New York-based Japanese 'action painter' and sculptor Ushio Shinohora, and his wife Noriko, are the subjects of this documentary. Coming to prominence in the 60s, Shinohara moved west to the acclaim of the New York art scene and press. However, his art didn't sell and Shinohara turned to alcohol, ignoring his wife's art career, who was forced to give it up to tend to her struggling husband and their son.
The first half is interesting. First-time director Zachary Heinzerling presents the documentary like a drama about two ageing artists coming to terms with their struggles to make rent, all the while worrying about their son Alex, also an artist trying to get his name out there, and his intake of alcohol. They never talk to camera - it's real fly on the wall stuff with the two comfortable to be really honest with each other. Too honest in parts as the barbed comments fly across the room.
The sight of an old man stripped to his waist punching a large white canvass with black paint is oddly hypnotising but Heinzerling inadvertently flags the whole process as possible nonsense when a buyer for the Guggenheim appears less interested in the new material, wondering instead if any paintings had a history, a story behind them, because they are the ones that sell. It seems art too takes an X Factor approach to decision making.
There is some MTV style manipulative editing: a home footage clip of late night drunken debauchery, a night we're led to assume was typical, is cut with a little Alex in the bath, suggesting that the two scenes are from the same night. You begin to wonder what else has been conveniently put together.
The second half doesn't have the same drive as the first, which is odd because it's here that it's announced Ushio and Noriko will have a dual exhibition in the coming weeks. It should be upping a gear here and instead it slows down. It's problematic too that Shinohara cuts an unlikeable figure; the focus of his wife's art - a comic series involving a woman and her self-absorbed artist husband - Shinohara has no redeeming qualities and doesn't really rate his wife's work. At one point he says, "The average one has to support the genius." Hmm.
Interesting style but Cutie and the Boxer plays within itself.
