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When Unable to Compete: Surviving Daughter in the World of Global Art

Nakajima Izumi 1

1Hitotsubashi University

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the historical background of Yayoi Kusama’s radical ambition and rivalry within the historical background of her cultural (dis)placement in the U.S. in the late 1950s. Feminist and post-colonialist study have refuted the patriarchal idea that originality has to be impelled under the negotiations between an Oedipal rivalry of the cultural father and his sons, and argued that women artists could be a presence to subvert the genealogical lineage. In this context, Kusama’s overt statement of rivalry seems odd and somewhat out-ofdate. This paper argues that European and North American feminist theories cannot fully explain the complexity and contradiction revealed in the national and gendered self that the artist had to bear in the post-war US by means of analyzing the gap between the manners of Kusama’s self-representation and her statement on the cultural position of Japanese contemporary art in the western art world. As a woman from a country that was defeated in WWII, Kusama, playing the role of exotic and obedient daughter figure in the US, secretly betrayed the expectation and requirement for the non-western women and remained competitive with the western cultural father and her siblings such as Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. The daughterhood that Kusama has performed in and out of Japan at that time implies the historical lineage of Japanese women’s particular identification with non-mother womanhood conspicuously in recent art works by Japanese women.

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