Exhibitions

Subterms

    More stories

    • 200 Shares99 Views

      in Exhibitions

      Salvador Dalí… Introvert? A New Show Looks at the Quieter Side of the Debaucherous Surrealist’s Life

      by

      Salvador Dalí painted an outlandish and dream-like universe. On occasion, he and his wife, Gala, brought those visions to dazzling life with outlandish parties hosted at their home in Portlligat, Spain. 
      The Surrealist couple’s soirees are the stuff of legend. Elaborately staged costumes were a must, with guests and hosts decked out in all manner of concoctions.
      Wild animals were often on the guest list, too, and could be found roaming freely through the Dalí’s fascinating home.
      At one such fête, Gala Dalí spent much of the evening reclining in a broad, velvet-covered bed, with a costume horse’s head crowning her head. Waiters served her food in a golden slipper, as a lion cub on a lease on the bed beside her (the party was, believe it or not, a benefit for refugees). 
      Despite (or because of) how extravagant the parties were, rumors swirled that the couple was involved with something more illicit. Orgies or satanical cabals were not infrequent accusations.
      Salvador Dalí, Les Dîners de Gala (pp. 16-17). Courtesy of Taschen.
      Though that was more the stuff of gossip, the Dalís’ culinary predilections were no more puritanical, as evidenced in the artist’s 1973 Surrealist cookbook Les Dîners de Gala (the dazzlingly illustrated book was reissued by Taschen in 2016).
      On the menu, one finds Frog Pasties, Toffee with Pine Cones, and, yes, a Peacock à l’Impériale dressed and surrounded by its court, which features a taxidermied peacock presented on a platter. Dalí described the recipes not as healthy (never!), but “devoted to the pleasure of taste.” 
      Those pleasures of taste came, of course, at great material expense—financial burdens which the artist and Gala, who was also his manager, funded through commercial endorsements including advertisements for Lanvin chocolates, which further played up the mustached caricature of Dalí’s persona. Such enterprises earned the couple derision in many circles; André Breton nicknamed Dalí “Avida Dollars,” an anagram of the artist’s name meaning “eager for dollars.” 
      But now a new exhibition, “Dalí at Home,” at the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, presents a softer look at the artist’s years in Portlligat. While photographs of Dalí in flamboyant poses drew wonder and disdain from the public alike, there were, as the exhibition shows, a few photographers who formed intimate friendships with the artist, gaining access to the personal and very private world he kept in Cadaqués, Portlligat, and nearby Figueres, the town where he was born.
      Horst P. Horst, Salvador and Gala Dalí (1950/2016). Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL. Courtesy of Condé Nast and the Horst Estate.
      In nearly 40 portraits by the photographers Horst P. Horst, Ricardo Sans, Melitó Casals, Lies Wiegman, and Robert Descharnes, the artist is presented informally, at times even tenderly, as he works, relaxes, and chats with friends at his home.
      Primarily taken in the 1950s and early 1960s, one sees a different Dalí—an artist who (even momentarily) appears unaware of himself. One photograph by Horst shows Dalí and Gala walking along the rocks of Costa Brava, chatting. In another, Dalí is snapping a simple photograph of Gala in an olive orchard. 
      The home in Portlligat (today the Salvador Dalí House-Museum) held deep sentimental value for the artist, which may explain the unaffected ease of these images. He lived and worked in the house for most of his life: it was his primary residence from 1930 to 1982, aside from his years spent in the United States.
      Impoverished and financially cut off from his family, Dalí first set up a home in a small fisherman’s hut in the town, drawn to the isolated landscape and the light (many of his paintings are based on its landscape), and spent some 40 years building it out. (In 1968, Dalí purchased a castle in Púbol, Spain, as a retreat for Gala. With their relationship growing increasingly rancorous, Gala moved to the castle full time soon after. Dalí was apparently only able to visit her by invitation). 
      “Portlligat is the place of production, the ideal place for my work,” the artist once said. “Everything fits to make it so: time goes more slowly and each hour has its proper dimension. There is a geological peacefulness: it is a unique planetary case.”  The home, he explained, had a biographical element to it.
      Ricardo Sans, Dalí in Fireplace (1950) Collection of The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL. Courtesy of Ricardo Sans, © Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2020.
      Over the decades, this wholly unique home became—rather than a place of pure spectacle—something quite cozy, filled with mementos, carpets, and velvet pillows, gatherings of dried flowers, and antique furniture. In one photograph the artist is crouching inside a fireplace writing or drawing, almost like a small child hiding at home. 
      “There is only one difference between a madman and me,” Dalí famously quipped. “The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.”
      What these pictures seem to say is that even madness can sometimes look quite ordinary.  
      Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

    • 250 Shares109 Views

      in Exhibitions

      Botanical Gardens Around the World Are Hosting Augmented Reality Artworks by Ai Weiwei, El Anatsui, and Other Artists This Fall

      by

      This fall, a group of artworks by Ai Weiwei, El Anatsui, and other contemporary artists will simultaneously go on view in a dozen different gardens worldwide. In a sense, that is. They’re augmented reality artworks, all belonging to “Seeing the Invisible,” a new exhibition sponsored by the Outset Contemporary Art Fund and the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens—the latter of which is one of the sites in which the newly-commissioned projects will also go on view. 
      Other hosting locations include the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in South Africa, and the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. The show, which will span six countries in total, brands itself as the “first exhibition of its kind to be developed in collaboration with botanical gardens from around the world.”

      In each case, the artists’ efforts will be situated among the local flora thanks to a dedicated, downloadable app. The idea, said exhibition co-curator Tal Michael Haring in a statement, is to break down “the binary between what is often considered ‘natural’ versus ‘digital.’”
      “Coming out of the pandemic when outdoor experiences and nature have taken on a new meaning and gravity in our lives, this exhibition represents a fresh way for people to engage with art and nature simultaneously,” Haring added. 
      Outset co-founder Candida Gertler and director Mirav Katri even offered a name for the special brand of work in the show: “this exhibition [bridges] the physical and digital worlds to create a new ‘phygital’ model,” they said in the show’s announcement.
      Ori Gersht, On Reflection Virtual (2014).
      Many of the artworks going on view, including pieces by Sigalit Landau and Jakob Kudsk Steensen, were commissioned specifically for the show by the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens in partnership with the Outset Contemporary Art Fund; other examples, such as contributions from Ori Gersh and Sarah Meyohas, were adapted from existing projects. 
      It’s the first AR experience for many on the exhibitor list, the show’s other co-curator, Hadas Maor, said, though didn’t specify who. Similarly, details surrounding the projects have yet to be announced, but Maor noted that “critical issues around the environment” will be a major theme. 
      See the full list of exhibiting artists and locations here.
      Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

    • 188 Shares99 Views

      in Exhibitions

      Painter Jason Martin Found Hope During Lockdown by Creating Sculptural, Color-Saturated New Paintings—See Images Here

      by

      Artist Jason Martin’s work has long captured the attention of viewers for the almost sculptural effect produced by the painter’s thick strokes of impasto. Each of his horizontal bands, which mimic the effect of canyon striations, challenge one’s perception of dimensionality by appearing to reach beyond the plane of the work itself. 
      While Martin, who studied at Goldsmith’s College in London in the early 1990s, has in past exhibitions adhered to more neutral color palettes in order to emphasize his work’s textural scapes, he is exploring bold new territory now, as illustrated in his latest show, “Space, Light, Time” at Lisson Gallery Shanghai, which opened earlier this month and is on view through late August.
      The work marks an exciting new chapter for the artist, who sought to return to the fundamentals of painting while in his studio in Portugal during much of 2020. It consists of a series of bold new shapes and bolder colors, partly inspired by Yves Klein and Lucio Fontana—two artists who played a key role in this shift for the artist.
      In the space, Martin’s round works in oriental blue and cobalt violet assume center stage on the gallery’s first and second walls, while further back in the later rooms, one can see an ultramarine blue tondo followed by a series of neon pink and scarlet canvases. The works, the gallery notes, “illustrate the core of Martin’s practice, yet [also] depict the ever-evolving pursuit of an artist exploring new and unique ways to handle the medium and the scenes that emerge.”
      In many ways, Martin’s hypnotic, colorful forms emit a more energetic, joyful sense of aliveness than his previous work, employing for the first time, too, mirrored surfaces using metallics like gold, silver, copper, and nickel in some of the works. All are meant to inspire, according to the gallery, “a desire to escape the melancholy and start anew.”
      To view Martin’s works, check out images of the show below and on the gallery’s website. 
      Installation view of Jason Martin’s “Space, Light, Time” at Lisson Gallery. Photo courtesy Lisson Gallery.
      Installation view of Jason Martin’s “Space, Light, Time” at Lisson Gallery Shanghai. Photo courtesy Lisson Gallery.
      James Martin, Untitled (Quinacridone scarlet) (2021). Photo courtesy Lisson Gallery.
      Installation view of Jason Martin’s Untitled (Fluorescent pink / Titanium white) (2021). Photo courtesy Lisson Gallery.
      A closeup of Jason Martin’s Untitled (Fluorescent flame red / Rosso laccato) (2021). Photo courtesy Lisson Gallery.
      Jason Martin, Untitled (Ultramarine blue) (2021). Photo courtesy Lisson Gallery.
      Jason Martin, Untitled (Ultramarine blue) (2021). Photo courtesy Lisson Gallery.
      Jason Martin, Untitled (Cobalt violet) (2021). Photo courtesy Lisson Gallery.
      Jason Martin, Untitled (Permanent red) (2021). Photo courtesy Lisson Gallery.
      Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

    • 250 Shares99 Views

      in Exhibitions

      See Socially Engaged Works by Carrie Mae Weems, Titus Kaphar, and Other Artists in Antwaun Sargent’s Curatorial Debut at Gagosian

      by

      Last week, as the streets of Chelsea were bathed in the golden light of early evening, a line wrapped around the block as creative types queued up to be admitted to the night’s hottest event. It wasn’t a restaurant or club, it was the opening of “Social Works,” a group exhibition at Gagosian’s West 24th Street gallery.
      Curated by writer and newly appointed Gagosian director Antwaun Sargent, “Social Works” features art by Kenturah Davis, Theaster Gates, Titus Kaphar, Rick Lowe, Carrie Mae Weems, and others, all of whom in some way reflect on Black communities and social engagement.
      “Given the last year of the pandemic and protest and the history in which Black artists operate, the work does more than just sit quietly on the wall,” Sargent told the New York Times.
      Christie Neptune, Untitled (2021).© Christie Neptune. Courtesy of the artist and Grant Wahlquist Gallery, Portland, Maine, and Gagosian.
      Linda Goode Bryant, founder of the gallery Just Above Midtown and Project EATS, an urban farming organization, grew vegetables in the gallery and a video made in collaboration with architect Elizabeth Diller titled Are we really that different? (2021).
      Theaster Gates, meanwhile, pays homage to DJ Frankie Knuckles, the “Godfather of house music” and an icon of the Black and queer music scenes of the 1980s. Rick Lowe, founder of the Project Row Houses organization in Texas, presents a new series of works documenting the Tulsa Race Massacre.
      See more images of the show below.
      “Social Works,” installation view, 2021. Artworks © artists. Photo: Rob McKeever. Courtesy Gagosian.
      Alexandria Smith, Iterations of a galaxy beyond the pedestal, (2021). © Alexandria Smith. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
      “Social Works,” installation view, 2021. Artworks © artists. Photo: Rob McKeever. Courtesy Gagosian.
      Carrie Mae Weems, The British Museum (2006–). © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York and Gagosian.
      Rick Lowe, Black Wall Street Journey #5 (2021). © Rick Lowe Studio. Photo: Thomas Dubrock. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian.
      “Social Works,” installation view, 2021. Artworks © artists. Photo: Rob McKeever. Courtesy Gagosian.
      Lauren Halsey, black history wall of respect (II) (2021). © Lauren Halsey. Photo: Rob McKeever. Courtesy of the artist, David Kordansky Gallery, and Gagosian.
      Kenturah Davis, the bodily effect of a color (sam) (2021). © Kenturah Davis. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio. Courtesy of the artist, Matthew Brown Los Angeles, and Gagosian.
      Theaster Gates, A Song for Frankie (2017–21). © Theaster Gates. Photo: Rob McKeever. Courtesy Gaosian.
      “Social Works,” installation view, 2021. Artworks © artists. Photo: Rob McKeever. Courtesy Gagosian.
      “Social Works” is on view through August 13 at Gagosian, 555 West 24th Street. 
      Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

    • 275 Shares99 Views

      in Exhibitions

      Researchers Discovered a Bookmark Drawn on by Vincent Van Gogh Inside an Old Novel. Now, It’s on View for the First Time

      by

      In 1883, Vincent Van Gogh gave a friend a book about French peasants. More than 135 years later, researchers discovered that the novel contained another present, too: a handmade bookmark, featuring a series of early sketches by the Dutch artist. 
      Made when the artist was still in his late 20s, the three drawings are laid out on a single strip of paper. Each depicts a single figure—perhaps peasants inspired by those in the book.
      Now, for the first time, the drawings are on public view in “Here to Stay,” an exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam that’s comprised of artworks and other artifacts that have entered the institution’s collection over the past decade. 
      “Relatively very few drawings from Van Gogh’s early period survive, although we know he must have made hundreds,” Teio Meedendorp, a senior researcher at the museum, said in a statement. “Small informal sketches like these—they are really tiny—are even more scarce, and practically limited to letter sketches.”
      Meedendorp added that the drawings were likely completed at the end of 1881 when the artist was living in his parents’ village, Etten. The strip, the researcher went on, “gives an idea of Van Gogh’s quick scribbling capacities, and the item as such is a rare tangible witness of his reading habits: a personalized bookmarker.”
      Three recently-discovered sketches made by Vincent Van Gogh circa 1881. Courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum.
      The drawings were found in a copy of Histoire d’un Paysan, an illustrated novel about the French Revolution told through the perspective of a peasant, according to Martin Bailey, a Van Gogh specialist who first reported the news in The Art Newspaper. Van Gogh gave the book to fellow Dutch artist Anthon van Rappard in 1883.
      “I do think you’ll find the Erckmann-Chatrian beautiful,” Van Gogh wrote in a missive to van Rappard that same year, referring to the book’s authors, Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian.
      After van Rappard died in 1892, the book was passed on to his wife. It stayed with her family for generations, until 2019, when it was sold to the Van Gogh Museum.
      “The drawings date from the early months of Van Gogh’s serious efforts to become an artist,”  Bailey told Artnet News in an email. “They are sketchy and slightly crude works, but are nevertheless highly revealing. They emphasize his interest in depicting the human figure and his interest in the lives of the peasants in the village where his parents were living.”
      Shortly after Van Gogh mailed the book, van Rappard visited him in the Dutch town of Nuenen. There, Van Gogh sketched a portrait of his friend—the largest such drawing he’s believed to have made. 
      However, the duo’s friendship dissolved shortly thereafter, when van Rappard criticized Van Gogh’s 1885 lithograph of The Potato Eaters. Angered by the perceived betrayal, Van Gogh sliced the portrait he had made of van Rappard in half. Today, only the top register of the drawing remains. 
      Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

    • 250 Shares109 Views

      in Exhibitions

      ‘We Have So Much Illusion’: Watch Artist Sarah Sze Blend the Tactility of Organic Materials With the Intangibility of Images

      by

      Artist Sarah Sze’s work is not easily categorized. It slips between sculpture and painting, harnessing light and shadows from projectors to shift a viewer’s perceptions between twinkling mirrors and organic materials.
      At Storm King Art Center, in New York’s Hudson Valley, an exhibition inaugurating Sze’s new permanent sculpture on the grounds combines all of the disparate parts of her practice into one 50-foot installation, which acts as a portal from the gallery space to the vast outdoor landscape.
      In the work, titled Fifth Season (2021), Sze’s fascination with entropy and fractured images are reflected in the array of materials, which include organic matter like soil and plants that are native to Storm King, along with photographs, paint, and prisms. Sze’s new permanent sculpture on the grounds, Fallen Sky, also considers the relationship between individuals and their environment. The work consists of stainless steel mirrored surfaces built into the hillside to reflect the world above, like a puddle of sky that is always changing.
      Sarah Sze, Fifth Season (2021). Courtesy of the artist and Storm King Art Center.
      In an exclusive interview with Art21, filmed as part of the Extended Play series in 2016, Sze describes her fascination with combining the sensory aspects of materials with the onslaught of digital images in contemporary culture.
      “I’m really interested in this kind of pendulum swing—this desire to be able to feel, touch, and smell materials, and the other end of the pendulum being the reality that we have a distance from materials because we have so much time with images,” Sze told Art21. “We have so much illusion, but we don’t have touch, we don’t have taste, smell, we don’t have that Intimacy with images.”

      Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s Art in the Twenty-First Century series, below. “Sarah Sze: Fallen Sky” is a new permanent installation at Storm King, and “Sarah Sze: Fifth Season” is on view at Storm King from June 26 through November 8, 2021. 
      [embedded content]
      This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org

      Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

    • 250 Shares109 Views

      in Exhibitions

      Two Immersive Van Gogh Experiences Offer the Post-Pandemic Escapism Visitors Crave. They Have Weirdly Little to Do With Van Gogh

      by

      How did Van Gogh become the hottest artist of the post-quarantine, return-to-physical-spaces moment?
      I speak, of course, not of the real artist named Vincent Van Gogh, with his old-timey tale of suffering and transcendence. I speak of the undead mash-up of Van Gogh’s paintings with projection mapping, animation, and music, now doing beaucoup business in dozens of cities across the globe in one of the largest coordinated art phenomena of all time.
      A romantic scene set in a Van Gogh light environment was featured in the hit Netflix time-waster Emily in Paris, which certainly helped incept the idea in the public mind during quarantine. And, indeed, these ubiquitous immersive Van Gogh Gesamtkunstwerks have essentially the same relation to Van Gogh, the artist, that the real Paris has to the Darren Star version of Paris of Emily in Paris. Maybe less.
      A message from Emily in Paris star Lily Collins greets visitors in the “Immersive Van Gogh” gift shop. Photo by Ben Davis.
      There’s something ironic—or maybe just telling—in the fact that, after a year of viewing art only in placeless online spaces, the hot art ticket now is a digitally augmented simulation.
      New Yorkers currently have two opportunities to participate in the phenomenon: “Immersive Van Gogh” at Pier 36, and the comically similarly named “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience,” at Skylight on Vesey, across from the solemn hulk of the Irish Hunger Memorial. Both share the same central attraction—a room where you bathe in projected versions of Van Gogh’s paintings accompanied by stately music—though each has its own bunch of add-ons thrown in to try to out-Van Gogh the competition.
      Trying out the augmented reality feature of “Immersive Van Gogh.” Photo by Ben Davis.
      “Immersive Van Gogh” offers a chic Van Gogh cafe; a series of light booths where, via some dubious science, you can experience how Van Gogh might have heard colors; a glitchy Augmented Reality feature where you can call up Van Gogh’s most famous paintings onto frames on the wall, via your smartphone; and an Artificial Intelligence component where you can write “Van Gogh” a letter on your phone and receive a response immediately, which you can then have printed out in the gift shop on vintage paper.
      There is an “Immersive Van Gogh” date night package where you rent a special booth and get Van Gogh-themed massage oil (sunflower oil, presumably). The gift shop is ginormous and the place, currently, to buy a Sunflowers thermos or Starry Night bucket hat.
      A 3D recreation of Bedroom in Arles at “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” Photo by Ben Davis.
      “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience,” the rival, offers its own extras: an educational film about Van Gogh’s relation to color; a huge sculpture of a vase with animations of different Van Gogh still lifes projected on it, so that it seems to morph from one giant pot of flowers to the next; a 3D sculpture version of Bedroom in Arles; and a room where kids can do Van Gogh coloring pages and have them scanned into a projection.
      Visitors enjoy the virtual reality component of “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” Photo by Ben Davis.
      Its high card in the Van Gogh Wars is a neat VR experience that floats you through an imagined pastoral landscape. Magic picture frames periodically appear over bits of your virtual surroundings, and are then filled in with paintings, illustrating how real places may have inspired Van Gogh’s famed works (even if you are not actually looking at real places, but at some kind of simulated videogame version of Van Gogh’s world). The gift shop here is beefy, but less impressive.
      When it comes to answering the most basic question—which is better?—”Immersive Van Gogh” stands above “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” The animations are crisper, the environment grander and more spacious, the choreography of images somewhat less cheesy, the musical choices more interesting (Handel, Edith Piaf, and Thom Yorke versus a more generically cinematic sounding score).
      Inside “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” Photo by Ben Davis.
      “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” does lean a little more toward the informative, with portentous Van Gogh quotes dropped into the soundtrack and splashed across the walls, and some projections tagged with lumbering titles such as “Sunflowers series” or “Tree Roots (last known painting).” A corridor of Van Gogh Facts that you walk through to get to the central light room leans hard into the kind of florid mythology you don’t see in mainstream art institutions anymore, e.g. of the painting Wheatfield with Crows, it explains that it “symbolizes the arriving of a kind of smiling death that arises serenely in broad daylight in a golden and very pure light that leads to the following reflection: is this madness that makes an art genius of him?”
      The Potato Eaters, animated, within “Immersive Van Gogh.” Photo by Ben Davis.
      “Immersive Van Gogh” contains such incongruities as a giant-sized image of The Potato Eaters, Van Gogh’s image of destitute rural labor, or a god-sized figure of Van Gogh’s humble postman, from New York’s own Museum of Modern Art, towering down at you at bombastic billboard scale.
      Inside “Immersive Van Gogh,” one of two competing Van Gogh light environments currently open in New York. Photo by Ben Davis.
      But nothing in “Immersive Van Gogh” is quite so goony as those moments in “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” where various paintings are brought to life, so that Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette appears to literally puff a cigarette, or Sorrowing Old Man actually appears to weep, or, inexplicably, Café Terrace at Night is transformed into a curtain blowing in the wind, the image divided like one of those rubber curtains at a carwash.
      Cafe Terrace at Night, animated, inside “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” Photo by Ben Davis.
      To circle back around to where we started, though: Why Van Gogh? Why now?
      I don’t really think that it is that complicated. Van Gogh’s paintings are beloved and beautiful, and escapism and beauty are what art-goers have said they want from the post-pandemic art experience over anything else.
      A worker polishes one of the large mirrored sculptures in “Immersive Van Gogh.” Photo by Ben Davis.
      Van Gogh is certainly the most pop culturally pervasive artist, from Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life to Willem Dafoe in At Eternity’s Gate, with something-for-everyone stop-offs in between at Martin Scorsese playing Van Gogh in Akira Kirosawa’s Dreams or that one episode of Dr. Who where the doctor brings Van Gogh forward in time to weep at his posthumous fame at the Musée d’Orsay.
      Van Gogh’s oft-biopic-ed story of the Artist as Suffering Outcast, of his missionary, suffering love for art, of failure vindicated by posthumous acclaim—“The Man Suicided by Society” as Antonin Artaud once put it—is one of the three major archetypes that form the bedrock of the broadest public’s image of artists (the other two being Artist as Rule-Breaking Free Spirit and Artist as Decadent Fraud).
      inside “Immersive Van Gogh.” Photo by Ben Davis.
      And yet, here is the interesting thing about the present wave of interest: Very little of the typical Van Gogh lore is to be found in what these immersive Van Gogh rooms are selling. There’s nary a severed ear on offer.
      Both the New York experiences are startlingly abiographical. Both pass through Japonisme sections (“Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” briefly exits his oeuvre entirely to animate some Ukiyo-e hits), and feature sections dedicated to projected galleries of his self-portraits staring at you in simultaneous judgment. Both animate the Starry Night in more or less inventive ways.
      Inside “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” Photo by Ben Davis.
      Both have mournful sections where the mythologized specter of Wheatfield With Crows suggests, if you know its place in the lore, that our hero is heading toward an end (and that the loop is almost over). Both have intimations of his time in the asylum, telegraphed via his paintings of it. But the famous beats of the Van Gogh biography really just linger behind all this like an afterimage, lending a sense of gravitas and narrative to an otherwise lightweight and amorphous experience.
      Inside “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” Photo by Ben Davis.
      Knowing anything about Van Gogh only very slightly adds to the experience in either case—in fact, “Immersive Van Gogh” probably works slightly better than “Van Gogh: The Immersive Van Gogh” precisely because it unburdens itself more completely of the half-hearted attempt to be educational, and so feels more comfortable in its own skin.
      Mainly you just sit there and let the Post-Impressionist fireworks go off all around, saying “I recognize that,” “I recognize that,” and, sometimes, “now, what’s that from?”
      Inside “Immersive Van Gogh.” Photo by Ben Davis.
      It’s actually rather striking: Here is Van Gogh, an artist whose biography is as popularly known as any artist, ever. And here we are in a moment, within the museum world proper, when biography has never been more important, with the worthiness or unworthiness of an artist’s life casting its light over how everything is valued. But in this ultra-popular new kind of art space, biography is a setting sun.
      The more I have thought about it, the more I realized that “Immersive Van Gogh” and “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” are not for fans of Van Gogh, the artist. They are for fans of the Starry Night, the poster. As a genre of art or art-like experience, these attractions are the product of several generations of Van Gogh merch and Van Gogh popular culture, so that the “original context” that these images tie back to, as memories, is not the museum at all.
      “Starry Night—one of my favorites!”, the intrepid Emily declares in Emily in Paris as she enters the Parisian Van Gogh room on which “Immersive Van Gogh” is based. “Did you know Van Gogh painted it while having a nervous breakdown?”, her friend Camille says. “Uh… no, I did not,” Emily replies. Her combination of enthusiasm and obliviousness is meant to be relatable.
      An enormous Van Gogh self-portrait greets visitors to “Immersive Van Gogh.” Photo by Ben Davis.
      The character is a professional Instagram marketer. The most normal, relatable, and marketable mode of interacting with famous art, in the age of ubiquitous photography, is to take a photo of yourself standing beside it. Viewed from this angle, there is really nothing incongruous about turning it into an immersive-art backdrop. That was already how it was apprehended within the contemporary experience economy. Only secondarily was it an object with any kind of alterity outside of that.
      Symbolic of this fact, at “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” you are greeted at entry and exit by a gallery of blown-up reproductions of Van Gogh paintings, presumably to convey a sense of the actual artworks that inspire the light show. But these god-awful simulacra are rendered on canvas as completely smooth printouts, leaving you with the impression that the “originals” it is working from, too, were not the paintings but flat images. Van Gogh without the impasto is like, I don’t know, facetuning Frida Kahlo to give her Lily Collins eyebrows.
      Display of replica Van Gogh self-portraits at “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” Photo by Ben Davis.
      Van Gogh was and is known for how the tactility and physicality of the paint, as if he is conveying the intensity and rawness of experience. Fredric Jameson famously took Van Gogh’s paintings as the paradigm of modernism, with their suggestion of depth—physical and emotional—opposing them to Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes, ghostly images of commodities reduced to shimmering, silkscreened flatness, symbolizing contemporary postmodern culture’s knowingly affectless, media-saturated superficiality. In that sense, these Van Gogh experiences have a kind of a symbolic potency as a synthesis of these poles: the idea of modernist depth itself is itself just a ghostly, marketable simulation itself.
      The most dominant current of the most dominant mainstream commercial culture is defined by reboots and reanimations of nostalgia fare, permuted and remixed and given a contemporary makeover in terms of sensibility and special effects (e.g. Disney remaking its own beloved animated hits in shambolic live-action form.) The immensely popular Digital Van Gogh trend, appearing largely outside of museums and unrepentantly for-profit, is the art version of that same zeitgeist. That’s the culture that dominates in a moment as anxiety-ridden and overrun with images as the one we live in: safe bets.
      A selection of Vincent van Gogh lollipops from the cafe in “Immersive Van Gogh.” Photo by Ben Davis.
      I am using lightly moralizing language here, but let me just say, I tend to view such things as an effect and not a cause. They are the product of the way visual culture already works.
      It was the museums themselves that merchandised Van Gogh into commercialistic ubiquity, as they leaned into blockbuster Great Men of Modernism shows. To claim now that a public that views Van Gogh first as a great poster artist are missing the point runs contrary to what the art context itself has been teaching for decades, in the gift shop. I imagine that for some, there is even a kind of pleasant honesty to the immersive Van Gogh experience, which is ingratiating without the tortured split personality of the museum presentation.
      Inside “Immersive Van Gogh.” Photo by Ben Davis.
      Despite many reservations, I enjoyed these shows for what they were (“Immersive Van Gogh” more than “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.”) I suppose I can identify with Emily’s friend Camille rather than Emily (though, unpromisingly for my metaphor, Emily does steal her boyfriend). There are, of course, important dimensions of art that come with knowing something and looking slowly at the paintings, and these for-profit (and very expensive, ticket-wise!) experiences in some ways are deliberately scanting these to service the largest possible audience.
      But the contemporary reality is that no one new arriving to Van Gogh will attain those shores except by crossing these waters, and its probably worth stating that it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Immersive Van Gogh is a part of the Van Gogh legend now, as much as the letters to Theo.
      Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

    • 225 Shares99 Views

      in Exhibitions

      Olympic Organizers in Tokyo Will Put Together a Splashy Art and Culture Initiative to Accompany the Summer Games

      by

      The Olympic Foundation for Culture and Heritage (OFCH) has unveiled plans for the inaugural Olympic Agora, an exhibition and series of art installations that celebrate the ideals and spirit of the games.
      The project, on view in Tokyo from July 1 to August 15, is inspired by the public assembly spaces, or agoras, of Ancient Greece, according to a statement.
      Viewers will be able to see artworks throughout Tokyo’s historic Nihonbashi district, including installations by Japanese artists Rinko Kawauchi and Makoto Tojiki and exhibitions of works by six Olympian and Paralympian artists-in-residence. 
      Another highlight will be a life-size commission by French artist Xavier Veilhan, who represented France at the 2017 Venice Biennale, that depicts five people of various ages, genders, and nationalities gathered in sport spectatorship. 
      Titled The Audience, it will become a permanent installation after its unveiling on June 30.
      3D rendering of Xavier Veilhan’s The Audience commissioned for Olympic Agora at the upcoming Tokyo Olympic games.
      The project also includes a multimedia installation by Montreal-based studio Moment Factory, and an exhibition of treasures from the Olympic Museum’s permanent collection in Lausanne, Switzerland.
      Onsite installations will be complemented by a digital program, including virtual exhibitions and artist talks on the Olympic Agora website and the Olympic Museum’s social media channels.
      In keeping with public health restrictions, visitor levels to in-person events will be limited and strictly controlled, organizers said.
      The agora will serve as “a hub for the cultivation, exploration and promotion of the Olympic values,” said OFCH director Angelita Teo.
      “In this unprecedented moment, the Olympic Agora is a symbol of determination, overcoming challenges, and international cooperation; of the power of sport and art to carry us in times of crisis.”
      Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More