Moving Away From The Pulsebeat:Ryoji Ikeda

It's all about the 'gram these days, isn't it? Instagram. Many art exhibitions seem to be held purely to encourage people to come along, take photos (that bit I like and comes in handy with the blogs), and then post them to Instagram thus, hopefully, ensuring yet more visitors come and do the same. Repeating the routine, increasing venue, and driving sales.

 

It's more a business model than an art one and while someone like Yayoi Kusama predates the fashion (and is a good artist to boot) it's a little harder to make a case for Ryoji Ikeda. Not least because his current exhibition at 180 The Strand (a Brutalist monster turned Japanese restaurant, boutique, and general hipster hang out) makes such bold claims about its spellbinding power, its beauty, and its overwhelming nature.

Writing for the Londonist, Tabish Khan claimed the exhibition to be so intense it made his eyes water and so beautiful it made him feel as if his heart was about to burst out of his chest. He even claimed he needed a lie down after. On entry to the exhibition, once you've perused the stark concrete industrial interior, decided against parting with £13 for a chicken and tomato broth ramen with parmesan, and you've been handed some completely unnecessary covers to protect your shoes, you are given an introductory talk that suggests you're about to ride one of the world's fiercest, and most dangerous, rollercoasters.

That was not how I experienced it and I certainly didn't need a lie down afterwards. It was reasonably enjoyable though hardly worth the £25 that some people were paying for tickets (there appeared to be some kind of sliding scale depending on what time of day you go, I went reasonably early). When I say reasonably enjoyable I mean it was, for the most part, mildly distracting.

Some of it, to be fair, was a bit shit but it didn't take up much of my time so I wasn't too offended and I could always, as you'll note from my photos, just enjoy the building itself. Twelve large scale immersive works began with a couple of rather weak rooms of computer visuals that my group (each group consisted of about fifteen to twenty people and was led round by a guide) looked at in a somewhat bemused fashion.

Before being led down a reasonably long all white corridor. Which was one of the best bits. The powerful white light was almost blinding and even made the corridor uncomfortably hot. I quite enjoyed being discombobulated but the room at the end of it was very disappointing.

The walls were lined up with large speakers which each emitted noisy and vaguely ambient sounds. It was quite pleasant but as it had been sold as a disorienting and even transformative experience it could only underwhelm. I'm a veteran of My Bloody Valentine playing the holocaust section of You Made Me Realise at Reading University and I listen to Asbestos Lead Asbestos by World Domination Enterprises for fun. You'll need to do better than this to impress me.

The exposed pipework up in the rafters of the room looked cool though. The next room, in which we passed through a dark corridor to reach, wasn't much better. A screen with a large dot on it pulsed and vibrated and people took photos of it before we all sat down and looked at some neon lights in a little alcove. I was a little bored. I noticed one of the girls in our group had a nice dress on and thought about what I was going to have for tea.

Which probably wasn't what Ikeda was aiming for. The next room, finally, was a vast improvement. Three very large screens filling up with confusing data and constantly refreshing was both relaxing and strangely comforting to look at while at the same time being impossible to process. There were graphics that looked like mother boards, some that looked like corrupted spreadsheets, and, best of all for me, large maps of cities, continents, and finally the world itself. I managed to recognise London and New York City but drew a blank on most of the others.

I was getting quite comfy in this room, sat on a carpeted floor, far enough away from everyone else to briefly remove my mask (incidentally, only two of our group opted to go maskless), and could have spent a little more time there but our guide eagerly ushered us towards the final room. The one he said was the best, the most disorientating.

It wasn't. There was a series of screens on the floor and another on the ceiling and our 'task', if you like, was to walk over and under them. Reviews suggest people losing their footing and becoming slightly ill but all of our group just waded straight across it, took yet more photos, and then headed out down a slightly careworn corridor into a side street, very much the tradesmen's entrance - staff were hanging around smoking, before taking one last look, and one last snap, of the concrete and wandering off down the Thames, across Blackfriars Bridge, down to Southwark, and into The Ring for a pint of Staropramen and a packet of salt'n'vinger Taytos. Which, for me, was a far more transformative experience than the slightly hucksterish art of Ryoji Ikeda.