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Item: The Hustler’s Grotto of Christopher Street

Yayoi Kusama

1998

Book, 21.5 x 13.8 cm, 164 p, language: English, publisher: Berkeley, California: Wandering Mind Books, ISBN: 0-9653304-2-7.
Materials: ink, paper

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2024/846).

Literary sinopsis

The Hustler’s Grotto of Christopher Street (Kuristofa Danshokutsu) is a masterpiece depicting a world filled with drugs and gay sex. Won Tenth Literary Award for New Writers, Yasei Jidai magazine. Kusama's characters -most obviously Henry in The Hustler’s Grotto of Christopher Street- are Pop-like reductions, stereotypical caricatures of the African American male, the junkie, the homosexual hustler. Like all her subjects both animate and inanimate, her characters are highly eroticized and therefore not "realistic;" like all Pop artists, she forgoes realism in favor of stylization. She is less concerned with drawing out her characters than using them as conduits of an excessive phantasmagoria.

- Alexandra Munroe

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The M HKA is a museum for contemporary art, film and visual culture in its widest sense. It is an open place of encounter for art, artists and the public. The M HKA aspires to play a leading role in Flanders and to extend its international profile by building upon Antwerp's avant-garde tradition. The M HKA bridges the relationship between artistic questions and wider societal issues, between the international and the regional, artists and public, tradition and innovation, reflection and presentation. Central here is the museum's collection with its ongoing acquisitions, as well as related areas of management and research.

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