‘Kusama: Infinity’ Review

We can't decide if everyone knows Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama or if not enough people do, although we hear tell that over 5 million fans on social media regularly check up on the contemporary art mastermind. She probably wouldn't care, however, and in the new documentary Kusama: Infinity from filmmaker Heather Lenz, we learn that lesson repeatedly.

Kusama, for those who don't know, has a career-spanning fascination with dots, soft sculpture and conceptual weirdness that dates back to early letters penned to Georgia O'Keeffe, the eschewing of familial expectations and a daring move to New York City in the late 1950s—after which everyone from Oldenburg to Warhol shamelessly ripped her off. From the 1966 Venice Biennale (where she arrived, without invitation, to sell mirrored balls she labeled as "narcissism") to arguably being the first artist to craft a mirrored room containing countless colored lights in a quest to represent the infinite, Kusama has been one step ahead of everyone practically always.

And yet she struggled—as a woman, as a Japanese person living in America, as an attempter of suicide and as an underappreciated force of nature. Lenz shows this brilliantly, mashing up film footage and decades of photography with modern-day interviews with gallerists, curators, Kusama's friends and contemporaries and the woman herself. She calls Japan home again these days, living in a hospital but marching the two blocks to her studio almost every day.

The process is fascinating and the story itself enraging, but we also catch a glimpse of how Kusama influenced and continues to influence the world of art throughout the ages. The tale is hardly pretty and the trials and tribulations were many, but genius always seems to come with a hefty price. And while we won't pretend to understand Kusama's thought processes and motivations entirely, we do know we appreciate them and her efforts; us and about 5 million others.

In other words, if you even think you like art, you must see this film. It'll change how you think about everything.

10
+Fascinating and heartbreaking
-Men are the fucking worst

Kusama: Infinity
Directed by Lenz
Center for Contemporary Arts, NR, 76 min.