'Immersive Van Gogh,' Part 2

[This is the second and concluding part of my report on Immersive Van Gogh as it was seen here in New York City.  I went down to Pier 36 on the Lower East Side on Friday afternoon, 31 December, and spent about two hours with my usual theater companion, Diana, taking in the “experience.” 

[Readers should catch up with Part 1, posted on 10 January, for the background to the exhibition and others like it and for a brief (which isn’t to say “short”) biography of Vincent van Gogh.  Here, I give you a description of IVG, my evaluation of the experience, and a summary of the published reviews.]

Van Gogh’s popularity and reputation ignited after his death and grew with each passing decade.  Exhibits of his work are today among the biggest draws in any museum.  That’s, of course, why such shows as Immersive Van Gogh are profitable and so well attended. 

(It doesn’t hurt, either, that virtual reality shows in large venues with plenty of open space are also tailor-made for such COVID times as these.  There are even projected circles on the floor of IVG to designate appropriate social-distancing spacing for viewers.)

That’s why I found myself with Diana at Pier 36 on South Street by the East River to experience IVG at noon on Friday, 31 December 2021.  Diana was almost literally chomping at the bit to see something. After I told her my trepidations about returning to the theater, we decided on an art show—less likely, I figured, to close down due to a COVID outbreak among the ranks.

Diana’d been to a couple of exhibits in recent weeks, but I hadn’t seen anything since the 12 March 2020 shutdown, so even when I reported the absence of actual paintings and the negative responses of some of the reviewers I read, not to mention the high ticket price, she still wanted to go.  So, we did!

Diana, who lives up in Morningside Heights, picked me up in the Flatiron District at 11 and we swung over to the FDR for the drive south.  That all went fine until we got all the way downtown when we missed the Clinton Street exit.  It took us a good 20-minutes-to-half-an-hour to find our way back up to Pier 36 driving on the surface streets of Old New York.  (We passed the 1719 Fraunces Tavern on our meander!)

Nonetheless, we still made it to Pier 36 with 15 minutes to spare before the hour on our timed-entry tickets ($54.99, plus tax and service charge).  Parking the car and negotiating the COVID protocols took another eight or nine minutes—all of which happened outside the event building, so we were lucky Friday’s temperature was about 52°.  Inside was the ticket scan and the bag search.

(I don’t know if the range of ticket prices I’ve been citing is just for New York City or if all the IVG entrance fees are the same across the country whether you live in L.A. or Boston, or see the show in Phoenix or Seattle.  I presume the parking fee is set by the venue, not the show producers; it’s higher than commercial garages in the same area, but you’re paying for the convenience of on-site parking and contributing to the overhead for operating the facility.)

After the entrance preliminaries, Diana and I were ushered through an entry gallery that showed slides of some of the details of the artist’s biography—we arrived when it was running through the women who were influential in the his life, many of whom he painted: his mother, Anna Carbentus van Gogh (1819-1907), who encouraged him to draw; Wilhelmina van Gogh, his youngest sister, known as Wil, who helped support him; Clasina Maria “Sien” Hoornik, a prostitute who served as the artist’s model and lover, among them.

There was a small bar in this anteroom and bunches of large, artificial sunflowers the exhibition was handing out as keepsakes.  The bar, which sold wine, beer, and snacks, also reportedly provided absinthe, van Gogh’s preferred tipple and was once believed to cause hallucinations and erratic behavior (up to and including madness.)

One of the ushers offered to bring Diana, who walks with a cane now, a chair—seating was reportedly scarce, which turned out to be true—and then escorted us into the main gallery-cum-projection room.

We passed through one of several small side galleries on the way to the large main room.  Here there were people standing around the space or seated on the floor as the artwork was projected onto the walls.  The room also offered abstract mirrored sculptures with irregular surfaces (Peter Marks in the Washington Post called them “mirrored ‘icebergs’”) that served as seats—though one really leaned or perched on an accommodating flat spot rather than actually sitting. 

If I had to guess, I’d say the sculptures were inspired by van Gogh’s depictions of stars in his nighttime scenes.  I surmised that their primary purpose was to break up the space and to refract and distort the images of the projected artworks to generate another perspective.

Diana and I proceeded through this small outer room into the large main gallery, chose a spot sort of in the center—it was not crowded and our usher placed Diana’s chair next to a vacant one already there.  Many viewers were lounging on the floor in couples or small family groups; there were quite a few small children wandering all around the room.

In the main room, unlike the side galleries, the floor was also a surface for the projections.  (I couldn’t tell how this was accomplished since spectators moving around the space didn’t disrupt the projection except with an ordinary shadow.  It was as if the image was projected from beneath the floor, but the floor wasn’t translucent like some kind of disco floor.)

For a different perspective, there was a tall platform, like a stand-alone bridge, in the middle of the main room.  One could climb up—there were only stairs to access it—and watch the show from about eight or 10 feet up.  For me, the extra height didn’t make much difference in what I was seeing.  The platform was constructed of the same mirrored material as the seating sculptures in the small side room.

The show was about 30 or 40 minutes long, and Diana and I sat through it 2½-3 times before we moved on.  There didn’t seem to be a thematic sequence to the images—though I suppose Massimiliano Siccardi, the designer, could have had something in mind that I just didn’t spot. 

There’s no narration (as there is, apparently, at Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience), but the images are accompanied by an eclectic soundtrack that includes French chanteuse Edit Piaf singing her 1960 pop hit “Non, je ne regrette rien” (No, I regret nothing) and, in IVG’s climax, Modest Mussorgsky’s crescendoing ”Pictures at an Exhibition” (in the 1922 Maurice Ravel orchestration).

The paintings—parts of them, really; I didn’t notice many visuals in which an entire canvas was projected (chiefly the portraits and self-portraits)—flow from one into another without breaks.  (There is a break with the projection’s credits, including the musical pieces used in the soundtrack, at the end.)  Elements of some 40 paintings are used in the video and, as creative director Korins put it, “broken down piece by piece, element by element.”

Practically none of the paintings are shown still; the projections are all animated in one way or another.  Some simply move as if they were alive, some are manipulated like hallucinogenic visions, with objects in the paintings fluctuating like an amoeba.  Some images pass by faster than others and at least one, The Bedroom (1888), was projected in parts, with the individual pieces of furniture floating randomly in a sea of corn yellow until they’re assembled into a reproduction of the painting.

I can’t say that I saw any rationale for the juxtaposition of the music with the pictures—as much as I love those two particular selections.  (I have an audio cassette of the von Karajan/Berlin Philharmonic recording of the Mussorgsky, the same one used in IVG, which I listened to on my car’s tape deck—which gives you an idea how long ago that was.  I was a fan of Piaf as a teen living in Europe and I have several of her albums—vinyl LP’s, which also gives away their provenance.  “Non, je ne regrette rien” is familiar these days from an Allstate TV commercial from last year.)

Several writers noted that van Gogh has been posthumously diagnosed with chromesthesia, or sound-to-color synesthesia, in which sounds generate colors and other visual sensations in the hearer.  Assuming Siccardi heard this condition, perhaps he was using the reverse phenomenon, color-to-sound synesthesia, and sees the projected images as evoking the music.

From my reading, I had the impression that the various rooms—there are three in all—in IVG showed different works of art, constituting different shows.  It turns out that was wrong: all three rooms showed the same videos synched to the same music at the same time. 

Diana surprised me somewhat because she was very enthusiastic about the experience.  She said so several times while we were there and has repeated her delight when we’ve talked in the days since.  What startled me was that, after paying over $60 to get in plus the parking fee, I figured she’d be disappointed that there wasn’t any actual van Gogh art on display.

You see, Diana’s an art-museumgoer, like me; she was a member of both the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.  I wouldn’t have thought that a van Gogh show without real van Goghs would satisfy her.

But Diana’s also a serious amateur painter.  She’s studied at the Art Students League of New York and has even exhibited a few times.  What she told me she truly valued in IVG was the magnification of van Gogh’s paintings so she could clearly see not just his brushwork, which is another of the artist’s trademarks, but, as she explained to me, which colors he applied to the canvas in which order. 

This really fascinated Diana and she said so to me multiple times both at the show and later over the next couple of days.  She specifically stressed her hope that viewers with no innate interest in art would see this—though my sense is that people who aren’t interested in art wouldn’t be paying attention at that level of detail; they’d be looking for entertainment. 

Jim Beckerman of NorthJersey.com insisted, in fact, that IVG “is all-out entertainment, with no apologies.”   In the Washington Post, Peter Marks, who’s the theater reviewer there, labeled “this unabashedly commercial venture, equal parts art installation, self-guided theater and tourist attraction.”

Indeed, there’s very little educational significance in the exhibition, either regarding Van Gogh’s biography or his artistic development.  As Corey Ross, one of the show’s producers, said in an interview (as paraphrased by the Washington Post): “‘Immersive Van Gogh’ is not seeking to compete with a museum.  It’s entertainment, not edification.”  The curatorial support you’d expect from a museum is absent.

While her little discoveries were enough to make Diana happy to have seen IVG, I had a different response to the experience.  Quite the opposite of Diana’s, in fact.

I said earlier that the three Times reviews had all been negative to one degree or another, and I commented that all three writers were art critics—and one of them had had an especially powerful response to van Gogh’s art.  I suspect that most people with some kind of interest in art will find these so-called immersive experiences disappointing at best, while entertainment-seekers will enjoy them for what they are: a video show.

Readers of Rick On Theater will be aware that when it comes to visual art, I’m a true culture-vulture.  My mother and father started taking my little brother and me to art museums in Washington, D.C., when we were small, and that continued through my adulthood.  In the late 1950s and early 1960s, my parents part-owned a small modern art gallery in Washington.  My father involved himself in two museums after he retired, the then-private Museum of African Art and the National Portrait Gallery.

(I’ve posted on some of these experiences.  See “The National Museum of African Art,” posted on 19 January 2015, and “Gres Gallery,” 7, 10, and 13 July 2018.  Additional pertinent remarks are also in “A Passion For Art: My Parents’ Art Collecting,” 21 November 2017.)

As it happens, van Gogh is my all-time favorite artist and Impressionism and Post-Impressionism are my favorite art styles.  That puts me in a similar position to Maya Phillips, New York Times critic at large, who experienced an intense “emotional high” when she viewed the van Gogh collection at Paris’s Musée d’Orsay in 2017.

Phillips described a response at seeing the artist’s paintings in Paris far more “fierce” than any I’ve had, but she reported the immersive show “left me feeling largely indifferent,” an impression with which I can fully identify.

Among my reservations, I cite IVG’s own promos for the show, that the visitor “steps inside” the artwork.  Not exactly.  You’re surrounded by it, in that it’s in front of you, behind you, to the left and right of you, and, in one gallery, beneath you—but you aren’t inside it.  You’re still looking at it from outside, and the images around you are the same as the one before you. 

It's also still 2D, not 3D—not even the pseudo 3D of the stereoscopic View-Master.  In an interview, IVG creative director David Korins, asserted: “Massimiliano Siccardi, the filmmaker who made the film at the centerpiece of the experience, created a whole new interpretation of Van Gogh’s work. . . .  [H]e . . . almost deconstructed it, then cut it together.”

“What you’re seeing at a museum is the art in a finite, framed setting as a two dimensional experience,” Korins concluded.  Well, maybe—but that two-dimensional framed view is what the artist (remember him?) created!  It’s what van Gogh wanted us to experience.  (Van Gogh’s work is all in the public domain, so commercial users can do what they want with it—after paying a licensing fee to the work’s owner, usually a museum.)

If van Gogh had wanted to make three-dimensional art, he’d have been Red Grooms. 

Furthermore, van Gogh’s paintings, like those of many of his contemporaries, isn’t really just two-dimensional.  He was well known for his use of impasto, so his pigment was raised off the canvas to varying degrees.  This gives his oils a texture that reflects some of his passion in creating the art.  This effect is lost on the photos of his works on which the video is based.

In addition, I invoke a principal articulated by Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) in his theory of “plasticity” (see my essay “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theater,” 9 May 2012).  In my interpretation of Hofmann’s notion, I wrote:

Hofmann defines plasticity as the communication of a three-dimensional experience in the two-dimensional medium of a painting.  His contention is that plasticity derives from the tension between the forces and counter-forces—which he calls “push-pull”—created by the separate elements of the painting.  (The juxtaposition of empty space and filled space, for instance, creates this kind of tension.)  The tension creates the sensation in the viewer that the painting breathes, even seems to move.  

Van Gogh perceived his own version of “push-pull” in the juxtaposition of contrasting colors, such as blue and orange.  This creates the kind of tension, van Gogh felt, that filled space and empty space did for Hofmann.  So, in another sense, van Gogh’s paintings were a 3D experience.

Of course, a viewer would actually have to look at the picture to sense this “plasticity,” not just let it pass before her or his eyes at vertiginous speed.

There were many press articles of one perspective or another in the newspapers from all the cities where Immersive Van Gogh was displayed, including reviews.  (It seems that many editors didn’t know what category into which to put IVG.  Many of the reviewers were art critics, but others were so-called cultural reporters and at least one was the theater reviewer.)

Somewhat surprisingly, the coverage in New York City, arguably the art capital of the U.S., was fairly skimpy.  The New York Times sent three reporters to cover the pair of van Gogh immersives that were playing here, but no other New York daily reviewed VGI (though a couple of others did report on some aspect of the shows).  A couple of out-of-town papers sent someone into the city to review the show.

Even though all the immersive shows were essentially the same irrespective of the city in which they were showing, IVG, at least, adjusted each production for the city and event space in which it played.  So even though the basic video in all exhibitions was the Massimiliano Siccardi creation, I’m going to limit my survey to reviews that specifically covered the New York version.

I’ve already mentioned the Washington Post review, so I’ll start there. 

“The intention here is not so much to try to understand Van Gogh or his work,” wrote Peter Marks.  “The immersive aspect is pleasantly theatrical—Van Gogh in the round—but it’s no more substantive than any special effect.”

Marks gave a capsulized description of his experience:

Watching the paintings metamorphose, with familiar colors and images taking shape on the walls and floors, and Handel and Ravel and Edith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” piped in over the speaker system, I got the appeal.  A certain hallucinogenic quality takes hold, especially if you can block out the spectators all around you with their arms raised, recording the film on their phones. . . .  The impression is not unlike that of an amusement park, or sitting through those scenes in Harry Potter movies, in which human figures in paintings are made to seem alive, changing their facial expressions or walking in and out of their frames.  Like many such effects, the thrills are highly perishable.

In the Pelham Examiner, the digital paper in Pelham, New York, a small town in Westchester County about 10 miles northeast of midtown Manhattan, staff reporter Gillian Ho’s first bit of advice was that “the tickets . . . were pricey” and that “if you’re looking for something inexpensive to do in NYC, this place isn’t for you.” 

Ho found, however, “[t]he whole show . . . really beautiful and exciting to experience.”  Van Gogh’s artworks “were showcased really beautifully.”  She felt, “The show really allowed us to feel the artwork and music.” 

Ho reported that for her, “the showstopper was the music in the exhibit” because it “fit all parts of the experience and was helpful in immersion, which is a pretty tough feat.” 

She admitted that she did “like the exhibit after going, but it was underwhelming considering the amount of praise it got online.  I was expecting much more from the exhibit and hoped it would be better or have something more than just the art show, despite the show being really appealing.” 

“Overall,” Ho concluded, “the experience was really nice, but I think it’s not worth going to considering the price-tag of admission. . . .  [I]n general,” she added, “this isn’t worth visiting.”

One little side note on this Pelham Examiner notice: reviewer Ho is an eighth-grader at an independent prep school in the Bronx.  The Pelham Examiner is a student-run, student-owned independent online daily newspaper serving the town.

In Spotlight News, which provides local news to communities in the Capital District (i.e., Albany area) of New York State, Olivia Poust declared of IVG that “it was one of the best art installations I’ve experienced.” 

“As someone with pre-existing knowledge surrounding the artist,” wrote Poust, “the Pier 36 exhibit was perfect for me, although I wouldn’t have opposed a letter or two.”  She added that “if you are looking for a beautiful visual display and don’t care much for the history, Pier 36 is stunningly crafted.”

Poust admitted that she “took in the room more than the paintings” when she first entered the main gallery.  “I did find that although the set work was beautiful, it could be a bit distracting when trying to focus on the paintings themselves.”  The reviewer felt, “The soundtrack accompanying the paintings fit perfectly.”

The Spotlight News reviewer visited MoMA the previous day where she saw The Starry Night and Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin.  She reported:

“Starry Night” was swarmed by visitors trying to get a picture alongside it and no one other than myself stopped to look at Joseph Roulin’s face.  But in the immersive exhibit, people had stars in their eyes—quite literally—and it was like they were seeing these paintings for the first time.  They were being seen how they were painted, as living and breathing representations of a not-so-colorful world.  When the blues and yellows swept across the wall, it was as if my eyes were following a paint brush.  I will always appreciate seeing an original painting, and I’ll get choked up over it as well, but there’s something to be said for walking amongst art, for existing in tandem with something so timeless and infinite.

As her final word on IVG, Poust recommended that “it’s not something to miss.”  She added, “It’s also a great way to get kids to engage with art, and they’ll definitely enjoy it more than a walk through the Met.”

And now, the Times, which, as I noted above, triple-teamed the exhibits.

First, on 8 March last year, Christina Morales, a reporter covering news on food and culture, filed her report.  “The projections move,” she recounted, “the images shift from dark to light, the colors explode.  The scale, the images and the effect of being inside van Gogh’s work have led some visitors to cry.”

Morales continued: “Groups and families often sit in circles on the ground, six feet apart, to drink in his almond blossoms or ‘The Starry Night Over the Rhône’ (1888).”  These video exhibits replace “the often rigid museum etiquette, with its near silence and strictures intended to protect the artwork, with a looser atmosphere filled by music, lounging and chitchat,” she added.

On 11 June, Jason Farago, a Times critic at large, explained, “Babies don’t develop stereoscopic vision for the first few months of their life; they have a hard time perceiving depth and dimensions, and therefore gravitate to swirling shapes and bright colors.”

Then the zinger: “They and others with similar taste”—by which he must mean “infantile”—"will find great pleasure in our culture’s latest virally transmitted spectacles, which distill fin-de-siècle French painting into an amusement as captivating as a nursery mobile.”  (I get the notion he’s not seeing this . . . ummm, experience in a positive light.)

“Vincent van Gogh, his corpse moldering in Auvers-sur-Oise and his paintings out of copyright,” lamented the Timesman, “has these past few years been dragooned into a new sort of immersive exhibition that reproduces his churning paintings of Provence as wall-filling animated projections.”

Dubbing IVG and its sister shows “postimpressionist fairground attractions,” Farago reported that “‘Immersive Van Gogh’ . . . favors lavish, synesthetic visuals.”  It “features irises, sunflowers and almond blossoms, cloned and flipped at mural scale, their short brush strokes whirling like cold fronts on Sam Champion’s [the weekday-morning and -noon weather anchor at WABC-TV, Channel 7 in New York City] five-day AccuWeather forecast.”

“If you are committed to trying one out,” advised Farago, “go to the east side [IVG], which has graphics of meaningfully greater sophistication.”  He suggested that “some might also enjoy a psychedelic supplement, and in fact the east side venue plans to install an absinthe bar later on.”  Be forewarned, he seemed to add: “Sensuous selfie backdrops come well before intellectual engagement here, so you might as well make the most of it.”

Of the two digital exhibits that were in New York, IVG’s animation “is cleaner and sexier, though not more sophisticated than the flat-screen visuals in airport terminals or sports stadiums.”  The review-writer continued: “In both cases, the digital reproductions . . . strongly recall the escapist fantasies of anime, and the childish moral sentiments that go with them.”  Farago asserted that “this van Gogh is less an artist than a craftsman of other worlds.”

Farago’s last remark was another lament—but this one is for those other art shows, the non-digitized experiences.  He commented:

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.

Have our museums and galleries played down too much the emotional impact of the art they show?  In the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s gallery 822, you can stand as long as you like in front of van Gogh’s “Wheat Field with Cypresses,” the agitated clouds rolling like waves, its climbing greenery edged with trembling blacks.  I want everyone to discover, right there in the thick grooves of the oil paint, the wonder and vitality of art that needs no animation.  There has got to be a way to lead people back to that discovery, even if some of us take a selfie afterward.

I have to say here that I get Farago.  Art, even in the depersonalized environment of a museum, makes me respond emotionally.  I’ve never actually cried from looking at a van Gogh—though I’ve come close.  But Joan Miró makes me smile, Red Grooms makes me giggle, and Jackson Pollock, especially his drip paintings, makes me drool (though, if I’m honest, that’s over the fantasy of owning one).

I’m not a Christian, but Salvador Dalí’s The Sacrament of the Last Supper fills me with a sense of spirituality that I don’t get from Leonardo da Vinci’s treatment of the same subject.  If you know me, you know that that’s an almost impossible achievement.

Returning to the task at hand . . . .  The Times critic at large Maya Phillips, who actually did cry over a van Gogh painting, she confessed, said, as I reported earlier, that the digital reproductions “left me feeling largely indifferent; in fact, the strongest reaction I had was an alarming sense of intrusion and a disingenuous connection with the artist and his work.”

“Immersive art installations . . .,” Phillips observed, “trigger my sense of play and activate both the critic and artist in me.”  But she admonished us: “There’s a large difference between art conceived to be immersive, though, and art strong-armed into an immersive medium.”

After having been excited by the homage by the designer David Korins to van Gogh’s Starry Night on the entrance ceiling, she was immediately disappointed by the “main show” “that left me numb.” 

“[W]hat got to me,” she explained, “was the brevity of the paintings in the video sequence—how quickly they appeared and disappeared.  And it was the animations—his mighty cypresses manifesting like apparitions from the mist so that the magic of the work is rendered literally.”

“There’s no room for subtlety or implication here,” she complained.  “The beauty of being swallowed by projections of van Gogh’s multicolored fields was subdued by the sloppiness of the translation.”  The reviewer realized, “The goal was to use the art as a backdrop for a kind of theatrical experience.”

It was precisely this experience that made me uneasy.  How do you make theater out of art that is so explicitly contained and individual to van Gogh’s perspective?  Despite all the color and character in his work, it would be inaccurate to restyle his paintings as scenery on the quasi-stages that these exhibitions create for audiences to explore not as admirers but active participants.

Phillips felt “it was dishonest” to alter the dimensions of the works because “there’s a reason for the size of the original work; what the painter wanted to obscure, what parts of the world we’re allowed to see and what we’re left to imagine.”

“A painting hanging on a museum wall is a declarative statement, the artist saying, ‘Here’s a piece of a world of color, style and form that I’ve given you.’” 

Recalling her experience in Paris in 2017, when seeing the van Goghs made her cry, made Phillips understand that “we can’t pretend to know van Gogh, just like we can’t pretend his work can be projected on walls as though it’s the same experience.  All we have are the paintings in the frames, but those nights, those cypresses, those sunflowers—they’re more than enough on their own.”

I concur.