Pioneering art held back by prejudice

Kusama — Infinity

K ★★ (out of four) Documentary starring Yayoi Kusama. Directed by Heather Lenz. Opens Friday at TIFF Lightbox. 77 minutes. PG In the late 1960s, Yayoi Kusama threw herself from the window of her New York studio and fell two stories to the concrete sidewalk below. If not for the bicycle that broke her fall, she explains, she’d probably have died. At the time, she didn’t particularly care either way.

That’s just one of the startling, revelatory episodes to be found in Kusama — Infinity, a new documentary biopic on the celebrated octogenarian Japanese artist, opening in Toronto on Friday. In the midst of a whirlwind touring exhibition of her work predicated largely on social-media hype and harmlessseeming flurries of polka dots, the film adds to the Kusama circus many layers of necessary depth.

Too many, some might argue: In its completist view and slavish devotion to a linear timeline of the artist’s life, the film could easily devolve into a dutiful plod, were its subject not relentlessly interesting. But she is, so it doesn’t, though it veers dangerously close.

We begin, of course, with Kusama’s childhood, wracked by emotional abuse from her mother, who would sneak up behind her and grab drawings from the grade-school Kusama’s hands, ridiculing her efforts as she tore them to pieces in front of her; the onset of hallucinations and other psychological episodes that became the young Kusama’s refuge; and swiftly to another largely for- gotten episode in the Kusama mythos, her youthful plea to Georgia O’Keeffe, by then ensconced in her high-desert studio in New Mexico.

Growing by turns increasingly obsessed with art-making and increasingly despondent at the conservative strictures of Japanese society that seemed to have no interest in her work, Kusama wrote to O’Keeffe of her encounter with Black Iris, one of the celebrated painter’s darkest works, of a flower consumed at its heart by blackness. “I felt I had something inside me that seemed very related to what lay at the bottom of Black Iris,” Kusama wrote. To her giddy amazement, O’Keeffe wrote back, urging her to move to America. She even offered to help arrange shows for her, and a bed at her Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, if she were so inclined. She never did make it to New Mexico, but in 1958, Kusama packed up and landed in New York in the midst of the explosion of Abstract Expressionism, as that wave of macho gestural painting began to crest.

Here, I felt an alarm bell ringing: At the urging of one of the world’s great Modern painters, Kusama locked horns with the next generation of artistic machismo, differentiating herself while challenging them. She could get no traction. Women “were not taken seriously,” Guggengeim curator Alexandra Monroe explains; the market wanted AbEx bluster, not her intricate, obsessive detail.

Then Donald Judd, one of the godfathers of Minimalism, reviewed one of her shows glowingly, prompting a reappraisal. Subsequent exhibitions put on view her gift, her obsessions, and her chutzpah.

Most significantly, I think, is what happened next, and this is where the film needed to live most fully: It explains, at length, both Kusama’s catalytic nature and her easy dismissal. In 1963, her 1000 Boats installation, in which a rowboat fitted with hundreds of soft phallic sculptures was placed in a room surrounded by hundreds of images of the sculpture itself; six months later, Andy Warhol was celebrated for a show in which his image of a cow was similarly repeated. Claes Oldenburg, the towering sculptor in the early ’60s was largely making everyday objects from papier mâché, until a show of Kusama’s soft fabric sculpture turned up in New York. Three months later, a show of his work was all soft and fabric, a turning point in his career.

The ultimate kicker, though, was the work of Lucas Samaras. In 1965, Kusama showed her first Infinity Mirror pieces — the genesis of the selfie-fest now occurring at the AGO — at a New York gallery. Six months later, Samaras showed his own infinity mirrors to much broader acclaim, prompting in Kusama a depression deep enough to prompt the jump from her window.

“Kusama was always at the pinnacle of a movement, but never seemed to get the credit,” one art dealer interviewed in the film muses, and a curator puts on it a finer point: “Sexism certainly played a role,” she says, “and likely racism too.” Or as Monroe says, the art world was set up to support “white men working in a Modernist tradition,” leaving the wildly original output of a genius Japanese woman on the outs.

Kusama aside — she, in her late-phase super-success, appears to have the last laugh — things don’t look all that different now. The Museum of Modern Art in New York’s current holdings are 4 per cent female. It prompts an observation from Kusama, back in the ’60s, about the institution: “It doesn’t look very modern to me.”

In 1973, wracked by obsessive compulsive order and depression, Kusama retreated to Japan, living in a mental hospital a hundred metres from her studio ever since, which the film visits to interview her at length while she works. The portrait of not only a true original — so rare — but a pioneer is compelling. It would have been more so had it fastened more tightly to the reasons why so many of us came to her genius only when it was almost too late.