Scoping Out Immersive Van Gogh

 

Hi Folks!

Alison and I went to Charlotte for the Immersive Van Gogh experience.  This exhibition is being held until the end of October at Camp North End in the old Ford plant, which also served as a bomb factory back in the day.

I found it a little weird that an event featuring an artist known for his brilliant and beautiful representations of European town and country would be taking place in a facility that produced things used to blast the living hell out of said town and country just a few years later, but I kept my swords-into-plowshares bullshit to myself and got on with the program, using the ever-popular “well, nothing can be done to help it now” justification.

Anyhoo, what this consisted of was a 35-minute film that served as an animated (but not in a cartoony way) tapestry of the master’s works. We watched it three times. It was spellbinding. The film is divided into what I remember as six or seven different theme-based segments, each of them serving as the framework for the varying aspects of Van Gogh as an artist and a real-life human being who walked among us. Very large projection screens covered the entirety of the wall space, so images were all around us and we could view from different angles. By focusing attention on three adjacent screens at once, one could enjoy a comprehensive view presentation.

Partial and entire images were taken from various of Van Gogh’s works and combined in ways that made sense in how they were used. For instance, the many individual villagers and buildings that popped up as oft-overlooked participants in Van Gogh’s works throughout the years were grouped together into certain scenes. To me, it gave these little images a new lease on life.

One sequence in particular caught my attention, and in a manner I did not expect. Van Gogh did several self-portraits throughout his career (like most artists, he did these as technical exercises or experiments rather than out of a sense of vanity—these were not prototype versions of our selfies), and there was a brief segment that showed a representation of these works over different periods.

I don’t know much about art, but a thing I’ve noticed about Van Gogh’s self portraits is that the representations of his own eyes convey emotion. It’s like you can sense what’s on his mind—boredom, irritation, dread, uncertainty, occasionally contentment, but always something. He also often alters, noticeably but not freakishly, his facial features, particularly the jawline or the top of his head which I think he does to amplify whatever expression he was trying to convey.

Anyways, during this sequence, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe makes the scene. This, of course, is a well-known work created by Van Gogh in the aftermath of a particularly violent seizure that resulted in his self-mutilation. And I noticed something I hadn’t before.

The eyes are distorted, ridiculously so, and they are absolutely dead. They convey no sense of thought, or emotion, or even a spark. There is life elsewhere in the painting—in the colors, the brushstrokes, even the smoke rising from the pipe—life everywhere but in the subject, who bears only the most passing resemblance to Van Gogh. Presenting and juxtaposing this particular self-portrait with the others really emphasized to me a sad aspect of this man’s life.

I don’t know if this is what the creators were going for, but that’s what I got out of it.  Which I think is what art is really about. Take what you need, or what you can get.

The program’s apogee came as it approached conclusion. From a series of scenes taken from Van Gogh’s works related to his stay in a sanitorium (Corridor in the Asylum, Prisoner’s Round), the presentation used captivating animation techniques as it pivoted to a montage of trees and landscape followed by brightly colored flowers (all being common themes of the artist). An explosion of the artist’s colors and textures repeated as the majestic power of Mussorgsky’s The Great Gate of Kiev thundered throughout the room. I found the impact to be striking. This entire series suggested that though a relationship may have existed between Van Gogh’s singular brilliance and the demons that plagued him, it is the brilliance and vision of the man that ultimately has mastery of the demons.

See a sample of the sequence here!

One thing I didn’t understand—one of the vignettes featured a selection of the many portraits of children Van Gogh did over the years. The animation used to enliven the portraits served to distort rather than magnify the subjects—and what they did to Young Man with Cornflower as well as The Schoolboy with Uniform Cap was positively grotesque. I don’t get the angle for this type of presentation. To my knowledge Van Gogh didn’t have some unhealthy obsession or criminal contact with children—he liked using them as subjects for various artistic reasons but didn’t engage them in a manner similar to that of, say, Lewis Carroll. Van Gogh didn’t have a psychological hiccup that gave him a pathological fear of children either, so what was the point in making them grotesqueries? I can’t immediately deduce a reason.

But this is a minor quibble. The presentation is brilliant and evocative. The supporting musical selections offer perfect support. The various thematic segments were subtle, and one didn’t have to necessarily notice them in order to enjoy or understand the program. The show connected well with what I saw as being a fairly representational audience that included several age ranges and ethnic groups.

At a minimum I think it would be a fun diversion for just about anybody. In our case it was spectacular. Perfect for family, a couple, or just one person. As for Camp North End, I think it will be a magnificent destination one day but for now it is most assuredly a work in progress. Redevelopment activities are oh-most-certainly underway (we accidently drove down a construction-only alleyway and encountered a very big truck), and though they are turning swords-into-retail as fast as they can there ain’t a whole lot of it right now. But there are a handful restaurants and a small food court. We had lunch at Leah & Louise and freaking loved it. Check em’ out. www.leahandlouise.com