The
art world has a marked preference for the enfant terrible and the angry young
man. Yayoi Kusama is the unusual exception. After a lifetime of swimming upstream,
she has found her greatest commercial and critical success in her late
eighties. Heather Lenz takes stock of the artist and her prodigious output in Kusama: Infinity, which screens during
the closing gala of this year’s DOXA Documentary Film Festival.
There
has already been at least one prior Kusama doc, Takako Matsumoto’s Near Equal Kusama Yayoi: I Love Myself, but
with Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors installation
breaking attendance records, the time is right for a new take on the artist. While
Near Equal spent a considerable
amount of time watching Kusama draw her trademark polka dots, Lenz takes a more
conventional but engaging narrative approach.
Lenz
understandably emphasizes all the adversity Kusama was forced to overcome, starting
with the abusive mother who made her formative years so difficult. However, she
received some early encouragement from Georgia O’Keefe, who invited Kusama to
share her studio based on one painting the teenager rather naively sent her. Unfortunately,
the budding artist opted for New York instead. Quite provocatively, but
convincingly, Lenz and her battery of experts suggest storied contemporary artist
such as Anndy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg basically ripped off her work. Yet,
she never explicitly explores the irony of the faultlessly liberal and anti-war
New York art scene also proving to be so sexist and exploitative.
After
returning to Japan, Kusama voluntarily checked herself into a sanitarium, where
she still lives as a permanent guest, sort of like the Major in Fawlty Towers. Of course, most viewers
inevitably wonder just how this arrangement works, but the film never offers
those explanations. In fact, it mostly just skims the surface of Kusama’s life
and career, rather than plumbing her deeper psyche. Arguably, this is a
function of the ultra-guarded Kusama herself, who either established innumerable
boundaries or is simply incapable of opening up to any meaningful extent.
