Will Wiles grapples with what he is supposed to feel at immersive art shows... and senses the distinctions start to blur
Earlier this year I visited Frameless, the ‘ultimate immersive art experience’, in Marble Arch, London. Famous works of art are projected onto the walls, ceiling and floor of large subterranean galleries, gently animated, and accompanied by music. The visitor experiences renowned and familiar works anew, and perhaps a few they don’t know. Then it’s off to the gift shop.
Frameless is one of a number of ‘immersive’ experiences that have opened in London in recent years. Outernet, next to the rebuilt Tottenham Court Road Tube station, offers a walk-in immersive display. The Van Gogh London Exhibit in Spitalfields is similar to Frameless but focused on a single artist. Lightroom in King’s Cross combines art with other interests – at the moment David Hockney and the moon landings. Pulse: Beyond Delight in Borough ‘offers a spectrum of experiences that encapsulate Seoul’s vibrant spirit.’ And there’s Dopamine Land in Knightsbridge, which has colour and light installations intended to stimulate production of what it calls ‘the happy hormone’, if you want some basic neurological gratification, at the cost of feeling like a button-mashing electrode monkey. There are others.
But isn’t it all just basic neurological gratification? At Frameless was I meant to enjoy the art on a significant level, or just enjoy the pretty colours and music, like a toddler?
I was reminded of the opening scene of Ben Lerner’s 2012 novel Leaving the Atocha Station, in which the narrator visits the Prado, Madrid’s immense museum of art. There, he observes another visitor approaching paintings, staring at them, and then bursting into tears. Is this stranger grappling with private grief? Or is he having a profound experience of art? The thought unnerves the narrator: ‘I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art, and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew. I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or a painting or piece of music “changed their life”, especially since I had often known these people before and after their experience and could register no change.’
The pattern repeats, and security guards become concerned, but the scene discharges without serious incident, or explanation.
One painting the sobbing man confronts is The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, which is also in Frameless, and works very well as an enfolding, exotic landscape, crammed with detail. It’s from an age in which art was approached with very different cultural antennae.
The popularity of Frameless and the others shows they cater to a need – but what? Simple amusement? Instagram-fodder? Or a desire to be stirred on a deeper level? And truly the same questions apply to the Tate or the National Gallery. How much should we enjoy ourselves there? How deeply should we feel? Sobbing is too much, but is there also too little? This anxiety is an inevitable result of treating art as an essential vitamin of secular metropolitan citizenship.
Perhaps ‘secular’ is the key word. Some time after visiting Frameless, I noticed the dog that didn’t bark. Where was the religion? It lurks in the background of a lot of paintings. But the Garden of Earthly Delights was the only obviously religious work. I’m not criticising – accessibility is plainly the priority, and Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes might be stirring but it might also upset the under-fives. Frameless made me reflect on how galleries have often worked to improve the emotional experience of art by experiments with architecture, lighting, projection and assorted pizazz. But the original Frameless is the interior of a Baroque church.
Will Wiles is an author
ILLUMINATING EXPERIMENT
A prototype of Frameless might be found in the work of artist and architect Frederick Kiesler, who was possessed of a near-fanatical desire to dissolve limits between environment, art and ideas, to create drastic and visionary spaces for art. Kiesler designed Peggy Guggenheim’s groundbreaking modern art exhibition space Art of This Century in 1942. Paintings were displayed frameless, at rightangles to the curved walls, which were in unusual materials and colours. Kiesler programmed the spotlights on the art to turn off every three seconds in sequence, disrupting the way the visitors viewed the works. ‘People complained,’ Guggenheim wrote in her autobiography, Confessions of an Art Addict, so the lights were left on.