Love and Fame to Nothingness: Cutie and the Boxer

Zachary Heinzerling's 2013 documentary, Cutie and the Boxer, is very low key - in the style of many fine recent documentaries the cinematography is completely transparent, we just watch the two artists at the center of the film as their life unfolds over several weeks - there are no interviews, with them or with anyone else, they only occasionally address the camera, other than for some well-integrated archival video or film that the artists must have provided, it's all just unmediated (seemingly) observation. What we're seeing is a somewhat elderly couple, both immigrants from Japan to NYC, who met in NY when he, Ushio Shinohara, a struggling artist, was about 40 and she, Noriko Shinohara, was about 20. Today, he's 80, she 60. Both still struggling. They live in a rented apartment in near squalor, and the studio they use is a cramped and crowded mess. His main artwork seems to be supersized constructions made with mostly salvaged cardboard boxes - replicas of motorcycles and other machinery. In my view, the works are quite ugly - but who knows what will attract an dealer? Her work is mostly a cartoon, with characters based on her and her husband, called Cutie and the Boxer - following the story of their life and struggles. It looks pretty good, and not all that different from many, many other graphic novels out there seeking a readership. He's clearly the star - though that's a big issue in their marriage, as she feels very much in his shadow. It would be one thing if he were a major, successful artist - but he's obviously lived through a serious drinking problem and has squandered much of his talent, his money, perhaps his life. But things are changing, as he is working to mount a show at a NYC gallery - where in particular his "action paintings" attract attention: these are paintings in which he literally soaks boxing gloves in buckets of paint and then punches the canvas or paper, creating various designs. Each covers a whole wall - and takes him about 2 1/2 minutes to complete. Make of that what you will. In what to me was the most telling scene, a buyer for the Guggenheim comes to see his work and she's interested in these paintings - and we get a real glimpse of how the art market works - it's all about connections and speculation and following the crowd. As she, Alexandra, notes, it's as if she's running a start-up. Though the whole enterprise feels fraudulent to me - the guy devotes his life to these painstaking sculptures and then winds up in a major museum collection with stuff he slams together in minutes?- at least he may at last get some $, and recognition, very late in life. That will please Noriko, but will not salve her wounded ego - though maybe this film will draw a publisher to her works as well (she does share a gallery showing w/ Ushio, but in a side room). The film does a fine job of leaving these questions and issues unresolved, and in making us think about art and about fame in a new way.

Should note that over past few days we started two movies that we abandoned: Berberian Sound Studio, about a sound engineer recruited to work on what may be the world's worst horror film - was kind of funny for a while, but the joke wore thin and film seemed to be headed nowhere in particular; and the 1990 The Grifters - which now seems ridiculously dated, slow-moving, noncredible, and miscast in every lead character.