A pattern of white netting has been painted onto a gray background created by a applying a thin layer of white onto a black ground. This net seems to stretch into infinity, with a thicker application of pigment here and there. Although there is a repetitive monotony, when apprehended in its entirety it creates a quivering undulation. This work is from the series Infinite Nets, begun by Kusama in 1959 when she was based in New York. Emerging from a persistence deep within herself, Kusama’s obsessiveness seems to have been brought out by the environment of New York. We can come to understand Kusama’s unique world through this image of proliferation, made by an act of repetition as though its creator were trying to drive something out.
