Yayoi Kusama is the world’s most successful living female artist. Her sculptures, paintings and performance art have been exhibited all over the world for decades. It’s a staggering legacy and one director Heather Lenz honors in her new documentary, Kusama Infinity. Lenz covers the artist’s life from her childhood in Matsumoto City, through her New York years and back to Japan in the present day. She intersperses archival footage and images of the art with interviews from those in the art world, Kusama’s intimates and the artist herself. It’s an impressive compilation of information, but it covers so much in a short amount of time that it ultimately feels a little superficial.
Kusama has worked in a number of mediums throughout her career, but the film starts with her childhood watercolor paintings. Though her mother would have preferred young Yayoi focus on finding a good husband, she knew she wanted to paint and convinced her mother that she’d go to manners school if she could also go to art school. Her mother agreed, but Kusama only attended her art classes.
It’s the first glimpse we see of how determined and rebellious she could be, but it’s not the last. She traveled to New York City as a young woman, burning 2,000 of her own paintings before she left. There, she forced her way into local galleries, palling around with the likes of Andy Warhol and Joseph Cornell (with whom she seemed to have a minor love affair), but never receiving the same recognition. Kusama’s struggle for legitimacy is a major theme in the film and it’s frustrating to watch such a prolific and challenging artist repeatedly not receive the recognition her male peers get.
Perhaps the film’s most enlightening (and frustrating) revelation, though, is the section where Lenz suggests that many well-known artists stole ideas from her. It starts with Claes Oldenburg. Before Oldenburg’s Men’s Jacket with Shirt and Tie hung in a gallery near Kusama’s Accumulation No. 1, he’d never worked in “soft sculpture,” but his next exhibition after that featured it heavily and it gave him the worldwide acclaim that eluded Kusama. Perhaps that would seem like coincidence, but Kusama recalls Oldenburg’s wife coming up to her at the exhibition and saying, “I’m so sorry, Yayoi.” Then came her friend Andy Warhol, who repeated an image on the walls of his exhibition after seeing her do it in 1000 Boats. The list goes on, and with each new name, Lenz reinforces just how much the primarily straight, male, white art world failed to appreciate Kusama’s work. It’s almost no surprise, then, that those betrayals and her continued lack of success drove Kusama to jump out of a window.
Though Kusama survived the jump because she happened to land on a bicycle instead of the concrete sidewalk, the revelation ushers in a fascinating discussion on the ways Kusama’s mental state affected her art. Perhaps the clearest manifestation of her anxiety is the repetitiveness in her work. One interviewee describes her style as a manifestation of Kusama’s OCD, what someone else calls her method of “managing her madness.” Another claims her work is a manifestation of her fear of sex, which in turn came from the times her mother made her spy on her father’s illicit affairs. The only person who doesn’t get to analyze her motivations is Kusama herself.
Though Lenz interviewed Kusama, she mostly lets other people explain her motivations and context. Perhaps that’s due to necessity. Maybe, despite years of distance and the fact that Kusama has chosen to live in a Tokyo psychiatric hospital for the past few decades, Kusama wasn’t that forthcoming. Regardless, by allowing others to speak on Kusama’s behalf, Lenz unintentionally distances the viewer from the artist.
We don’t know if she would agree that her mother’s jealousy had an effect on her mental state—in fact we don’t even hear her talk about her mother. Instead, Kusama, who was for so long ignored or silenced by an art world that was influenced by her, is effectively silenced here. She tells us only facts, nothing about why she chose to make the art she did or what drove her for so many years.
Despite its flaws, Kusama Infinity is not a bad movie. It’s well-assembled and gives a concise yet comprehensive overview of the artist’s career that will satisfy both fans and newcomers alike. The breadth of Kusama’s art it showcases is impressive and every interview adds a new facet to either the artist or her work. What the film lacks, is the artist herself. On some level, it’s easy to argue that Kusama’s work speaks for itself, but without hearing the artist contextualize the drive and determination that made her such an influential figure, we’re distanced from an artist whose work is so inherently emotional.
Rating: 7.5/10
