s substance, or body), hung themselves in trees, threw themselves around in mud, ran through paper screens, and knocked logs down on top of themselves. This was resolutely materialist work, unlike the optical participatory experiments of the European technology artists. Interaction with the spectator was a part of the project.
Allan Kaprow included the Gutai Group along with the Europeans Vostell and Lebel, in his landmark 1966 coffee table book Assemblage, Environments and Happenings. Artists in Japan soon took the new event- and installation-based modes of artmaking in a strongly political direction under the banner of “anti-art.” This aesthetic philosophy evolved as street demonstrations raged against the U.S.-Japan military agreements, vestiges of the postwar occupation. The Neo-Dada Organizers broke furniture in a gallery as jazz music blared, and the artists of Hi-Red Center dressed in lab coats and meticulously cleaned busy public streets in Tokyo and New York (1966).
The Japanese modes of radicalized street work, exhibitions and installations were largely carried out by groups. Collectivity indeed became the predominant way to organize the cultural work that can comfortably be called social sculpture, and it remains a favored mode of organizing this kind of cultural work.
Crazy Dot Lady
That said, the influence of one charismatic clinical obsessive cannot be denied. Yayoi Kusama was a manic presence in New York City during the 1960s. (She also worked in Holland and Rome.) She produced numerous events called Happenings where nude men and women – in the parlance of the tabloid press – “cavorted,” their bodies painted all over with polka dots by the artist. These events included at least one gay wedding. Kusama sited her events in very public and provocative locations – the Museum of Modern Art sculpture garden, the Brooklyn Bridge, and Wall Street in front of the stock exchange.
In the press, which she courted, Kusama was identified with free love and the psychedelic hippie culture. She understood herself as the “High Priestess of Polka Dots” in her own Church of Self-Obliteration. Kusama was also involved with pioneer queer activist Louis Abolafia. Abolafia ran as a nudist (“Love Party”) candidate for president in 1968, then moved to San Francisco where he produced the annual “Erotic Exotic Ball.”
Kusama’s performance actions flaunted sexuality and celebrated hallucination. Her work was in the forefront of the U.S. sexual revolution – sexual experimentation, the emergence of gay identities. Kusama engaged politics in her selection of locations (sites) for actions, but she was far from a feminist artist. She was, in fact, fabulously mad, and in 1968 she returned to Japan where she lives today – happily and productively – in a mental hospital.
Psychedelic Tropical Shantytown
The psychedelic experience was widely understood as revolutionary, albeit centered on individual consciousness. The drugs which induced it and the culture that sprang from them became a worldwide cultural vogue. It made the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica famous. His 1967 installation Tropicália, a walk-in installation abstractly based on a Rio de Janeiro favella, or shantytown of squatters, gave its name to a cultural movement including musicians and filmmakers. In devising his participatory forms of art, Oiticica, like his compatriot the sculptor Lygia Clark, was strongly influenced by purist abstract art of the kind taught by European exiles who fled Nazi Europe to South America.
Both Oiticica and Clark’s work was made to be interactive. Oiticica began making complex manipulable boxes which the viewer was invited to play with. Clark made masks and body suits which were intended to be worn and stimulate a variety of sensuous experiences. Oiticica’s parangolés are mobile sculptures, layered mantles of fabrics and plastic, designed to be worn through the carnival streets like flags.
Oiticica and Clark’s aesthetic philosophies are dense and complex, and they have both been the subject of extensive recent exhibitions and publications. Both artists