Kusama – Infinity

Cus­tom-tooled mir­ror balls spread out on a lawn in Venice; embroi­dered penis fur­ni­ture; body-paint­ing and nude col­lage work; and a mix of lights and mir­rors cre­at­ing the impres­sion of a sprawl­ing infin­i­ty. These are just a few of the artis­tic con­coc­tions made by Japan­ese icon­o­clast Yay­oi Kusama who is, to quote this func­tion­al doc­u­men­tary pro­file by Heather Lenz, the most suc­cess­ful artist liv­ing today.

Her cre­ations still draw ador­ing throngs to major gallery spaces across the globe, and her brand of colour­ful, mul­ti-dis­ci­pline cre­ation is seen by the art world cognoscen­ti as open­ing up the medi­um to the mass­es. But it wasn’t always the case. The film offers a straight, talk­ing-heads dri­ven biog­ra­phy of Kusama, from her con­ser­v­a­tive upbring­ing, to her self-imposed con­fine­ment in a Japan­ese men­tal insti­tu­tion, all via a mid-cen­tu­ry sojourn to break the US market.

She defied expec­ta­tions of prim and prop­er women in the post-war peri­od, and her hunger to become an artist made rela­tions with her moth­er extreme­ly test­ing. Yet the film is also about how her suc­cess was large­ly the prod­uct of her own inge­nu­ity and lack of scru­ples when it came to self-pro­mo­tion: she wrote a let­ter to Geor­gia O’Keeffe dur­ing her for­ma­tive years as a painter, and received a response sug­gest­ing she should high­tail it to New York. While there, she made it her per­son­al trade­mark to tip art world the apple­cart and try, wher­ev­er pos­si­ble, to mus­cle in on ter­ri­to­ry that had been the sole pre­serve of age­ing white males.

Kusama’s insights are fas­ci­nat­ing, and the film is at its best when it allows the artist to analyse her own work. Her icon­ic ​“infin­i­ty net” con­cept was coined while fly­ing over the Pacif­ic Ocean to the US, and her sprawl­ing, hyp­not­ic paint­ed pat­terns remain mod­ern mas­ter­works of land­scape inter­pre­ta­tion. There are all man­ner of gallery own­ers and artis­tic direc­tors on hand to sing her prais­es, but the film is lit­tle more than a polite puff piece which betrays none of the mox­ie or for­mal daz­zling of Kusama’s own work.