Experience over the material
THE first time I went to the Hirshhorn Museum’s Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors exhibition, I went as a reviewer and had the place to myself. That’s a great way to encounter art and engage with the exhibition’s theme and argument, but it’s not the experience most people have. So I decided to go back, as an ordinary visitor.
The exhibition has been setting attendance records at the Hirshhorn with visitor numbers triple the average since it opened in February, and foot traffic at its highest in almost four decades. Big crowds, alas, mean long queues. The exhibition, built around Kusama’s immersive boxes in which visitors are surrounded by mirrors and reflected lights, creates almost impossible crowd-management problems. You will need a timed ticket to get in, and then expect to wait in often long lines to enjoy only 20 to 30 seconds inside each of the individual Infinity Rooms.
While I didn’t spend hours in the Infinity Rooms, I got to spend a lot more time there than others. Thus, I missed the temporal dynamics of the “average” visit, full of the intensity of expectation, extended periods of waiting, and brief moments of enjoyment.
The crowds were thick at the beginning of the exhibition, so I skipped the first few boxes and proceeded to a couple of my favourite spaces: the 2009 Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity with its golden glow of flickering lanterns and the 2016 All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, which suggests an endless field of preternaturally glowing gourds.
After that, I toured the Kusama galleries, full of her paintings and sculpture, and then made my way to the exit, through the “Obliteration Room”, where visitors are invited to paste coloured polka-dot stickers on the white walls and furnishings of the now well-obliterated and raucously colourful space.
This final room was more meaningful the second time around, with its exuberance of stickers, and with the crowds lingering and enjoying a bit of camaraderie. It is one of the more relaxing and engaging moments in the exhibition, perhaps because only at the exit point do visitors finally feel free of the tension of expectation and gratification – waiting and reward – that defines much of the experience.
Kusama’s basic aesthetic – her fascination with infinity and repetition and the way these things can obliterate the ego (like being dwarfed by a sea of stars on a cloudless night) – is lost when the time in each room is so rushed. You have barely registered the basic look of the space when there is a knock on the door and it opens, daylight rushes in and you’re on your way to the next one. The noise of the crowd also filters through the walls of Kusama’s boxes, disrupting the serenity I remembered from my earlier encounters.
The mad crowds of the Kusama exhibition raise important questions about the basic experience museums offer, and whether they can continue to offer it in an age when success is measured in foot traffic, admission and other revenue (if the museum has an entry fee), and crowd-based metrics (social media success, including Instagram posts, among them).
Museums such as the Hirshhorn, which don’t charge admission and offer intangible rather than material rewards, seem to be harnessing the power of what is often called the “experience economy”. The idea is simple: Some people are more interested in experiencing things (such as travel, art, social gatherings) than buying material objects. Exhibitions such as the Kusama show appeal to much the same audience that is attracted to “experiences” over objects, a large, and largely young, audience who would rather invest their money and time in going to things, being out and about, and soaking in the ambiance of a place and the dynamics of an event, than drop a fortune on clothes or a new car.
The experience economy also seems to promise a reservoir of fundamentally aesthetic interest in the world – better to enjoy a sunset on the beach or an afternoon at the Kusama exhibit than hoard up useless money in your back account. That seemingly anti-materialistic energy could be diverted into a more prominent social role and perhaps better bottom line for museums. It seems to be an egalitarian system, too, rewarding people for their curiosity, engagement and willingness to wait in line rather than merely for their socioeconomic status.
But the more you examine the actual experience offered at the Kusama show, the less idealistic it seems. Like other highly prized experiences, those who have financial resources are more likely to be able to enjoy it. Not only do they have greater freedom to arrange their schedules around the experience, they are more likely to gain in social status from saying they have participated. And afterwards, they are better positioned to relate the experience to a reservoir of similar experiences, and thus integrate it into their memory and world view.
But the experience of Kusama is discontinuous, fractured, full of stops and delays and rushed encounters. It is, in fact, so unsatisfying that one might reasonably say there is no experience of it at all, which is why the selfie Instagram picture is so important. Rather like the Obliteration Room, in which visitors paste coloured stickers over blank, white walls, the selfie is something pasted over the blankness of the experience itself.
And it is something that can be exchanged. Placing the selfie on social media not only substitutes for the experience that didn’t in fact happen, it engages the audience in an economy of images, including exchange, competition and reward (praise, “likes”, retweets). The experience at the core of the experience economy is now looking not so different from any other commodity, although it is less tangible.
This exhibition highlights problems far deeper than those raised by the all-too-successful blockbuster shows of the past. This isn’t about managing success and finding the right balance between access for crowds and the integrity of the individual aesthetic experience.
This is about the nature of experience itself and whether museums want to reinforce an understanding of existence that is fractured, competitive, capitalistic and ultimately alienated from art. Or strive for something else, more radical, that doesn’t align with how we experience the rest of the world outside the museum walls? So, the Kusama dilemma isn’t about the dynamics of crowd control and better ticketing systems, it’s about the basic mission of the institution.