‘People were suffocating. In my opinion, just as starvation leads to crime and violence, the suppression of sex twists the true nature of human beings and is an underlying force that pushes people towards war’ – Yayoi Kusama

Playful, provocative and psychologically charged, Untitled (Phallus Bottle) (1965) is an important sculpture dating from the height of Yayoi Kusama’s radical practice in 1960s New York. An array of soft protrusions sprout organically from a bottle; the entire work is coated in lustrous gold paint, uniting the found object with its biomorphic growths, which are made of sewn and stuffed fabric. Transforming an everyday item into an unsettling, fantastical and humorous presence, Untitled (Phallus Bottle) is typical of Kusama’s hallucinogenic approach to the world. The artist had left her native Japan for New York in 1958, where she found early success with her ‘Infinity Net’ paintings. In 1962, she made her first sculpture, Accumulation No. 1 (Museum of Modern Art, New York), which – much like the present work – sees an armchair obliterated by masses of tactile, tuberous forms. Kusama used these works as a way of exploring and overcoming her own sexual neuroses and phobias, which stemmed from a repressed and sometimes traumatic childhood. Similar to the contemporary sculptures of Louise Bourgeois, they were frankly sexual but also wittily ambiguous. The clustered phallic shapes are made through the traditionally ‘feminine’ craft of sewing by hand; in the present work, they might also be read as breasts. The bottle itself takes on a curvaceous, anthropomorphic profile, seeming to echo the form of an ancient fertility idol like the Venus of Willendorf. These works were also closely related to Kusama’s burgeoning installation practice, which began with erotic ‘happenings’ and stage-set-like constructions in the mid-1960s. In the same year she created Untitled (Phallus Bottle), Kusama debuted the first of her acclaimed ‘Infinity Rooms’ in New York: Infinity Mirror Room – Phalli’s Field contained twenty-five square metres of the soft forms in a mirrored chamber, offering the viewer a disorienting psychosexual face-off with their own reflected image. Deeply personal yet universal in its resonance, Untitled (Phallus Bottle) offers a similarly rich encounter.
Post Lot Text
This work is recorded in the archives of Yayoi Kusama, Tokyo.