Anatomic Explosion on Wall Street*

MIGNON NIXON The money made with this stock is enabling the war to continue, warns a press release announcing a pop-up protest on Wall Street. This pointed critique of the military-corporate complex is timely, but not new. The press release in question was issued in 1968, at the height of the American War in Vietnam, by an artist whose unorthodox antiwar protests frequently made the pages of major American newspapers.1 Back then, before the New York Stock Exchange was surrounded by security barriers, when any passerby could walk right up to it, Yayoi Kusama staged a protest on the sidewalk outside, inviting the press to report an Anatomic Explosion on Wall Street. And cover it they did, as Kusama directed four professional dancers, two women and two men, accompanied by a conga drummer, to strip and frolic with Rite of Springlike abandon in front of the Stock Exchange, and on the plinth of the George Washington statue opposite, while the artist, clothed in a flowing frock and discreetly accompanied by her lawyer, spray-painted polka dots on their bodies.2 Cameras clicked away for several minutes until a lookout announced the imminent arrival of the cops. On a quiet Sunday morning in July, as witnessed by a clutch of tourists and parishioners of the nearby Trinity Church, Wall Street had been occupied. Alls Quiet on Stock Market, but Wall Street Bares Busy, announced the next days UPI story, which appeared in newspapers across the country on Monday
* This text is adapted from a chapter on Yayoi Kusamas peace politics in my forthcoming book, Sperm Bomb: Art, Feminism, and the American War in Vietnam. I wish to thank Shaun Vigil, my undergraduate research partner at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 201011, for assembling key materials; Midori Yamamura for generously sharing her research and her comprehensive knowledge of Kusamas work; and fellow Radcliffe fellow Nick Turse, author of Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, for uncovering traces of Kusamas protests in some unexpected places and for providing intellectual and moral encouragement to this project. 1. Yayoi Kusama, Naked Demonstration at Wall Street at 10.30 a.m. on Sunday October 13, 1968: The Anatomic Explosion, press release, repr. in Yayoi Kusama, ed. Laura Hoptman, Akira Tatehata, and Udo Kultermann (London: Phaidon, 2000), p. 107. This text is quoted from the second of two press releases for naked protests on Wall Street in 1968. The first of these took place on July 14. 2. Kusamas press release for the July 14, 1968, event identifies the dancers as Lynda Meyer, Ernie Blake, Paul Sanford, and Diane Bedford, and the musician as Daniel Barrajanos.

OCTOBER 142, Fall 2012, pp. 325. 2012 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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July 15, 1968.3 In some editions, Anatomic Explosion on Wall Street even ran above the fold, opposite the AP account of U.S. Defense Secretary Clark Cliffords first visit to Vietnam after taking over from later-disgraced war architect Robert McNamara. Clifford Gets Briefings During Visit was the main story of the day, a report on the confused state of the war in the aftermath of the Tet Offensive and Lyndon Johnsons dramatic announcement that he would not seek reelection. As usual, the above-the-fold photograph in most editions showed U.S. forces in the field bogged down in a war that was now finally exposed as hot.4 Anatomic Explosion on Wall Street was one of many political protests Kusama conducted around town with a changing cast of nude accomplices during the 1968 presidential campaign.5 In July, three days after the Wall Street event, her performers turned up at the Statue of Liberty, declaring, Liberty is all dressed up with no place to go.6 In September, they burned a Soviet flag near the United Nations to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia. 7 On the eve of voting in November, the group appeared at the New York City Board of Elections on Varick Street, wearing only oversized paper cutout masks of the candidatesHubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, and George Wallaceand urging the candidates to reveal the bare facts about themselves.8 On a chilly day a week later, Kusama and her entourage distributed copies of an open letter to the president-elect on Reade Street and lower Broadway as part of a postelection peace protest in the raw.9
3. See, for example, Alls Quiet on Stock Market but Wall Street Bares Busy, Ogden, Utah, Standard-Examiner, July 15, 1968, p. 1, and Barefoot in the Street, Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), July 15, 1968. In an even lighter vein, see Hugh Wyatt, Nudies Dance on Wall Street and Cops Dont Pinch Em, New York Daily News, July 15, 1968. 4. As Sven Lindqvist succinctly notes, The Tet Offensive was a political catastrophe for the Johnson administration, because they had lied for so long about the war. They had said there was no war. Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, trans. Linda Haverty Rugg (London: Granta, 2001), entry 336 (n. p.). 5. This was a year of upheaval, in which a presidential election was held even as the war in Vietnam escalated and the antiwar movement exploded. Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, trans. Ralph McCarthy (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), p. 121. 6. RAT-Subterranean News, in its July 26August 8, 1968, issue, published a double-page spread pairing Come, Kusama, Come! At the Statue of Libertine, a piece on the happening at the Statue of Liberty, with Hiroshima 1945, an interview with the mayor of Hiroshima on the anniversary of the atomic bombing. 7. Five Nude Protesters Dance, Burn Red Flag was the headline of the AP report in the Cedar Rapids Gazette on September 9, 1968, p. 20. It reported that Kusama, sponsor of the protest, held the flag while it was being burned. She was fully clothed. See also 4 Eves and an Adam Burn Commie Flag, New York Daily News, September 9, 1968. 8. 4 Bare All to Get at Naked Truth, Long Island Press, November 4, 1968. See also Bare Facts Presented in a Political Protest, New York Times, November 4, 1968. The event was widely reported in local newspapers, from the Niagara Falls Gazette to the Honolulu Advertiser. It also made the China Post (Taipei). 9. 4 in Nude Protest the War in Vietnam, New York Times, November 12, 1968, p. 35. This event was also reported by a host of local newspapers, their number, diversity, and geographical spread testifying to the culture of print journalism that has since withered. It is worth listing the roll call of newspapers as a reminder of what making the papers meant at the time: Plainfield Courier-News, Flint Journal, Alexandria Daily Town Talk, Lynchburg News, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, Nyack Journal News, Bergen Record, Woonsocket Call, Danbury News-Times, Riverside Enterprise, Tacoma News-Tribune, Grand Island

Yayoi Kusama. Anatomic Explosion on Wall Street. July 14, 1968. All photographs of works by Kusama courtesy of the artist.

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My name was in the tabloids day after day, magazines carried stories about me, and the public was fascinated by my activities and movements, the artist recalls. This said a lot about where peoples real interests lay and proved how starved they were for Love and Peace.10 Kusamas antiwar Happenings have tended to be dismissed as stunts, and the effect of that derisive reception has been prolonged neglect. In retrospect, it seems worth asking how any body of protest work that broke through to the front sections of American newspapers from the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Chicago Tribune to the Ogden, Utah, Standard-Examiner, Cedar Rapids Gazette, Idaho State Journal, and Santa Fe New Mexican, and that garnered stories in such a promiscuous array of publications as Vogue and The Village Voice, the East Village Other and Stars and Stripes, the conservative National Review Bulletin and the soft-porn magazines After Dark, Mr., and Ace, could be studiously ignored for so long.11 What distinguishes a legitimate protest from a stunt in the eyes of the political establishment, as the reception of the Occupy movement today attests, is a

Independent, Watertown Public Opinion, Duluth Herald, Baltimore Evening Sun, Mt. Vernon Argus, Grand Forks Herald, Sioux City Journal, Kearney Hub, Little Rock Gazette, Dyersbury State Gazette, Portland Express, Wenatchee World, Concord Monitor, Minot News, Baltimore Morning Sun, Richmond Times Dispatch, Trenton Times, Coca Today, Baton Rouge Advocate, Mesa Tribune, Racine Journal, Winchester Star, San Francisco Examiner, Newark Star Ledger, Texarkana News, Cannon City Record, Coos Bay World, Livingston Enterprise, Murray Democrat, Pocatello State Journal, Portales News-Tribune, Sterling Journal Advocate, Shreveport Journal, Salisbury Post, Rochester Times Union, Portland Press Herald, Bridgeport Post, Mamaroneck Times, New Rochelle Standard-Star, Lewiston Sun, Green Bay Press-Gazette, Hartford Courant, Newport News Press, Dallas Chronicle, Biddeford-Saco Journal, Bristol Press, Caledonian Record, Danville Bee, Fort Dodge Messenger & Chronicle, Hobbs News & Sun, Indianapolis News, Lewiston Journal, Mexico Ledger, Newport News Times-Herald, Perry Chief, Rochester Post Bulletin, Salisbury Times, Sedalia Democrat, Springfield News, Wausau Record Herald, Tampa Tribune, Youngstown Vindicator, Utica Press, Charlotte News, San Francisco Chronicle, Yuma Sun, Raleigh Times, Abilene Morning Reporter-News, New London Day, Norfolk News, Stamford Advocate, Hagerstown Mail, Rapid City Journal, La Crosse Tribune, Omaha Morning World Herald, Sedalia Capital, Poughkeepsie Journal, Thomasville Times Enterprise, Walla Walla Evening Union-Bulletin, Cambridge Banner, West Palm Beach Post, Batavia News, Camden News, Cape Girardeau SE Missourian, Douglas Dispatch, Edinburg Daily Review, Kilgore News Herald, Macon Chronicle Herald, Mt. Vernon Herald, Port Angeles News, Sacramento Bee, Wichita Falls Times, Yamika Herald, Walla Walla Morning Union Bulletin. For publication details, see Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective, ed. Bhupendra Karia (New York: Center for International Contemporary Arts, 1989), pp. 13031. 10. Kusama, Infinity Net, p. 139. 11. Alexandra Munroe estimates that Kusama staged at least seventy-five Happenings between 1967 and 1970. Munroe, Obsession, Fantasy and Outrage: The Art of Yayoi Kusama, in Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective, ed. Bhupendra Karia, p. 29. Laura Hoptman puts the number even higher. Hoptman, The Princess of the Polka Dot, Bazaar (March 1998), p. 388. These events have been selectively documented in a rich array of scholarly publications, in addition to Karias essential volume, including: Lynn Zelevansky, Laura Hoptman, Akira Tatehata, and Alexandra Munroe, Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 19581968 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1998); Paul Schimmel, ed., Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 19491979 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998); Laura Hoptman, Akira Tatehata, and Udo Kultermann, eds., Yayoi Kusama (London: Phaidon, 2000); and Frances Morris, ed., Yayoi Kusama (London: Tate Publishing, 2012). The absence of sustained critical interpretation of the political happenings, however, is in striking contrast to a burgeoning literature on Kusamas painting, drawing, sculpture, film, and installation work.

Anatomic Explosion

Kusama. Anatomic Explosion at the Board of Elections. November 3, 1968. Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah.

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political program. Kusama did not claim to offer, or even to support, a program. She opposed the American War in Vietnam, but her aspirations did not end with a U.S. withdrawal. My end is to end war, she explained to the Associated Press.12 Nor did Kusama conform to any existing model of how a so-called political artist should behave. She does not appear to have attended meetings, served on committees, or taken part in many official demonstrations, though she did break with her own protocol and strip with artist and Love-ticket mayoral candidate (and former presidential hopeful) Louis Albolafia at a Bust-Out Happening in Central Park in April 1969.13 If the protests she staged echoed any contemporary model of political activism, it was the publicity-seeking antics of the Yipees.14 For what Kusama did, and was sometimes roundly criticized for doing even by the left press, was to claim column inches for her protests.15 NAKED EVENT OUTSIDE THE STOCK EXCHANGE AT 11 A.M. ON SUNDAY, JULY 14, 1968 was the all-caps headline issued from 404 East 14th Street. Kusama invites you to this antiwar event to save our young men for LOVE and PEACE. Lets let the lost generation generate.16 The East Village Other duly published a two-page artist profile on the Polymorphous Polka Dot, describing Kusamas little hoo-rah in front of the Stock Exchange as a demonstration in favor of nudity.17 Such articles set the tone for future art-historical accounts of Kusamas protest work by contrasting her Infinity Net paintings, those vast and hypnotic webs of proliferating loops, and her Accumulations, found objects bristling with stuffed and painted fabric phalli, with the supposedly risible spectacle of nude antiwar Happenings, the overtly politicized extension of Kusamas foray into psychedelia and body painting. Further down-market, the man-zine After Dark published a suite of before, during, and after photographs of Anatomic Explosion on Wall Street unfolding as the dancers stripped, danced, dressed, and evaded arrest by casually assuming the demeanor of innocent bystanders.18 Meanwhile, the
12. Associated Press, People in the News, Idaho State Journal, November 12, 1968. 13. The conservative National Review Bulletin reported in its On the Left column that Love candidate for Mayor, Louis Abolafia, and his occasional partner for protest-stripping, Yayoi Kusama, appeared before a crowd of 4,000 at Sheep Meadow to inaugurate the campaign. On the Left, National Review Bulletin 21, no. 16 (April 29, 1969), p. B58. Or, as Kusama put it, she and Abolafia, who had earlier waged a write-in campaign for president as the nudist candidate, conducted a Happening to kick off our campaign for mayor of New York City on the Love and Nudity platform. Kusama, Infinity Net, p. 139. 14. Abbie Hoffman conducted a guerrilla action at the Stock Exchange in 1967. While on a tour, he and fifteen accomplices hurled dollar bills from the public balcony onto the trading floor. See Abbie Hoffman, The Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1980), pp. 1002. 15. The Village Voice, for example, wrote this of Kusamas 1968 Homosexual Wedding Happening: Kusama, whose gross lust for publicity never leaves room for taste, managed to put on the years most boring freak show for members of the press this week. . . . Kusama is definitely suffering from overexposure of overexposure. Village Voice, November 28, 1968. Quoted in Munroe, Obsession, Fantasy, and Outrage, p. 30. 16. Kusama, press release, Naked Event Outside the Stock Exchange at 11 A.M. on Sunday, July 14, 1968. 17. D.A. Latimer, Polymorphous Polkadot, The East Village Other ( July 26, 1968). 18. The New York Scene, After Dark, August 1968, p. 6.

Anatomic Explosion

correspondent for Ace, another long-forgotten mens title of the day, supplies one of historys more detailed accounts of Kusamas protest at the United Nations on September 8, 1968: Originally, Kusama and her entourage arrived at the northeast garden of the UN at First Avenue and 47th Street, where they had hoped to stage their ban-the-bomb ballet. UN guards had other ideas. . . . Not to be suppressed, though thwarted momentarily, the troupe trooped down to 42nd Street and First Avenue on instructions from their lawyer, Robert Cahn. At approximately 11.30 a.m., they started doing their thing while more than fifty dumbfounded passersby stopped passing by to gawk.19 By the fall of 1968, Kusamas underground disturbances had attracted stories in the likes of Vogue, which reported, In the last few months, anatomic explosions have been taking place on the sidewalks of New York. Following an exact pattern, they happen quickly, unexpectedly, and invariably in front of famous public buildings and monuments.20 To the extent that critical writing on Kusama has taken account of these events, it has mirrored the fashion and pornographic press in portraying them as cunning capers. If anything, mens magazines outpaced other cultural reporting in the pursuit of information, offering up more details than Vogue or the East Village Other about Kusamas tactics, explaining how she tipped her hand to trusted reporters and photographers, revealing the role played by her lawyer, Robert Cahn, and providing comments from participants, spectators, and a patrolman, one Patrick Page of the East 51st Street Station.21 Kusama, for her part, welcomed coverage in the pornographic press, apparently regarding its readership as a key target audience for antiwar work. Convinced that the suppression of sex . . . is an underlying force that pushes people towards war, she elicited extended feature articles that, in contrast to the cheesy imagery and tired story lines of the magazines usual editorial content, portrayed the exploits of Kookie Kusama and her nude protesters as daring avant-garde gestures of sexual liberation. Not content to infiltrate pornographic magazines, she even lent her image to a rival publication, Kusama Orgy, a weekly newspaper of Nudity, Love, Sex, and Beauty, designed for newsstand distribution alongside the lads mags.22 Committed to the sexual liberation of the American people as an integral part of the antiwar movement, Kusama mixed sex and politics as freely as the establishment she was attempting to reach.23
19. John Stange, Kookie Kusama: Fun Citys New Nude Goddess of Free Love, Ace: The Magazine for Men of Distinction 11, no. 5 (March 1969), p. 21. 20. John Gruen, Vogues Spotlight: The Underground/Anatomic Explosions, Polka Dots for Love, Vogue (October 1968), p. 17. 21. Stange, Kookie Kusama, p. 21. See also Neal Weaver, The Polka Dot Girl Strikes Again, or Kusamas Infamous Spectacular, After Dark (May 1968). 22. In 1969, Kusama entered into an exclusive agreement with Enterprise Modern Services, Inc., to publish a tabloid newspaper under her name. My thanks to Midori Yamamura for this information. 23. Kusama, Infinity Net, p. 135. As she also notes, It was widely believed that only hippies attended my [sex] parties, but in fact the majority of participants were businessmen (ibid.).

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Popular magazines discounted the antiwar politics of Kusamas protest pieces, preferring to privilege themes of anti-authoritarianism, freedom of expression, social transgression, libertinism, and bohemian larking. The matter of the war in Vietnam, even in Kusamas distinctive evocation, lacked commercial appeal. Newspapers, too, treated the protests as art-scene anticsat first. Headlined 4 Dance Naked, Get Paint Job on Street, the Chicago Tribunes article on the protest at the Stock Exchange opted for a salacious pun, reporting the event, on page three, as an art Happening and omitting any mention of its antiwar politics.24 The Ogden Standard-Examiners front-page story from UPI was merry, reporting that Yayoi Kusama, a psychedelic painter and sunbathing enthusiast, accompanied by

four young, supple hippiestwo boys and two girls (the bares), had performed in front of fifteen tourists and the statue of George Washington.25 There was no hint of Kusamas antiwar aims, but the headline Alls Quiet on the Stock Market, with its conspicuous echo of Eric Maria Remarques Alls Quiet on the Western Front (1929), did bring an allusion to the futility of war into conjunction with the days lead story, the troubling Vietnam report. And so, at a time when the public was absorbing the revelation that American forces were bogged down in Vietnam, and that the political and military establishment had manipulated newspapers by planting rose-tinted war stories in them for years, Kusamas protests bloomed on front pages almost as a return of the repressed. Without the editorial content of wire-service stories even bothering to acknowledge her antiwar stance, Kusamas social demonstrations began to shadow the war news.26 A moral fable, the received history of Kusamas protest works runs something like this. Following the succs de scandale of her Narcissus Garden at the Venice

24. 4 Dance Naked, Get Paint Job on Street, Chicago Tribune, July 15, 1968. 25. Alls Quiet on Stock Market, but Wall Street Bares Busy, Ogden Standard-Examiner, Ogden, Utah, July 15, 1968, p. 1. 26. Kusamas performances had acquired a presence in the war news even before she began dedicating them explicitly to an antiwar politics. In September 1967, Stars and Stripes, for example, had illustrated her body-painting Happening in Provincetown alongside a story headlined More Combat Troops for Vietnam. Stars and Stripes, September 7, 1967, p. 5.

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Biennale in 1966in which the artist blanketed the lawn of the Italian pavilion with 1,500 plastic mirror balls, offering these for purchase under the slogan Your Narcissism for Sale to any passerby for the price of two dollarsKusamas thirst for fame drove her to abandon painting and sculpture and embrace fashion, body painting, Happenings, and film. She conducted body-painting festivals and orgies; produced a prize-winning psychedelic film, Self-Obliteration , with Jud Yalkut; designed a line of peek-a-boo-polka-dot clothing; attempted to smuggle her naked Happenings onto television programs in New York and the Netherlands; and amassed volumes of press clippingsall with the aim of promoting her own

Ogden Standard-Examiner. July 15, 1968.

image.27 She became, in the process, an art star to rival Andy Warhol.28 Then, Icarus-like, her fame turned to ashes. Having sold out and burnt out, she broke down, clocked out, and finally checked herself in, returning to Japan and taking up residence in a psychiatric facility, only to have her reputation eventually rehabilitated, now Phoenix-like, by a triumphant reappearance at the Venice Biennale in 1993. Kusamas belated return to the critical fold came at a cost. Even her most sympathetic interpreters dismissed the protest works, counting them as part of the artists official oeuvre only by way of explaining her earlier banishment. Kusama
27. Self-Obliteration, made in the summer of 1967, incorporates footage from the artists body-painting festivals and Happenings. The film won prizes at the Fourth International Experimental Film Competition at Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the Second Maryland Film Festival. In a contemporary conversation with Yalkut, Kusama described a body-painting event in Delft that was shown on Dutch television. Jud Yalkut, The Polka Dot Way of Life (Conversation with Yayoi Kusama), New York Free Press 1, no. 8 (February 15, 1968), pp. 89. In 1968, Kusama attempted to stage a naked happening for New York television as part of an appearance on the Alan Burke show. The tape was never aired. On this episode, see Far-Out Fashions, Mr. 13, no. 8 ( July 1969), p. 61. 28. According to Munroe, Kusama actively competed with Warhol for the most press coverage. Munroe, Obsession, Fantasy and Outrage, p. 30. The Warhol comparison became a perennial of the Kusama literature after her critical recuperation in the early 1990s. By 1968, Kusama was as famous as it gets. It is alleged that she received more mentions in the New York press than even Andy Warhol. Andrew Solomon, Dot Dot Dot, Artforum (February 1997), p. 100.

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called her performances during this period social demonstrations, a leading account acknowledges, but their thin veneer of progressive political rhetoric did not disguise the fact that their true agenda was Kusamas symbolic philosophy with polka dots.29 Such scolding is a ritual recitation in the Kusama literature. Still, it is curious. An artist who has attained critical acclaim as a painter, attracted a prominent New York dealer, and begun to sell, who then abruptly abandons painting, parts company with her dealer, and takes to producing nude Happenings in public places to protest war, might indeed be on a path toward self-obliteration, but in what sense is her conduct opportunistic?30 Yet it is the consensus of leading scholars on Kusamas work that her antiwar protests were occasions to advance a quest for personal fame. The more generous concede that the protests arose from a profound loathing for war, chalking up their perceived excesses to the artists self- confessed emot ional fragilit y: As in some massive cathart ic r ite, the Happenings exorcised her lifelong fear of repression. Her ambition, which had been denied as a child, was now prohibited nothing. . . . Outlandish fashion, radical politics, sex and drugs were all acceptable, even encouraged.31 Kusama offers a simpler explanation. Publicity is critical to my work because it offers the best way of communicating with large numbers of people, she explained, suggesting that avant-garde artists should use mass communication as traditional painters use paints and brushes. 32 Calling her protests Press Happenings, Kusama claimed to stage them exclusively for the benefit of the press.33 Think of it like this. Kusama was a protest artist from the start. In protest, she left Japan, turning her back on a country she deemed too small, too servile, too feudalistic, and too scornful of women.34 Arriving in New York in 1958, she embraced the ambition of large-scale all-over painting, only to invert its affective economy from one of expressive plenitude to one of cultural exhaustion. She described the marathon sessions during which she painted her capacious Infinity Nets as like being carried on a conveyor belt without ending to my death.35 This cool response to the clichd rhetoric of action, dismissing it as a false myth of masculine creative agency in the margins of a culture of conformity and automation,
29. Laura Hoptman, Yayoi Kusama: A Reckoning, in Yayoi Kusama, p. 67. 30. An exhibition of five large-scale Infinity Nets at the small Tenth Street cooperative Brata Gallery in 1959, reviewed by Dore Ashton and Donald Judd, was followed in 1961 by a solo show of Infinity Nets at Stephen Radichs uptown space. As Frances Morris has noted, Radich and Kusama broke over her shift from painting to the phalli-covered Accumulations and immersive installations. Frances Morris, lecture, the Japan Foundation, London, May 24, 2012. 31. Munroe, Obsession, Fantasy and Outrage, p. 30. 32. Kusama, quoted in ibid. 33. Kusama, quoted in Nakamaru Kaoru, Kusama Yayoi ha naze Ny y ku de nuguka [Why does Yayoi Kusama strip in New York?], Sh kan Post [Weekly Post], September 12, 1969, p. 59. I am grateful to Midori Yamamura for this translation. 34. Kusama, Infinity Net, p. 93. 35. Kusama, quoted in Jud Yalkut , The Polka-Dot Way of Life (Conver sat ion with Yayoi Kusama), p. 8.

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also attested to the consumer cultures hypnotic power, to the morbid appeal of being carried on a conveyor belt without end to ones death. Through slavish dedication to the task, she protested as phony the individualist aesthetics of gestural excess, generating a body of painting defined by a characteristically mundane visual field.36 And no sooner had the Infinity Nets achieved critical acclaim than she abandoned this mode in favor of Accumulations, phalli-studded articles of sex-obsessional furniture and clothing arranged in dense tableaux, and kaleidoscopic chambers, or Infinity Mirror Rooms, offered up in parody of the pervasive phallic hyperbole of the atomic consumer age. Manic overproduction, frenetic erotomania, hallucinogenic alternative realities: these were gestures of protest awaiting the arrival of a counterculture.37 Far from a display of naked ambition in the careerist mode, Kusamas antiwar protests verged on career suicide. To that extent, the charge of madness is fitting: it would have been crazy to sacrifice her success to her politics if her politics were a sham. But what if art history is looking at her meteoric career through the wrong end of the telescope? What if this artistborn in Japan in 1929, who witnessed the ravages of economic depression, totalitarian militarism, and all-out war (starvation, deprivation, forced labor, aerial bombardment, atomic apocalypse, and military occupation)actually did feel compelled to voice a moral objection to the relentless carpet bombing of Vietnam? The New York Times, at least, seemed to credit the idea that Kusamas protests were the genuine article. A week after the 1968 presidential election, it reported: Four persons stripped off their clothes on Reade Street near Lower Broadway yesterday and handed out copies of an open letter to President-elect Richard M. Nixon that said that anatomic explosions are better than atomic explosions. The naked protesters, three men and a woman, stood on the sidewalk for 15 minutes and were daubed with body paints by a woman who identified herself as Yayoi Kusama, a 28-year-old Japanese artist of 664 Avenue of the Americas. As a crowd of 150 people watched, Miss Kusama urged peace in Vietnam. The short Times piece, under the headline 4 in Nude Protest the War in Vietnam, was a straight news story on page thirty-five, clearly identifying the purpose of the event as an antiwar protest.38 Granted, a consequence of serious reporting of the protests was exile to more obscure regions of the paper, but the story also suggests that Kusamas gambit was paying off: by inventing a captivating persona and cultivating a press following, she had set the scene for more explicit political speech. Coverage of her demonstrations had migrated from the underground press to the tabloids to the hard news pages of national newspapers. Her Happenings were accruing credibility in the broadsheets even as the artist was losing favor in the art press.
36. Kusama, Infinity Net, p. 26. 37. For an extended discussion of Kusamas Infinity Nets and Accumulations as integral to a body of protest art, see my Infinity Politics, in Yayoi Kusama, ed. Frances Morris, pp. 17785. 38. 4 in Nude Protest the War in Vietnam, New York Times, November 12, 1968, p. 35.

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The Times story also yields a clue as to why critics might have underestimated the significance of Kusamas antiwar protests. In 1968, the artist was not twentyeight, as she told the Times. She was thirty-nine. When the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, she was not a child of five but a war survivor of sixteen. I was born the year the stock market crashed, the artist acknowledged on another occasion.39 The global economic depression of the 1930s devastated the silk industry of Japan, centered in Nagano Prefecture, the remote mountain province where Kusama was born. There, as an adolescent artist living under an authoritarian regime in an all-out war, she was conscripted for labor in a textile factory converted to the production of fabric for military uniforms and parachutes.40 Of the moment in November 1944 when U.S. bombers, flying in broad daylight, reached the mainland of Japan, she recalls, I could barely feel my life.41 Two dozen Novembers later, in lower Manhattan, Kusama was protesting the escalating U.S. bombing of Vietnam, an aerial war that relied for its lethal efficiency on American naval bases in Japan.42 Cutting a youthful and glamorous figure, and proclaiming herself a high priestess of love, she zealously promoted the sexual revolution, summoning Eros, not Thanatos, in the name of peace. Art history detects vanity in this self-fashioning, but that misses the feint. For what Kusama was concealing with her extravagant self-exposure was her own history as a survivor of war. By protesting the war in Vietnam as a youthful denizen of New Yorks bohemia, she adopted a political position inside, not outside, the culture responsible for the war. Her spirited protests shunned the role of war victim, and so avoided arousing the guilt and distrust that any evocation of atomic attacks on Japan might still have summoned. So successful was Kusama in blending into the scene that even in retrospect few historians detected the irony of her performances: that by divesting herself of the moral authority to oppose war as its historical victim, she dramatized the possibility of assuming individual responsibility for war in the present. Writing in 1966 in response to the Cold War nuclear threat, the Italian psychoanalyst Franco Fornari declared that the prevention of war depends upon the urgent necessity of returning to the subject.43 The perception that the state forces us to make war, Fornari maintained, leads even opponents of war to avoid

39. Quoted in Midori Yamamura, Rising from Totalitarianism: Yayoi Kusama 19451955, in Yayoi Kusama , ed. Frances Morris, p. 170. The source is a 1988 interview with Bhupendra Karia and Alexandra Munroe. 40. See Yamamura, Rising from Totalitarianism, p. 170. 41. Quoted in ibid. 42. The free access of U.S. forces to naval bases in Japan for the bombing of Vietnam was a consequence of the postwar Japan-U.S. Joint Security Treaty (ANPO). Opposition to ANPO in Japan increased with the escalation of the war in Vietnam, galvanizing an antiwar movement of artists and students. 43. Franco Fornari, The Psychoanalysis of War (1966), trans. Alenka Pfeifer (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1974), p. 176.

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the possibility that war arises from our own desire.44 We convince ourselves that the state is responsible for war in order not to feel responsible for it ourselves, Fornari concluded.45 Attributing the destructiveness of war to the alienated aggressiveness of the individual, he claimed that the institution of war is the formal consolidation of the destructiveness we each disown, that by disavowing our personal destructiveness and turning it over to the state, we create the political and psychical condition of alienation in the state. To escape from our alienation in the state, therefore, means to feel personally responsible for warto reclaim our destructiveness by tracing the war phenomenon to the unconscious.46 Kusamas idiosyncratic performances envisioned an escape from the political and psychic condition of alienation in the state by pursuing the trends of unconscious fantasy. Rather than perpetuate the idea that the state makes us make war, and that to oppose war therefore is to defy the state, the artist proposed a more speculative mode of political resistance to war, one that asked, in effect: what makes us make the state make us make war? It is we ourselves who desire war, Fornari declared.47 Employing libidinal rather than militant gestures of resistance, Kusamas protests opened antiwar politics to questions of desire. Her nude performers claimed their freedom in democratic space but also embodied the vulnerability that public self-exposure exacts. If putting the body on the line was a precept of antiwar protesters determined to display the physical courage of soldiers in defying state authority, Kusama and her performers, too, chanced arrest, but hardly courted it.48 Their brazen displays of nudity all but mocked the bravado of militancy. Risking ridicule over violence, they exposed themselves to the derision that any attempt to introduce desire into war discourse inevitably invites. Disarmingly playful in contrast to the martial masquerade of militancy, these pseudo-political Happenings, as one newspaper described them, used ludic tactics to dramatize the absurdity of warand the ridiculous lengths to which war protest must go to attract the attention of newspapers.49 Crashing the papers day after day, Kusama made a virtue of scorn, taking her own derisive reception as an occasion to ask: what makes us lovers of war?50
44. Ibid., p. 199. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., pp. 199, xxiii. 47. Ibid., p. 199. 48. Striking on Sunday mornings accompanied by a lawyer and with press in attendance, Kusama took extraordinary measures to avoid confrontation with authorities. It was not an easy task to promote this sort of movement among people who had been tormented with repression and sexual bigotry all their lives, she has observed. Most daunting was the stubborn police oppression. Kusama, Infinity Net, p. 139. Kusama was arrested only once, at the second Anatomic Explosion on Wall Street, staged near the Trinity Church: I had always managed to escape being taken into police custody, but I directed so many of these performances in New York that eventually I was arrested there. Ibid, p. 116. 49. 4 Bare All to Get at Naked Truth, Long Island Press, November 4, 1968. 50. In her classic essay on the prevention of war, Virginia Woolf advised women to embrace derision as a mark of freedom from the social conformity that militarism exemplifies. Woolf, Three Guineas (1938), in A Room of Ones Own/Three Guineas, ed. Michle Barrett (London: Penguin Books, 1993), pp. 203205.

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Fornaris call for a return to the subject, and more specifically to the subject of the unconscious, carries political import, confronting the totem of irrationality that blocks opposition to war as a realistic political demand. For if war is our mad destiny, then calling for an end to war is mad; but if war is the cultural expression of our unconscious fears, then working for an end to war is a process of cultural analysis in which art might have a role to play: for example, by helping to reveal what is at stake in our attachment to war. But of course, to many people, including many critics of war, the idea of assuming individual responsibility for war, particularly at the level of the unconscious, seems quixotic, even ludicrous. I recognize that this thesis may be understood, Fornari himself conceded, as a mystical thesisspecifically on the grounds that it does not properly show the importance of the realistic motives for war.51 This objection, he insisted, ignores the unconscious motives for war. War is an essential social institution, the psychoanalyst contended, not because it is realistic for groups to engage in orchestrated violence, but because war serves a profound social purpose, namely, to export the problems of the inner world to the outer world.52 It is easy for certain political operators to present war as a dramatic but definitely desirable event, he explained, because war projects paranoid anxiety onto an external enemy we can fight.53 So war is not mad after all, but a solution to our madness. Without war, we would have all our madness to ourselves, and be destroyed by it. With war, we export our madness and aim to destroy others. Fornari expressed this logic in economic terms: we deposit our individual violence into the state, as into a bank.54 Needless to say, the consequences of this investment are horrifying to calculate. As Freud pointed out some time ago, in response to the carnage of the First World War, we are all very bad, but our individual evils do not begin to rival those of the state, which forbids certain crimes of violence, not because it desires to abolish [violence], but because it desires to monopolize it.55 Capable of anything, stopping at nothing, the belligerent state is, Freud suggested, a juggernaut of destructiveness beyond the capacity of any reasoned argument to constrain. Yet Fornari believed he had found a compelling argument for peace: the pantoclastic prospect of nuclear annihilation. Faced with the concrete possibility of nuclear war, in which it is realistic to suppose that the destruction of the enemy will result in the annihilation of ourselves and all that we love, Fornari reasoned, the individual might be motivated
51. Fornari, The Psychoanalysis of War, p. xxiii. 52. The exportation of the problems of the inner world into the outer world is the function of the war institution, Fornari maintains, calling war a strange import-export agency of destruction (ibid., pp. xxvixxvii). 53. Fornari, The Psychoanalysis of War, p. xxvi. 54. Ibid., xxviii. It seems that we can no longer cure our madness with war, Fornari also observes (italics in original, p. xix). 55. Sigmund Freud, Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (1915), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957/1981), p. 288.

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to withdraw the destructiveness that she or he has on deposit with the state. This appears to be the only path, Fornari claimed, if the state is to be liberated from the accumulation of private violence which it has monopolized, capitalized, and finally increased to nuclear proportions.56 The growing destructive intensity of war having reached its zenith in the nuclear age, war might be precipitated into a state of crisis, Fornari predicted. Herein lies our hope.57 This is the hope that animated Kusamas protest s. Her proposit ion Anatomic explosions are better that atomic explosions clearly alluded to the pantoclastic prospect of planetary annihilationthe world dissolved into polka dots, each of us pulverized into a speck of dustas a hopeful argument against war. Forget yourself and become one with Nature. Lose yourself in the everadvancing stream of eternity. Self-obliteration is the only way out, the press release for the Anatomic Explosion at the Stock Exchange advised. This may sound like hippie talk, but there is a sinister side to it: Kusama will cover your body with polka dots, help you become part of the unity of the universeor you may be united with your inner polka dot by other means. Kusamas idiosyncratic performances freely acknowledged the cultural attitude that assuming individual responsibility for war is a fools errand, playing up that response the better to take it on, but also to ask where folly truly lies in the postatomic age of war. Her self-identification to the New York Times as a Japanese artist underscored the realistic dimension of the assertion that anatomic explosions are better than atomic explosions. Without any explicit reference to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, her public appeal for peace to a newly elected U.S. president invoked the threat of self-annihilation as an argument for restraint. Lets forget ourselves, dearest Richard, and become one with the Absolute, all together in the altogether, she implored Nixon in an open love letter that might count as one of the most improbable statements of antiwar protest of the Vietnam era.58 Mingling the contemporary patois of cosmic love with the doomsday scenario that was its persistent psychic corollary, she cajoled him with a fantasy of self-obliteration Kusama style, in which we forget ourselves in love rather than destroy ourselves in war. As if somehow already attuned to Nixons private madness, this siren song of peace also anticipated one of the more bizarre episodes in his prosecution of the war. I call it the Madman Theory, Bob, the president is said to have confided to his aide Bob Haldeman. I want the North Vietnamese to believe Ive reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. Well just slip the word to them that for Gods sake, you know, Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We cant restrain him when hes angryand he has his hand on the nuclear button.59 Fornari had imagined that the realistic
56. Fornari, The Psychoanalysis of War, p. xxviii. 57. Ibid., p. xxix. 58. Kusama, An Open Letter to My Hero, Richard M. Nixon (1968), reprinted in Yayoi Kusama, ed. Laura Hoptman, Akira Tatehata, and Udo Kultermann, p. 106. 59. H.R. Haldeman, quoted in Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008), p. 419.

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threat of nuclear annihilation would finally render war untenable. He did not anticipate that even the pantoclastic prospect could devolve into farce. Maybe he skipped Dr. Strangelove (1964). Maybe Kusama took it in. Imagine, if you will, a series of orgies dedicated to the eras war presidents. In parallel to her public peace protests, Kusama conducted politically themed Happenings and performances in her studio, among them her darkly comic presidential orgies. Burlesque tableaux of war camp, the orgies featured Kusama Dancer s enact ing ob- scene r ites celebrated offst age from t he press Happeningsto dramatize the degradation into which successive administrations had dragged the country. Planted on the studio floor and supplied with a smoke, a rubber-masked effigy of LBJ was subjected to the gruesome practice of GIs in country of stuffing the mouth of a trophy head with a cigarette. In Nixon Orgy, the president was represented by a popular poster showing him in American Gothic mode bearing a pitchfork (an icon that was also on display in the Anatomic Explosion at the Board of Election). It is a truism of modern warfare that war is an orgy of violence, an occasion for acts to be performed by the group that are prohibited to the individual. The hyperbolic violence of war, like the excesses of the totemic feast, testify to the primacy of the law that is being transgressed: The collective action is the necessary condition for the criminal orgy to be carried out with impunity, as Fornari explains.60 Kusamas presidential orgies burlesque the criminal orgy of a war carried out with impunity under the cover of democracy, by men in drag, wearing the flag on their sleeves, screwing us all, friend and foe alike. The naked participants, their antics extensively memorialized in studio photographs, sprawl on the Stars and Stripes or sport it, mug, and pleasure one another. Hats are produced. And plastic rifles. Promiscuously intermingling stars and stripes with polka dots, guns with groins, and dicks with Dicks, the presidential orgies are in kitschy-campy contrast to the public displays of youthful nudity in the landmark Anatomic Explosions, events deemed innocent enough to be gaily reported in newspapers from coast to coast.61 Those protests took place on democracys hallowed ground. Demonstrations at the Statue of Liberty, the United Nations, even the dilapidated Board of Elections, used the protesters own nudity as a strategy to expose the hypocrisy of a war promulgated on the false pretext of promoting democracy in Vietnam. Among these civic monuments was Wall Street itself, the site of the New York Stock Exchange but also of Federal Hall, marking the spot where George Washington took the oath of office in 1789, an event commemorated by an imposing bronze statue mounted on the steep steps tourists climb to have their photographs taken at the feet of the founding father, his arm extended in perpetual blessing of pilgrims, his wary gaze permanently trained on the Stock Exchange across the way. Accounts of Kusamas Anatomic Explosion on Wall Street often con60. Fornari, The Psychoanalysis of War, p. 81. 61. The most useful published account of the orgies remains Alexandra Munroes Obsession, Fantasy, and Outrage, p. 20.

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Top: Kusama. Johnson Orgy. 1968. Bottom: Kusama. Nixon Orgy. 1969.

flate these two adjacent sites, the original seat of the postrevolutionary democratic government and the neoclassical capitol of capital, a confusion that only compounds the irony of an intersection no visitor could fail to remark. On July 14, 1968, Bastille Day of the banner year of the international youth movement, a paean to revolution unfolded on the sidewalk in front of the Stock Exchange as four dancers stepped out of their clothes, obeying Kusamas edict to let the pants fall where they may. Sans culottes, like their French revolutionary forbears, the band also mounted the base of the Washington statue.62 Following in the footsteps of countless sightseers on patriots tours of Revolutionary Warera New York, Kusamas protesters were not only paying their respect s to the past but also reviving it s Enlightenment spirit, breathing new life into libert y. Gyrat ing on the base of the Washington statue, converting the ceremonial plinth into a stage, they enlivened that venerable monument with the vitalistic political energy of the generation of 68.63 The Washington statue at Federal Hall styles the former revolutionary general in a sweeping cape redolent of his military success, beneath which the breeches, vest, and ruffled cuffs of the Enlightenment gentleman testify to his subsequent transformation into a democratic political leader. Divested of military regalia or conspicuous symbols of

62. The sans-culottes were the working-class radicals of the revolution of 1792 to 1794. They called for the abolition of the aristocracy and the monarchy and for social equality, direct democracy, and taxation of the rich. Adopting the trousers of the worker in contrast to the breeches of the aristocrat, they argued that class distinction should not be perpetuated by fashion. Kusamas rhetoric of abolism, including the abolition of clothes as a symbol of class difference, and her demand for tax and economic reform, echoes the demands of the sans-culottes. 63. Summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1967 to answer for his role in organizing demonstrations against the American war in Vietnam, Jerry Rubin appeared dressed in the costume of a Revolutionary War soldier and distributed copies of the Declaration of Independence.

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Kusama. Anatomic Explosion on Wall Street. July 14, 1968.

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high office, the first president of the republic is presented with the relative simplicity cultivated by the revolutionaries of 1776. The American Revolution, as every schoolchild learns, was an insurgency waged against a colonial power for the right to political self-determination. As the rare schoolchild is told, it was this foundational struggle for liberation from colonial oppression that led Ho Chi Minh to hope, in the aftermath of the Second World War, that the United States would lend its support to Vietnams struggle for liberation from colonial France.64 Instead, U.S. forces became the successors to the French, supplanting them as occupiers while the American government exploited the accumulated riches of an advanced military and economic power to destroy a people its own liberatory history had inspired. Dancing at the feet of Washington on Wall Street, now the seat of the vast imperial treasure being invested in a counterrevolutionary foreign expedition of mass killing, Kusamas demonstration bore witness to this supreme historical irony. Shes getting angrier, my friend Nick Turse observes, leafing through a stack of Kusamas press releases.65 In July 1968, the announcement of Anatomic Explosion on Wall Street had called for the abolition of clothes, cars, television, guns, atomic bombs, and Wall Street, under the rubric of abolism. Lets let the lost generation generate, Kusama proposed. Forget yourself, Lose yourself, and Let the pants fall where they may were the imperatives of that season. By October, when she called for a second naked demonstrat ion at the Stock Exchange, her tone had hardened into the rhetoric of a no-nonsense sans-culotte: STOCK IS A FRAUD! STOCK MEANS NOTHING TO THE WORKING MAN. STOCK IS A LOT OF CAPITALIST BULL SHIT. We want to stop this game. The money made with this stock is enabling the war to continue. We protest this cruel, greedy instrument of the war establishment. STOCK IS FOR BURNING. STOCK IS FOR BURNING. STOCK MUST BE BURNED! Dont pay taxes. . . .
64. On September 2, 1945, following the Japanese surrender, Ho Chi Minh addressed a crowd of half a million people in Hanoi, quoting the Declaration of Independence and expressing his conviction that the Allied nations would not refuse to acknowledge the independence of Vietnam from French colonial oppression. Mar ilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 19451990 (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991), pp. 1013. 65. Conversation with author, June 2, 2011.

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Wall Street men must become farmers and fishermen. Wall Street men must stop all of this fake business. OBLITERATE WALL STREET MEN WITH POLKA DOTS. OBLITERATE WALL STREET MEN WITH POLKA DOTS ON THEIR NAKED BODIES. BE IN . . . BE NAKED, NAKED, NAKED. And so she was nicked. Kusamas sole arrest occurred at the second Anatomic Explosion on Wall Street, conducted near Trinity Church, three weeks before the 1968 president ial elect ion. This t ime, she explicit ly called the event an antiVietnam War demonstration. This time, the artist herself appeared nude, hair and skin stickered with polka dots. In the crowd were armband-wearing demonstrators, but also men in suits, shown in photographs crowding closely around her, one picking at the polka dot pasted onto his lapel like a campaign sticker, another jabbing his finger at the artist, as if addressing a political candidate on the stump. Her detention was brief. She emerged defiant: While I was in the holding cell, a patrolman came by with an elevator boya friend of his, apparentlyand said, Kusama, get up! My buddy here wants to shake your hand.66 We invest our private violence in the state as in a bank, where it is monopolized, capit alized, and finally increased to nuclear proport ions, Fornar i maintained. He hoped that the threat of nuclear war would galvanize a process of political change through which the state would, over time, become subject to the same laws of individual ethics as its citizens. In this, he failed to anticipate the phenomenon of so-called limited war, in which the great powers proved themselves capable of evading the pantoclastic prospect through proxy wars while continuing to invoke nuclear annihilation as an ultimate threat.67 The American War in Vietnam was such a war, and it amply demonstrated the persistence of the war phenomenon, as Fornari called it, into the nuclear age. Still, his contention that war is impeded if we each withdraw our individual share of violence from the state was borne out when opponents of the war in Vietnam did just that. Effecting, precisely, a return to the subject, the antiwar movement translated an appeal to individual conscience into specific modes of resistanceincluding draft dodging,
66. Kusama, Infinity Net, p. 116. 67. For an account of limited war as a retro military doctrine for the nuclear age, see George C. Herring, LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War (Austin: University of Texas, 1994). He writes: The exigencies of the nuclear age brought a revival of limited war in the mid-twentieth century. . . . With nothing but nuclear weapons as a deterrent, the United States in responding to Communist challenges in marginal areas would face the unthinkable choice of nuclear war or acquiescence. . . . The objective would be not to destroy opponents but to persuade them to break off the conflict short of achieving their goals and without resorting to nuclear war (p. 4).

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draft counseling, draft-card burning, and combat refusaldevised to help liberate the state, in Fornaris terms, from its stockpile of private violence. But, as the war in Vietnam revealed, our private violence is invested not only in the state. It is also invested in Wall Street. In Vietnam times, consumers and investors were already capitalizing state violence through an extensive network of corporate contracts that consolidated and expanded militarization.68 Napalm, Agent Orange, and cluster bombs all returned generous profits for American corporations and their investors. What is more, these industrial innovations, used to flay and shred the skin of women, men, and children, even poisoning them before they could be born, were also engineered to economize on the expenditure of individual violence. Dropped from planes on civilian populations, these anti-personnel weapons spared the skins
68. The militarization of everyday life through consumerism from the era of the American war in Vietnam until today is outlined in detail in Nick Turse, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (London: Faber and Faber, 2008). As he observes: The high level of military-civilian interpenetration in a heavily consumer-driven society means that almost every American (aside, perhaps, from a few determined anarcho-primitivists) is, at least passively, supporting the Complex every time he or she shops for groceries, sends a package, drives a car, or watches TV (p. 18).

Kusama. Anatomic Explosion on Wall Street. October 13, 1968.

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New York Daily News. August 25, 1969.

of perpetrators.69 As opposition to the war in Vietnam increased, and willing conscripts were in diminishing supply, the use of aerial warfare intensified, with devastating effects for the civilian populations of Indochina, and with dramatic benefits to American corporations. As the reliance on elite aerial weapons in Americas drone wars today attests, Wall Street provides the model for the psychic economy of a mode of war in which, as Kusamas protest-performances anticipated, our private violence is converted into esoteric forms of exported destructiveness we cannot be expected to apprehend, much less control. For Fornari, the state was a protector turned persecutor. It acquired all of our violence in the name of marshalling and exporting our fears, then turned against us and exploited our fearful violence for its own destructive ends, or to
69. Sven Lindqvist writes: Napalm was popular with the military because . . . it could combine area characteristics with high incapacitating power.. . . Good area characteristics means that the pilot can fly higher and faster, thus running less risk of being shot downand still destroy his target. Of course, everything else is also destroyed and unavoidably and even deliberately greater harm will be done to the civilian than to the military sector of society. The risk is passed off to the people on the ground. The pilot and his crew save their own skins. Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, entries 344 and 345 (n.p.).

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end the world. As a solution, he dreamed of the gradual dissolution of states.70 Kusama, for her part, perceived that the state invests the accumulated fears and violence of individuals in another, bigger bank, one that might avoid the pantoclastic prospect to shield its profitslimited war is lucrative businessbut that proves more dangerous, and more destructive, from day to day, than the impassioned nuclear st ate. Wrapping her self in the flag, str ipping for votes, barnstorming for democracy, Kusama sought, in the title of her most famous protest, to awaken the dead.71 Anatomic Explosion on Wall Street was a wake-up call to citizens, an appeal to the descendants of revolution to revolt. On Monday, August 25, 1969, newspapers across the country gleefully reported Kusamas Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead at MoMA. In the sunny sculpture garden of the museum, featuring its usual display of nudes, six women and two men stripped before a crowd of some three hundred visitors and waded into the pool, clambering over the Maillol.72 While the dead show dead art, living artists die, Kusama observed.73 Of all her performances, Grand Orgy has attracted the greatest measure of art-world attention.74 It is seldom remembered as an antiwar protest, but its appeal to the living dead was echoed in the war news the following day, when alongside the AP story on Kusama ran one datelined Song Chang Valley, Vietnam. A-Company, 3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry, 196th Light Infantry Brigade ordered at dawn on Sunday morning to return to battle, had refused. Asked to explain this to the battalion commander, who paled at the news, the lieutenant on the ground offered this: The situation is psychic here.75

70. Fornari proposed the abolition of national sovereignty from below and the creation of an international Omega Institution, a judicial institution that would replace the war institution. Fornari, The Psychoanalysis of War, pp. 199236. 71. Kusama, Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead at MoMA (Otherwise Known as the Museum of Modern Art), Sunday August 24, 1969. 72. Kusama, A Message from Kusama, press release, Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead at MoMA, repr. in Hoptman et al., Yayoi Kusama, p. 117. 73. Modern Art Museum Gets Some Real Nudes, The New Mexican, Santa Fe, N.M., August 24, 1969, p. 7. 74. Jon Hendricks, a founding member of Guerrilla Art Action Group, has remarked on the significance of the Grand Orgy for GAAG. See Lynn Zelevansky, Driving Image: Yayoi Kusama in New York, in Yayoi Kusama, 19581968, p. 28. 75. American soldiers defy orders; refuse to return to bloody fray, The New Mexican, Santa Fe, N.M., August 24, 1969, p. 7. Opposite was the story Modern Art Museum Gets Some Real Nudes, illustrated with a photograph of naked participants cavorting in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art, a happening by offbeat artist Yayoi Kusama. The event was covered extensively by newspapers. The Daily News, a New York tabloid, made the Grand Orgy its cover image of the day, and ran a different Vietnam story as the lead: Fearful Beret Blew Lid Off: His Role in Viet Slaying Bared. Frequently reproduced in exhibition catalogues and shown in exhibitions of Kusamas work, that front page, and its reminder of U.S. atrocities in Vietnam, has become the most visible evidence of Kusamas strategy of making her art part of the war news.