Kusama: Infinity (2018)
Directed by Heather Lenz. Magnolia Pictures, Tokyo Lee Productions Inc., Submarine Entertainment, Dogwoof, Parco, Dakota Group LTD
On a weekend visit to the National Gallery of Victoria’s Triennial exhibition last year, it was almost impossible to get into the room of red flowers. Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s Flower Obsession was a show stopper, beautiful, poignant and bold. Kusama: Infinity uses interviews with her friends and colleagues and with Kusama herself, along with historic footage and archive material to tell the story of this once marginal artist became one of the best loved in the world.
Kusama overcame incredible odds to pursue art. Hailing from a conservative and dysfunctional family, with a mother who would snatch the pencils out of her hands whenever she tried to draw, she moved to New York to try to make a name for herself in the art world. She was not afraid to hustle, but for many years never got very far and Kusama: Infinity makes a convincing case for her gender and race being largely to blame. It also shows how several of her white, male contemporaries, shamefully, took credit for ideas. Kusama also battled mental ill health throughout her life, attempting suicide more than once, before her work was rediscovered in the 1990s and became increasingly popular.
Kusama: Infinity is a triumphant story, but it is no fairytale. The artist still sleeps every night in a mental health ward, travelling to her studio each day to work. But what work it is. Most wonderful about Kusama: Infinity is the way the film uses the colours and motifs of the artist’s own work to enhance its storytelling. Coloured spots dance over the screen, interlocking scales blend with lapping water. Kusama herself is interviewed in front of a wall of coloured polkadots, an intense, almost stern figure under her helmet of bright red hair. It does not always succeed in conveying the great despair that has clearly dogged this woman for most of her life. But it offers the viewer an opportunity to be immersed in the strange, technicoloured beauty of Kusama’s mind, in the same way her best works do.
