A welcome return to the Tate Modern to see the Andy Warhol exhibition. This is my first outing to a gallery since lockdown, and the Tate is very quiet. Everyone has had to book an appointment and queue for entry, before having our temperature taken and being told to sanitise our hands. Once in the Warhol exhibition we are supposed to move only in one direction, but this soon goes awry, and we end up dodging around people to try and maintain social distancing. Everyone seems to find the situation amusing but also odd. When we exit the exhibition, a large queue has built up as they are only allowing a certain number of people in at a time, and I think people are moving more slowly than they anticipated.
This way of seeing an exhibition is a pleasant change from the usual scrum, but it feels very sterile and unnaturally quiet. It is different and may now be the new way. I don’t know how we will be able to hold our own exhibitions next term. From previous experience with third year shows the venues are necessarily small to keep costs down. They also take place in the colder months of November and December. I can’t see many people waiting outdoors in the cold to come look at our work two or three at a time. Even if we show work in groups of three or four to save on costs, the fact remains that numbers will be limited indoors. This is something we need to address before the term starts.