Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on November 2011

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) campaign has been in the news. But this campaign to bring a supposedly corrupt financial system crashing to its knees by setting up camp in a small park near to the center of the financial nexus is nothing new. An earlier attempt to close down the heart of the capitalist system occurred in October 1968, but that time it involved a troupe of naked dancers adorned with polka dots led by a diminutive Japanese artist who demanded that “Wall Street men” stop their “fake business” and become farmers and fishermen.

Events like this were the foundation of the fame of the lady who is now Japan’s most famous contemporary artist, the incredibly dotty—in both sense of the word—Yayoi Kusama. If you haven’t already been to the exhibition “Kusama’s Body Festival in ’60s,” which has been running at the Watarium Museum since the summer, the OWS protests may provide an additional incentive.

With photos, posters, videos, and artwork from the period, the exhibition captures the atmosphere of New York’s counterculture from a time when acts of nudity and sexual liberation were regarded as radical and dangerous. Like the present Lady Gaga, Kusama was also something of a gay icon and gay rights activist, even going so far as to stage the first “homosexual wedding” complete with a “fantastic orgy wedding gown, designed for two instead of one.”

The show’s curator Koichi Watari draws parallels with the contemporaneous scene that existed around Andy Warhol. Although both artists promoted sexual liberation, employed sexual shock tactics, and encouraged various forms of sexual promiscuity, they were both rather asexual themselves, as testified by Kusama’s fear of male genitalia which inspired her soft phallic sculptures made of cloth which she affixed to everything from rowing boats to step ladders.

In addition to the paraphernalia from the 1960s, the show also includes one of Kusama’s “Infinity Mirror Rooms,” complete with large polka-dot strewn inflatables, and a recent video work entitled “A Manhattan Suicide Addict,” a dotty ditty sung like an ancient rice planting song.

Kusama’s Body Festival in ’60s, Watari-Um Museum, until Nov 27 (listing)