43 SPRING / SUMMER 2018 Yayoi Kusama: Inventing the Singular By Midori Yamamura MIT Press, 2015 Reviewed by Gloria Sutton S ince the publication of this watershed study in 2015, there has been an unparalleled level of public attention stemming from international museums, commercial galleries, and popular media alike (Time Magazine named Kusama one of the most influential people in 2016), all concentrated on the 87-year-old artist’s prolific output. The global reach of Kusama’s signature dot painting style, iconic sculptural forms that draw from natural elements, and the heightened visibility accorded her persona have been amplified through social media often generating record breaking crowds to Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, a career survey organized by Mika Yoshitake for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, which will travel throughout the United States and Canada over the next two years. This intense public interest only makes art historian Midori Yamamura’s rigorously researched book even more vital, not simply as a scholarly account of a popular artist’s career, but as an argument for how Kusama’s current vis- ibility must be measured against a his- torical backdrop of deliberate omission. Each of Yamamura’s assiduously framed chapters delivers a perceptive and compelling argument for how Kusama converted the unconscious biases as well as the overt omissions of the international art world into genera- tive methodologies by anticipating many of the conceptual maneuvers made by her U.S.-born white male artist contemporaries. These included Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol, whose own storied careers would eclipse Kusama’s art his- torical reception. Despite the unassail- able impact Kusama has had on the key debates that have shaped postwar art— including her first barrier breaking exhi- bition of her infinity net paintings in 1958 set against the dominant discourse of Abstract Expressionism up through her ambitious public performances dur- ing the 1960s and 1970s that foreground- ed the commodity status of art, followed by her large-scale outdoor sculptures and the sensorial environments created through her mirror rooms and experi- mental multimedia installations that she continues to produce—the scholarship on Kusama is often limited to the sub- specialty of Japanese postwar art histo- ry. In addition to making Japanese lan- guage primary sources newly available in English, Yamamura’s book is an important corrective. Rather than recu- perating Kusama as a lost visionary or overlooked female artist, Yamamura deftly recasts the entire art historical REVIEWS Fig. 1. Eikoh Hosoe, Yayoi Kusama in 14th Street Happening (1966), Slide projections of performance. Collection of the artist. Reproduced in Yayoi Kusama Infinity Mirrors (Hirshhorn Museum and Delmonico Prestel, 2017), p. 119.