Beyond van Gogh: The Immersive Experience (art exhibit 2022)

 

Beyond van Gogh: The Immersive Experience

(art exhibit 2022)

 

 

 

Back in October I went to this show in Hartford, Connecticut. It’s moved on since, but as it’s a traveling show, you can find it elsewhere in the USA, and I suspect it will likely make it back to Connecticut again as it was hugely popular.

 

Van Gogh is probably the central figure in our culture’s folklore of the tortured and tragic artist. Unappreciated during his life time, his paintings now are among the most expensive sales at auctions throughout the world (“Portrait of Dr. Gachet” sold $82.5 million in 1990, it was more recently been valued-up to $171.1 million). He came from an upper-middle-class family, but he died in poverty, selling exactly one work while living, despite his brother, a gallery owner, promoting his work. His letters to that brother reveal an exceptional deep and lucid understanding of color theory, writing worthy of inclusion in a textbook, as well as rich human compassion, but he also was seriously mentally ill, repeatedly hospitalized, famously self-harmed in 1888, and finally committed suicide in 1890 at age 37. His sojourn to Arles 1888 to 1889 didn’t just mark his final mental decline, but also his greatest artistic achievement production, more than 300 paintings and drawings, including most of his now-world-renowned masterpieces. His most famous quote is, "I dream my painting and I paint my dream," but given that these were the words of a man plagued by hallucinations, it’s hard to separate his genius from his madness. He created brilliantly, but with a doomed-man’s fury, as if he sensed he was running out of time so he had no time to rest. Not surprisingly, the best best-selling biography of van Gogh is titled “Lust for Life.” Quite remarkably, he did not begin to paint until he was in his late twenties, so his entire artistic career was less than a decade.

 

In antechamber of the exhibit, as one walked past screens outlining his life, it is written, “Van Gogh’s work radiates joy and celebrates life,” and that “to experience his work is to open oneself to immense joy.” The antechamber also is the first clue as to why this such is big-a-hit with audiences and so disdained by critics. The large panels filling in the artist’s background are hung in a way the creates a snaking corridor to the main event. These panels are separated from each other with decorative antique-looking frames that are empty and these encourage us to pose in them, and have a companion take an I-phone picture while you make silly faces. This is as social-media friendly as an art exhibit can be, and those who dedicate their lives to plumbing the ineffableness of what these masterpieces represent have concluded this isn’t about van Gogh at all, but his name-recognition; that new technology has empowered present-day P.T. Barnums to create a veneer of respectability on a cheap (though the tickets are expensive) tourist trap. Some were snide about the helpful directional arrow that reads “Gogh this way” and critic Cody Song wrote that it failed to achieve the stated, “goal of the exhibit, which is to ‘go beyond the myth, beyond the images, to venture into the work itself.’ One gets the feeling that the point is not to encourage deeper inspection, but to push yet another barrier between you and the work in the form of your iPhone camera.”

 

Jason Farago was the most obnoxious, objecting to how it, “distill[s] fin-de-siècle French painting into an amusement as captivating as a nursery mobile.” What? He doesn’t like Alexander Calder either?

 

And everybody complains about the gist-shop. It’s fashionable to complain about gift shops, and this is an especially bad giftshop, selling trinkets in abundance, but not a single good biography, history, or picture-book.

 

The cultural elite are probably correct in their disdain but, fuck it, I loved the show anyway.

 

The main thing the show promises is delivered, immersion. Within the massive main chamber (about 3,000, in some cities it is as large as 30,000 feet) the walls, supporting pillars, and to a degree even the floors, are aglow with the colors that so distinguished van Gogh from all others. Around you are projected a leisurely loop of about 300 works (overwhelemingly, but not exclusively, from the Arles period), reproduced in larger-than-life high-definition. The reproductions are partially animated so eyes blink on the portraits and self-portraits, seasons change on the landscapes, birds and clouds cross the sky, the swirls in the sky of “Starry Night” rotate, the reflections on the surface of the river Rhône ripple, and the petals of the cherry blossoms fall, flutter, then then flood the entire of our field-of-vision. The show is a bit less-than an hour but your permitted to stay through it more than once, in fact, your encouraged to do so, because they helpfully provided benches.

 

Imbedded in the pictures, a large handful of quotes appear and disappear, all handwritten, some representing the script of the original hands, not all translated into English. A sort-of narration murmurs these words, sometimes a bit inaudibly, as the spoken word merges into the music, mostly instrumental, mixing classic, jazz, a bit of pop. Predictably there’s the melody of Don McLean’s “Vincent” (1971) is heard, but also Pat Methany’s “A Letter Home” (1989), Alexandre Desplat’s “The Shape of Water” (2017), etc.

 

Its visually stunning and also feels peaceful and safe. Its good to linger, and to do so publicly, without expectations or pressures. It first appeared at the end of the CV19 lock-downs, when were we eager to re-embrace the world but much of what we had been used to do, crowded bars and musical performances, still seemed iffy. Earlier incarnations of the show had circles painted on the floors to encourage social-distancing - when the same thing was tried at concerts in early 2020, it didn’t work, but then concerts are uni-directional, we feel compelled to rush the stage, but this is omni-directional (except for the direction of straight-up) and there’s no bad angles. When I saw it, the circles were gone, but the distancing was instinctively respected as people wandered about. Each and every one of us were washed by the light-scatter of the wall projections and no one could block another’s view because our figures, which were both shadowy and a aglow, became part of the piece. Also, showed a particularly large person step in your way, you merely had to turn your head in another direction or stroll.

 

It has competition, there are about a half dozen such shows devoted to van Gogh, and critics who have seen more than one struggle to distinguish them from each other. Additionally, other shows based on the works of Monet, Frida Caro, etc, have begun to appear.

 

Some complain that van Gogh himself disappears behind the spectacle (a paradoxically calming spectacle) but I’d argue not. Not every great artist lends him/herself to this new medium which was not only non-existent, but barely unimaginable, in his time. Monet attempted something like this with his “Water Lilies,” the first exhibited in 1889, and shadow puppetry was millennia-old and touched on some of this, by Monet’s paintings could not move and shadow-puppets could never be this all-surrounding. The oldest projected motion picture “The Roundhay Garden Scene,” from 1888, was released to the public only as the last of these paintings were created, and to the best of my knowledge that first serious attempt make projection so immersive was the epic film “Napoléon,” in 1927. Van Gogh was among the heroes of an era before Modernist revolutions unleased after around 1913 (I’m thinking of the New York Armory Show), where rethinking representation was the order of the day, but in retrospect, it was less smugly intellectualized than what was to come. Rejected by conservatives of its era, his work is now is a vital bridge between the traditional and modern for any who didn’t spend their college years taking a couple credits in art appreciation. He reinvented the world’s color-pallet, and his sensitive evocation of both dynamic forces and sentimental longings, emotionally innocent but lined with hard experience, can be seen reflected all creative medias today: painting, commercial design, landscape architecture, fashion, etc. What was once ignored is now a powerful shared short-hand for our culture.

 

The show makes bold claims about being “cutting edge,” but that’s a bit of an exaggeration. The digital technologies do help, the execution is wonderfully smooth (at least in Hartford, technical glitches and obvious seams at the borders of the over-lapping projections were complained bout in other cities) but they don’t break very much new ground. Similar shows started appearing just before I was born, there was a not-dissimilar set-up at the World’s Fair in Queens in 1964, and by the time I got to experience events mimicking the Joshua-Light-Shows, which go back to 1967, such things were sort-of a given. For years, not-entirely-unrelated immersive environments are created as original works (as opposed to new forms of reproduction) by artists such as James Turrell and Doug Wheeler, though they prefer the far more austere and abstract.

 

Van Gogh’s legacy has kept pace with time the way other masters have not, and in this new context we can’t help but ask, “Why van Gogh?” Why is his high-art also art for all the people in a way that Willem de Kooning could never be (nor want to be)? Song again, “Is it the bright, mesmerizing swirls of color juxtaposed with the often dreary, lonesome subjects that he would capture? Could it be the approachability of his paintings, offering a nostalgia for a feeling, rather than a place?”

 

Whatever it is, van Gogh is special, and that touches on the value of this kind of exhibit, no matter how much the elites may want to poo-poo it. Van Gogh is an artist for the whole world like almost no other. His painting are sought after by the Japanese (he was influenced by Japanese painting, which were just arriving in Europe when he was trying to figure out what an artist actually was) and this specific exhibit was a hit in Dubai. But in Arles produced barely more than 300 works, and the whole rest of his career was barely more than triple that (still, quite a lot for a single decade). He belongs to everyone, but only a mere handful of tens-of-millions (out of a total of 8 billion) humans have the privilege of being near the sanctums wherein the actual work is housed. Bringing Van Gogh to a larger audience through a new medium is important, I’d even say it the most virtuous form of populism, or at least I’d say that if the ticket prices weren’t so goddamned high (I won’t quote the price I paid, because it varies somewhat from city to city).

 

Above I called James Farago “obnoxious,” and he was, but not without justification. He was writing from New York City, home to about 20 of the about 900 paintings, including “Starry Night.” When he wrote his critique there were two, competing, van Gogh immersives showing simultaneously, one on the east side of Manhattan, the other on the west, and yes, the real paintings hanging in the buildings in between are way better and more important. Nether exhibit even tried to address van Gogh’s influences, his development, his historical context, or the social tensions that are reflected in his work; a cheap slide-show with a bored middle-school teacher reading-off index cards do all those things better than the grand presentation. But for all his smugness, Farago also offered a grudging acknowledgment that should be noted:

 

“There’s a speechless and irreducible quality to great art, a value that goes beyond communication or advocacy. And if audiences find that quality more immediately here than they do in our traditional institutions, maybe we should be asking why.”

 

Preview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lxmh5m8hm8g