Art

There's an awesome exhibition at the Hayward Gallery at the moment. It's called 'Universal Experience: Art, Life and the Tourists' Eye' and is an amalgamation of photography, film, installation art, sculpture and general strangenesss. They have one piece that I've seen before in many a modern art gallery in the states - it consists of a pile of sweets piled up in a corner. Visitors are invited to take a sweet and therefore actively engage with the artwork. The weight of sweets at the start of the exhibition is the weight of the artist's partner, who died of AIDS. As the shiny-wrapped candies diminish there's a continual remembrance of the diminished life of one man. It made me think of communion and thousands of people carrying around a symbol of a man's death digesting in their stomachs.