Love, Yayoi Kusama

I’ve a slight allergy to films about artists: how to capture and convey what is essentially an internal process?  The artist drinks! Smokes! Acts out! Scowls at canvas! Drives into a tree/ODs/walks into river!

I doubt that I’m the only one in the audience asking, “Is that all there is?”

All rather dull, really, compared with the hard work of getting up in the morning and making art, which is why films about artists tend to look at subjects that uneasily fit their environs.  I know no one’s going to watch a film about a completely stable artist who dies peacefully of old age after a life of steady production…except maybe me.

I don’t think I have to worry about Yayoi Kusama: I Love Me.  Instead of scripted histrionics, the documentary by Matsumoto Takako was made with the full cooperation of the artist, and based on the trailer, made with love.

At the risk of ruining my chances of getting a ticket, the doc is screening for one night only at New People’s Viz Cinema Thursday, September 17, at 6 and 8 PM.

If I’ve much to fear from how artists dear to my heart are portrayed, I suppose I may as well be concerned with how the legend of their psyches eclipse their work.  It’s undeniable that Kusama is a bit wacky–she lives, by choice, in a mental hospital, having left New York in 1973 in a delicate state.  But importantly, she is not the shadow of an -ism, nor is she hanging on to the specter of early avant-garde greatness.  Recent work shows that she is powerful as ever, still willing to challenge perceptions of seeing.  Her (literally) luminescent “Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity, 2009″ at a show that closed at the Gagosian Gallery earlier this year proves just that point.

Seeing the 1998 MoMA/LACMA-curated exhibition Love Forever was a revelatory experience for me as a young critic.  The net paintings enveloped, polka dots dizzied with endless detail, and it was impossible to not giggle a little about the sculptures and films.  Even the happenings, with their shaggy, dated quality, begged me to wonderment.  While no stranger to the art of the era, Kusama’s held a personal fascination for me that was much more inclusive than her poppy contemporaries: here was art that didn’t hold you at arms length, that didn’t beg you to look, shrug, and move on.

It reminds me now of one of my favorite quotes by Ed Ruscha: “Good art should elicit a response of ‘Huh? Wow!’ as opposed to ‘Wow!’  Huh?’”

Kusama as seen by Hosoe Eikoh

I don’t exactly agree with the last sentiments of Heather Lenz’s as yet unfinished documentary, but a valuable point is made: making art anchors Kusama to the earth–how lucky for us.