Anatomic Explosion on Wall Street

Abstract

“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 Spring ‐like 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. “All’s Quiet on Stock Market, but Wall Street ‘Bares’ Busy,” announced the next day’s UPI story, which appeared in newspapers across the country on Monday * This text is adapted from a chapter on Yayoi Kusama’s peace politics in my forthcoming book, Sperm Bomb: Art, Feminism, and the American War in Vietnam . I wish to thank Shaun Vigil, my undergradu ate research partner at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2010 ‐11, for assembling key materials; Midori Yamamura for generously sharing her research and her comprehensive knowledge of Kusama’s work; and fellow Radcliffe fellow Nick Turse, author of Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam , for uncovering traces of Kusama’s protests in some unexpected places and for providing