Yayoi Kunama & others.

Disappointing and unrewarding..

Yayoi Kusama exhibited this Summer at the Victoria Miro gallery in North East London. I had heard a while back that she would be exhibiting in London, and I was eager to see more of her work after seeing an exhibition in Copenhagen a few summers back. I had almost forgotten about the exhibition until a massive wave of Instagram posts of large pumpkins popping up on my newsfeed prompted me to get a move on and join the bandwagon. I decided that if even the most mainstream of my Instagram followers had trekked out to North London see a few pumpkins then surely I could too!

However it was disappointing and certainly not worth the 2 hour wait. If you weren't to know what the queue was for, one could easily mistake it for a One Direction book signing joining the hype to snap a photo for their Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook. Perhaps this is now the audience Kusama is appealing to? Creating art that is both easy on the eye and 'trippy' invites a younger audience to act as her means of promoting herself through all forms of social media. Fame can sometimes destroy rather than enhance the original meaning behind art. It soon becomes just creating art for the sake of art, rather than creating art with a purpose. The '15 minutes of fame' has been replaced with a '15 second Snapchat' in our modern age.

Once I arrived at a teeny tiny entrance (which would clearly only fit teeny tiny teens), I found that after a 2 hour wait I would only get a 2 second viewing of the optical illusion of pumpkins in a mirrored box. So I did what any 'basic-bitch' would do... looked at the man holding the timer and tried to flirt my way to 3 seconds. Clearly unsuccessful at this, I went in, took my Insta-Snapchat-facebookable-tumblresque-photo in one go.. and shuffled out of the box. Behind me I looked at the queue of teenage girls with iPhones at the ready, and sighed. By shortening the length of viewing time to a few seconds, it sets people into a mad panic meaning they view the art not through their own eyes, but through a digital screen.

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Surprisingly the most enjoyable part of the gallery was downstairs. And the best part.. not a soul in sight! The room was filled with installations and random pieces of linear sculptures floating around. Sure, it wasn't amazing... and I've forgotten the name of the artist... but it reminded me of the reason I love sculpture and installation; the way that it gives way for the audience to interact with the space around it. Every time someone walks up to a sculpture or installation, they will approach it in an entirely different and unique way each time. This, for me the is main purpose of creating installations or interactive art.