Image taken from The Week magazine on my iphone. It shows an installation of David Hockney’s The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011.
I was walking around Salford Quays a few months ago and I noticed a very large tent-type structure housing what it called a ‘Van Gogh Immersive Experience’. “Have you ever dreamt of stepping into a painting?” asked the hoardings. (For £25, if I remember correctly.) There were no queues – which didn’t surprise me – and I imagined that this attempt to turn the work of a great artist into some sort of digital sensurround was bound to fail. Even these days of visual excess it seemed pretty tasteless to take great work in one medium – oil painting - and desecrate in another – digital projection.
Well, how wrong can you be? There are, apparently, five of these things going great guns across the globe. There are Hilma af Klint experiences, too, and in Paris there is one about the Mona Lisa. There’s a Dali and a Frida Kahlo about to open. Suddenly, immersion is everywhere. (And now I see where the Sebastiao Salgado exhibition ‘Amazonia’ which I found so noisy and wrote about in July got its forest-immersion ideas from.) You can see why this format would be popular with the the galleries: no security problems because the artworks aren’t actually there; the digital medium can flash round the world in seconds, so no logisitical problems; and you can mount them in different places simultaneously. Think of the revenue!
Those artists above are all dead, so they can’t complain. But now David Hockney has taken the plunge with an immersive exhibition called ‘Bigger and Closer (Not Smaller & Further Away). There’s even a “specially-recorded voiceover”. In the press releases about this he is reported as saying: “The audience will feel in this. They will feel in the forest. They will feel on the cliff….” The suggestion seems to be that this one is more legitimate because the artist is alive and participating.
I haven’t been to any of these “experiences” though I might go to one, if I get the chance, now that my interest has been piqued. I’ll try to keep an open mind but I don’t think it is too hard to imagine what they will be like. They will attempt to engage digitally with every human sense: vision, sound, smell even, possibly taste and doubtless touch one way or another. Customers will pay to be overwhelmed.
It’s the digital medium that’s the driver. There is nothing to restrain it. Anything is possible. It’s like someone who humbly offers to help you with a job you have and then takes over completely and gets you sacked. So it starts off as a kind of support technology to the arts and all of a sudden it has become the art itself.
I’ll reserve judgment. But I think that my problem with all of this is that I already have an all-round immersive experience. It’s called ‘Being Alive’ and it’s unbeatable.