Something Thoughtful

  Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

VAN GOGH AS FAST FOOD 

            The whole thing was devised and put together by two French art directors, Annabelle Mauger and Julien Baron. It finally came to Auckland’s Spark Arena having been seen in many other countries. It was an “immersive” experience. Over 200 paintings by Vincent Van Gogh were projected on huge screens by a system called “Total Image”. As the moods of the paintings changed, these gargantuan images were accompanied by [what the French duo thought of as] appropriate mood music. Beethoven for vigour, Satie for pensiveness – that sort of thing. The paintings were presented more-or-less chronologically from the artist’s first dark Dutch canvases through his Parisian and Provencal periods to his final mental disintegration. They were also interspersed with [English translations of] various wise things that Van Gogh had written.  

            The images were not projected onto just one screen, but simultaneously on all the walls of the venue. And the images never stopped moving, being shown in full-form or as enlarged details at the same time, or sharing the many walls with projections of other paintings. Sometimes – but only occasionally – animation was added to Van Gogh’s images. On a couple of occasions, where he had painted birds flying overhead, the birds flapped their wings and flew. According to one puff, the whole experience added “emotional depth” to each image and allowed us “to live and feel the creative energy” of the artist.

            Of course we went along to the Spark Arena show. We enjoyed the ante-chamber in which we could wander at leisure past framed reproductions of Van Gogh’s works, with detailed placards attached, explaining the when and where painted etc.etc. We chuckled at the silly bits, like the alcove painted up like one of Van Gogh’s depictions of his bedroom, with chairs added so that tourists could be photographed as if in the bedroon. Or like the “immersive” mirrored room filled with sunflowers that we could wander through. Or, outside the display itself, the car painted up with Van Gogh-ish stars.

            But the main attraction was the big son-et-lumiere show itself, projected and heard in a large darkened display hall.

            It was fun up to a point – a quick run through some of the best-known of Van Gogh’s work, with the enlarged paintings beautiful in themselves. For us it was also very nostalgic. As I noted in an earlier posting SomeProblems with Cultural Sensitivity , we have three times visited Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum which has, I believe, a larger collection of Van Goghs than any other gallery or museum in the world. (Not that all Van Gogh’s works hang there – the famous “Starry Night” is in MOMA in New York and the “Café Terrace at Night” in a different Dutch museum.) Thrice we have walked slowly and with close attention through the Van Gogh Museum, taking the time to appreciate each canvas, being able to exchange our views on them or just quietly enjoy them.

            And this is exactly what the less-than-one-hour-long magnified light-show does not allow you to do. Approximately 200 paintings gallop before you in less than one hour, which works out as approximately thirty seconds per painting. As a primer on, or introduction to, Van Gogh’s work it’s effective enough. But it is a little like Van Gogh served as fast food. And it’s ironical that one of the wise words of Van Gogh on display says “It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper meaning.”

            Just as troubling is the giganticism of it. Van Gogh’s crows in a cornfield are simply not meant to be seen as a series of huge panels with every brushstroke magnified to the size of a garden rake. Ditto Van Gogh’s delicate petals on trees in early bloom. The real ability to appreciate the work is destroyed.

 

            Of course everything I’m complaining of here takes me back to arguments in Walter Benjamin’s influential essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), only I think the case is more extreme now than it was in Benjamin’s time. To reproduce is to distort and deprive the work of art of its uniqueness.

            Yet there is another line of thought that gives me pause.

            When this blog was young, I wrote a review of Marybeth Hamilton’s In Search of the Blues, her account of how white enthusiasts interpreted, and often misinterpreted, the nature of a black musical genre. In it, she told the tale of such enthusiasts, in the 1940s and 1950s, eagerly hunting in junkshops for old, scratched recordings made by bluesman in the 1920s. These fans, as I put it, felt “the thrill of the hunt for them, the sense of having found undiscovered treasure, and especially the sense that – even though one was only collecting records – one was actually a lonesome rebel against the commercial mainstream.” But then there was a mass revival of interest in such music “the old recordings began to be re-pressed and mass-circulated in LPs (the vinyl equivalent of a CD collection). And suddenly [the enthusiasts] lost interest in them. If they had become the property of a mass audience, then they were no longer an elite, rebel taste. They too were now ‘commercial’ and no longer ‘authentic’.”

            Now, as I search my conscience scrupulously, I wonder if I’m not like those fans. Is part of me miffed that a mass audience, who can’t see the original paintings, is now able to taste these masterpieces, albeit in a different form? In short, am I being a snob?

            I hope not. I think the show is a good primer and could be an incitement to find out more about the artist’s work. But that fast food aspect really does trouble me.