Review of Kusama: Infinity (2018) by Rachel Y — 21 Dec 2018

Director Heather Lenz has created an important, timely, and fascinating film about the brilliant Yayoi Kusama, the now 89-year-old groundbreaking and only recently famous Japanese visual artist. In the early 1960s, Kusama 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. Hence Lenz's film is a 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 massive 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.