Yayoi Kusama
Kusama Presents An Orgy: Nudity, Love, Sex & Beauty. Vol. 1 No.2
New York City, USA: Enterprise Modern Services, 2001
24 pp., 42.8 cm x 30 cm., tabloid
Edition size unknown
Between the major retrospectives, public art works and collaborations with huge fashion labels, Yayoi Kusama's work has been pretty comfortably subsumed by the mainstream art and design worlds. But her output was often a lot more complicated and confrontational than the Instagram-friendly polka-dot works and infinity rooms (which are, admittedly, excellent).
In the 1960's, she hosted a variety of naked public interventions, often involving group sex. These were part protest, part publicity stunt, part sixties free-love hippy happening.
“I made my art to try and change peoples’ minds about the love in the world that can last forever,” she explained in 2018. “I wanted to spread hope to the world through my artwork.”
She once wrote to president Richard Nixon and invited him to an orgy she was hosting in his honour, offering sex in exchange for ceasefire in Vietnam. She presented the "first homosexual wedding ever to be performed in the United States" and a Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead outside of MoMA in 1969 ("I did body painting while my models fucked a bronze sculpture by Maillol" - see below).
The combination of controversy and titillation made these works perfect tabloid fodder and Kusama received considerable press coverage. Simultaneous to this, pornographic publishers were attempting to thwart government censorship by linking themselves to the (somewhat less regulated) world of fine art. Artists were invited to produce work for their pages, providing political coverage to the publications while allowing artists to engage with "every day" audiences.
Her involvement with a few of these porn papers led Kusama to start her own periodical, Kusama Presents an Orgy, for which she was the "chief editor". Printing costs were primarily paid for by the personal ads that appeared in the publication's pages and, according to Kusama's autobiography, the tabloid was "sold at news stands all across the USA". Her goal with the newspaper was to combat the "medieval mindset that sex is dirty and not to be enjoyed".
“Publicity is part of my art,” declared Kusama in the pages of the periodical, preceding later publications which were part-artwork and part-promotional vehicle, like General Idea's FILE Megazine. Suck, The First European Sex Paper was founded in Amsterdam by Fluxus artist Willem de Ridder and authors Germaine Greer, Heathcote Williams and Lynne Tillman, also in 1969. It, too, aimed to merge art, politics, the counter-culture and sexual liberation.
Other artists mining this territory include Cosey Fanni Tutti of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle, who posed nude for an explicit porn magazine and Sophie Calle who performed at a strip club. Annie Sprinkle continues to blur the line between pornographic performer, activist and visual artist.
Originally selling for less than a dollar (“$5 gets you the next six orgies”) and intended as a weekly, Kusama Presents An Orgy: Nudity, Love, Sex & Beauty only lasted 8 issues.
The above issue is a reprint of the second issue, released in 2001 and already scarce. The contents include: "A Vote for Kusama," by R. Melvin Brandon; "They Said it Couldn't Be Done: Or a Gay Guy Tries it Straight," by Richard; "Bringing Up the Rear," by Robert Pauls; "Kusama's Garden of Narcissus;" "Do Your Thing;" "Million Dollar Pussy;" "Bringing Up the Rear;" "Premises," by Kusama and more.
