I suppose it must be documentary week as here is another back to back. I don’t really know of Yayoi Kusama but like everyone else I’ve seen her distinctive polka dot art before without realizing who made them. This is a biography of her life and career by first-time director Heather Lenz and quite clearly was made in cooperation with Kusama herself. It’s a well-made and comprehensive account but considering how flamboyant a personality Kusama herself is, this documentary feels oddly straightforward and conventional.

It traces the life of the artist from her childhood and it seems that she has always been determined to be an artist. Born to an affluent family, she developed a strong aversion to sex due to her abusive mother and womanizing father. She also experienced hallucinations and her art is an attempt to show these visions to the world. When in became clear that her art was too avant-garde to flourish in Japan, she moved to the US. Soon her infinity nets and infinity rooms made her a notable figure in the art world and according to this documentary, was copied by other artists yet she never gained a large following and had difficulty earning much money. This lack of success exacerbated her mental issues and led to suicide attempts. Her participation in nude, outlandish protests against the Vietnam War led to her being seen as an attention-seeking, controversial figure. She was forced to return to Japan in disgrace and checked herself into a mental hospital.

By any measure, Kusama lived a remarkable, eventful life and this documentary does a solid job at covering it. Lenz takes special care to show off as much of Kusama’s work as possible throughout the different phases of her career though the camera cannot do proper justice to her larger installations and infinity rooms. The sheer impact of her work even seen secondhand like this and their originality leaves you in no doubt that she is truly an artistic genius. What is especially interesting to me is that she seems to be completely obsessed with making art and cannot help but keep making her works though many of them are very similar until the obsession has run its course. You only have to look at a shot of her carefully painting each polka dot by hand and knowing how large the works are to realize how insane this sort of compulsion is. The medium hardly seems to matter as her work is striking and revolves around the same themes regardless of the format.

At the same time, Kusama is the very opposite of the reclusive artist, even if she does now still live in a mental hospital. She has continuously sought out ways to publicize and market her work, inventing methods such as having herself photographed next to her own work, which today feels like a prelude to the selfie generation. She has also gone to extreme lengths for the sake of attention, including crashing uninvited into art shows and apparently offering sex to Richard Nixon, and was sorely disappointed when more famous artists borrowed ideas from her work but she received none of the credit. I think it’s a fascinating admission that it’s the complete package of the artist’s public image and marketing campaign in addition to the work itself that makes Kusama such a celebrated name today even if she was too far ahead of her time in the 1960s to be properly acknowledged.

Anyway this documentary serves as a good overview of her life and while it’s clearly made by a director who is in awe of her, it avoids being overly hagiographic by mostly allowing the artwork to speak for itself instead of constantly interviewing people who spout her praises. Still it is a very conventional film and comes with zero artistic pretensions of its own which precludes it from being great in its own right. This is not a film that will win any awards.