Tonight's post is sponsored by Professor Ward's extra credit option.
This past Saturday, I was lucky enough to be in the company of a half-full independent theater in the heart of downtown Long Beach. Historic Fourth Street's Art Theater is the last of its kind, a rarity in the modern-day overabundance of corporate film. Since its birth in 1925, the theater has gone through several transitions in architecture, until ten years ago its facade was restored to the original blueprints. If you have not yet attended a screening at this theater, put it on your Winter break to-do list.
What sparked this visit to the theater I had not previously been to, was the limited showing of documentary director Heather Lenz' extended biopic on artist Yayoi Kusama: "Kusama Infinity". Lenz made a special appearance at the end of the film to explain the process that made the piece possible as well as take a short Q&A session before the next movie's crowd could spill in.
I felt a tangle of motivation, sympathy, and utmost appreciation after I exited the building. Before the film, Kusama's enigmatic aura and favorable presence that invited social-media influencers to photography themselves in nearly every major museum seemed like a perversion of modernist indulgence. It was soon realized that this wrong internalization of spite towards mainstream culture had been misunderstood without the context of Kusama's lifelong trajectory as an artist.
She started her journey in her youth, knowing that she wanted to become a painter and disobeying the strict traditions of her wealthy Japanese upbringing in her hometown, Matsumoto. She asked painter Georgia O'Keefe, whom she admired, for advice in letters and eventually moved out to New York on her own to pursue her goal. Although stricken by the unspoken traumas of her family and obsessive-compulsive disorder, Kusama was effective in her creative methods and stuck to what she set out to do. Her ideas permeated the New York art scene, as more-famous and Caucasian artists would visit her shows and adapt her methodologies into their own to plagiaristic extents. Kusama was inherently loving and embraced the ability to question and push her way through; performing gay marriages, retailing her art for the price of hot-dogs (at the time), and injecting herself into an environment that did not respect or validate her presence. This lack of recognition wore at her mentality and led her to several suicide attempts and a return to Japan. Against these odds, Kusama re-implemented herself into the art world and is now able to reside in a psychiatric hospital that takes care of her, two blocks away from her studio. She is the most successful living female artist today.
The screening was well-needed to my limited understanding. While the themes of her work tie into her OCD with repeated motifs that aid the publicity factor and draw in curious viewers-- I did feel a bit compelled by the vague romanticization of mental illness. Neuroticism can be a hindrance or catalyst for creating work, and to see Kusama suffer the abuse of invalidation from the American art scene and still persevere left an impression that made me consider my own artistic choices. Anyhow, her dedication to her work has overthrown the defeats of her past into an infinite circulation of influence that continues to grow everyday.
Kiani Wish
