Kusama: Infinity

Truly informative AND entertaining film about one of the most significant artists of her generation. If you know about Andy Warhol and his contemporaries but you don't know Kusama there are reasons for that - watch the movie and you'll see why being Japanese and a woman made her ripe for those guys to rip her off, use her genius for their own acclaim. But we're in a different era, and it's not Warhol whose art shows draw crowds out the door and down N. Grand Ave. at the Broad Museum and others around the world. I saw this film at Sundance and again at a LACMA screening in Los Angeles and I'm impressed by the painstaking detail with which the director executed her vision (Director Heather Lenz). Whether or not feminism, women's issues, race, etc. are categories that draw your interest, the look into the life and mind of an intense artist like Kusama is revealing.

Heather Lenz directs an important, timely, and fascinating film about the now 89-year-old artist, Yayoi Kusama. A Japanese who in the early 1960s escaped her stifling family to begin her career in New York, where she innovated--as Lenz's film reveals--only to have her concepts and techniques stolen by the likes of Warhol, Oldenburg, et al. These men soon eclipsed her celebrity, and at her expense. Very critical correction of the historical record. Lenz also locates the origins of some of Kusama's visual motifs in childhood trauma, which had resulted in hallucinations and then obsession with hallucinated shapes and patterns. Kusama herself acknowledges as much and credits art-making with her survival. Her mirrored "infinity room" installations, giant polka-dotted pumpkins, and huge paintings covered obsessively with her personal iconography, now draw huge crowds at museums and galleries all over the world. Heather Lenz has not only drawn a powerful portrait of an artist whose late fame has intense cultural significance, but has also set a humanistic standard for the accounting of biographical details and, critically, for setting the historical record straight.

A remarkable, provocative, innovative artist in canvas, art installations, and even performance art protests. Decades ahead of her time, she fought hard her whole life against the establishment but found her ideas constantly stolen and capitalized on by men. Even when hospitalized for her obsessive compulsions, she was nonetheless prolifically productive. Her mirrored rooms and penis-covered furniture are the perfect fodder for social media, and she finally got the recognition she deserved when almost 60 - her works and installations now garner millions.

This documentary is well researched and illustrated by contemporary footage.

An infinitely amazing, thoughtful, compassionate and deeply profound look at one of the most influential and unsung artists of the modern era. Director Heather Lenz captures the eccentric essence of this fascinating figure, while also making a bigger statement about overlooked female artists and artists of color. It creates a compelling and shocking case for how Kusama's vision influenced greats like Warhol, but how she got none of the credit. The exclusive footage Lenz caught of Kusama is amazing and rare. This film demands to be seen because Kusama demands to be known.

Yayoi Kusama is without question an utterly fascinating character. I am happy that she finally gained recognition for her life-long, singleminded dedication to art, even after so many rejections and shunnings (and pilfering of ideas by artists!) by people in both the US and the Japanese art worlds. I suspect that there are many other people like her who were not strong enough to continue on in the face of so much adversity, so she should be applauded as a human being as well as an artist.

That said, I think that it is pretty clear that her late recognition is a part of the unfortunate and relatively recent phenomenon of the hyper-commodification of art, with collectors and gallerists and curators all out on the hunt for artists whom they can champion so that they (the hustlers) can get rich quick, along with their clients. The completely insane prices commanded for some artists´ works (including, now, Kusama´s) while most artists starve as they await to be (in most cases never) discovered is a result of a massive quantity of wealth concentrated in the hands of a few powerbrokers who trade art in the manner of stocks and bonds. In recent decades, such persons, and their agents, have come to wield enormous power in the art world. The entire system has become corrupt as a result. Now we have con artists posing as not only art critics and art dealers, but artists as well!

Many films have dealt specifically with this new development, of collectors buying art in order to flip it for profit, so if you are interested in that topic, I recommend that you watch some of those films. I have created a list here at imdb, but it appears that they will not include a link within the text of this review.