Infinity Mirrored Room––The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013.Photo courtesy David Zwirner/© Yayoi Kusama.
Way back in October 2012, art collective Random International installed their immersive artwork, Rain Room into The Curve at London’s Barbican Centre. At the time, the ambitious installation—an indoor rainfall that tracks visitors’ movements through sensors—was a breakthrough, accompanied with breathless tales of queuing for three hours for a few minutes in a darkened room, enveloped by the sound and sensation of falling raindrops. (On Monday, the installation, which has subsequently been exhibited at MoMA in New York and LACMA in Los Angeles, was bought by hotelier Louis Li for an undisclosed sum, and will find a permanent home at a new hotel in Melbourne, Australia). Importantly, the work offered a physical encounter and a wondrous visual spectacle at the same time.
But before Rain Room arrived at the Barbican, an equally significant exhibition had opened a mere twenty minutes walk away at Tate Modern, some months prior: a retrospective of the work of Yayoi Kusama. For anyone present in and around this location at that time, the Kusama show was, for want a better word, mega. Although the Japanese artist had been making art since the late 1950s, revered by art world heavy weights such as Donald Judd and Joseph Cornell, the Tate retrospective arguably made her a household name, soon to be universally known and beloved. The show included a magnificent version of her now ubiquitous Infinity Mirrored Rooms, and with that, the gallery experience was changed forever.
The side-by-side success of the Kusama show and the Rain Room within months of each other was a turning point for the international art world. It would no longer be enough to present a picture on a wall, or play a video on screen, visitors wanted more: they wanted an experience. The pursuit and value attributed to “experiences” as opposed to “things” is often associated with the millennial generation—a 2017 survey conducted by online ticketing and event management platform, Eventbrite found that 3 out of 4 American millennials would rather buy an experience than something desirable.
In terms of art, however, what even constitutes an “experience” in this sense? The magical element of Kusama’s kaleidoscopic chambers—a million tiny bulbs twinkling like fairy dust in a night sky—create a sense of total immersion, of letting go, of standing and being apart of something that doesn’t have to be explained, it is just seen, appreciated, experienced. It is the happy fizz of pure, childlike wonder captured by the eye, and kept whole and sacred within. It does not stand-up to theorising and art history classes, and that’s not a dismissal. It is, in fact, its greatest gift.
But with great beauty comes great desire: in the case of Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Rooms and even the Rain Room, desire came in the form of a smartphone and the paradoxical urge to bottle the experience into a 2D image to share across the internet. It is no coincidence that the boom in experience-led art coincided with the worldwide explosion of Instagram—in April 2012 the photo-sharing app, founded in 2010, was bought by Facebook, marking its global takeover. And—as we are well aware—Kusama’s exhibitions are notable for their Instagram presence: over 800k images are accompanied by the hashtag of the artist’s name on the app; according to the Guardian 5 million museum visitors have flooded through gallery doors in the past five years to photograph themselves like mysterious spectres emerging out of the blinking glitter of her creations.
The popularity of Kusama’s work in the age of Instagram is unsurprising. As it has been well documented, Instagram promotes a certain type of aesthetic: contrasting colours—the dreaminess of ‘millennial pink’ clashed with the ludicrous green of a halved avocado—and of course, illusions, mirrors, sparkling colours and gleaming lights, in other words, everything encompassed by Kusama’s cosmic installations. The realisation, however, that there is—or at least was (some believe the age of the cookie-cutter “Instagram aesthetic” is over)—a certain formula of aesthetic choices that work on Instagram ushered in a whole crop of artistic projects and pop-up museums, most notably the nauseatingly kitsch Museum of Ice Cream, which now has a permanent set-up in Los Angeles and reportedly valued at $200 million. The same candy pinkness that is the Museum of Ice Cream’s main selling point is the same reason why business is booming at London’s spacey, Wes Anderson-esque restaurant, Sketch—a padded pink palace of every Instragrammer’s dreams. Although the restaurant opened in 2003, in the age of Instagram it has gained unprecedented allure on account of its whimsical, photographable interiors; in the case of the Museum of Ice Cream it is a space specifically engineered for sharable photo ops.
The zenith of all of this surely must be the news as reported last week that Japanese art collective teamLab’s Tokyo museum is apparently the world’s most popular single-artist destination, overtaking even the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. For those not familiar, you’re likely to have seen the collective’s work on, where else, but Instagram. TeamLab—compiled of artists, programmers, engineers, mathematicians, animators and architects—create large scale immersive installations composed of swirling cascades of colour and light. Although the collective’s eye popping installations have been met with scepticism within the art world, they are beloved by punters—in its first year alone the collective’s museum, teamLab Borderless, attracted some 2.3 million visitors. While they have stalled plans to open a museum in Brooklyn for the time being, their expansion and popularity shows no signs of slowing down.
Many of teamLab’s installations bear a striking resemblance to Kusama’s. But the collective takes the ideas started by Kusama to new extremes: these rooms are not mirrored illusions, but actual dreamworlds you can walk around in. Here, the magical spectacle is rendered real in a dazzling experience that caters to Instagram feeds. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but when’s the spectacle going to end?