On the way home, every bright colour calls to me. I feel myself in a way that I haven’t in years. It was the pumpkins. Glowing bright yellow-orange in a sea of endless mirrors. I am calm. Happy.
“Nope.”
I sigh loudly, closing my banking app and lowering my phone. The desk attendant glances at me with an odd look on their face.
Oops.
Head down, face heating, I turn and make my way back through the gallery to see the rest of the free exhibits.
According to the website AGSA offers meaningful art experiences for everyone. It really doesn’t feel like that while I do maths in my head, trying to figure out if I can afford to get into the Andy Warhol exhibit before I am paid later that week.
Should have checked the website.
Shouldn’t have gotten that icy mango bubble tea.
I had forgotten that it was the weekend of Womad, and the city was full of bohemians and artistic types. A group, through no fault of their own, that I had grown to detest. Social media would be full of images of people being artsy, women in their perfect linen maxi dresses and Birkenstocks.
Is there a law requiring this outfit during Womad?
Predictably, the crowd in the gallery is upper middle class. Predictably Boomer. Predictably artistic.
They look at me like I am out of place. That nearing forty, I am too old to be wearing my vans and band shirt in a not-so-ironic manner. I don’t belong.
“You never get it quite right, do you?”
I don’t know what to say. I mean, who thinks that a bad dye job would end with such a scathing critique about you in one neat little sentence?
I thought we were friends. Best friends.
I am twenty and I just want to belong, for once.
I don’t quite fit in with the bohemian, artistic crowd I am dying to be a part of. I’m not artistic enough to OD in the bathroom of a run-down share house. Artistic enough to break down in an appealing way. Artistic enough to waste my talent while sucking down pack after pack of Marlboro Lights, chasing it with Fruity Lexia.
I am, instead, shy in a way that comes off as cold. I am too desperate to be loved. I love Stephen King over Jack Kerouac. I am pumpkin spice.
A basic bitch.
I throw my head back and laugh with her, pretending it doesn’t matter.
“Just fantastic, wasn’t it?”
The Boomer bohemian’s embroidered silk pants swish as they pass, gushing over an installation piece called ‘The spirits of the pumpkin descended into the heavens’ by Yayoi Kusama.
Here we go, more wankery…
Maybe if I had pants like that…
I am conflicted.
It only takes a minute to go through the exhibit of other works by Kusama. More than 5 million visitors lined up to see her work between 2013 and 2018. I’m not surprised. Her work looks cool; artistic in a user-friendly way. I get some great pictures for Insta, just like everyone else.
Is her art well-planned, sell-out style commercialism?
I climb the stairs and peek inside the mirrored box of endlessly repeating pumpkins, the type of pattern that repeats itself endlessly in Kusama’s work, and something in me clicks. I find I don’t really care.
I don’t care if Kusama is a sell-out or a genius. I no longer care about fitting in with the artistic crowd. About Boomer bohemians with pants costing more than my weekly rent. I am enthralled by the colour and light.
I feel alive.
The world of the art gallery, the feeling of judgment, is gone.
Later, I come to understand why ‘The spirits of the pumpkin descended into the heavens’ speaks to me in the way it does.
Besides being bright and colourful, and therefore attractive to my basic bitch sensibilities, it’s something about Kusama. She doesn’t really fit in or belong. Born in post-war Japan, she was a world apart from the expectations put upon her and came to the United States with only a few hundred dollars. She survived by dumpster diving. Even after making it in the New York art scene, her influence on Pop Art was largely ignored. She was not male, she was not white. When we studied the Pop Art movement in that bastion of culture, the high school art class, she was never mentioned.
Forget fitting in with the artistic cool kids if Kusama doesn’t either.
For a brief moment, I am envious of her. Despite everything, despite not quite fitting, she is relentless in her art. Now, after her struggle, at least five million people have seen her work. A little bit sick really, to be envious of a woman living in a psychiatric hospital.
I am sure that if I locked myself away with no earthly worries, I would just sleep and watch telly rather than write.
So, I admit, I’m slightly envious.
“Really!?”
I look down and laugh. The others at the bus stop glance my way, deciding if they should be fearful or curious.
At some point, as I dodged the Womad crowds on the way to the gallery, I must have spilled my bubble tea all over my band shirt. There is a nice, bright yellow-orange stain against the black.
Cool. That’s why everyone at the gallery was looking at me strangely.
At least I match the pumpkins now.
Lucy Irene 
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