Thousands are flocking to hi-tech shows of work by Van Gogh, Dalí and, from next month, David Hockney, in London. What makes these exhibitions so fascinating – and popular?
Concerning immersion, a shower is as far as I’m usually prepared to go. I don’t recognise the existence of bathtubs and when it comes to immersive art, I prefer to be an engaged and critically alert observer, not a participant. I made an exception for Nicholas Hytner’s Shakespeare productions at the Bridge theatre in London, though I chose to watch the scrum – with the rest of the audience as a harried, feuding mob in Julius Caesar or a gaggle of bewitched revellers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – from the safety of a fixed seat. I love hearing the soprano at the end of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde sing about ecstatically drowning in the torrents of sound that pour out of her, which she calls “the wafting universe of the world-breath”. In the opera house, you can feel this sensorium throbbing around you, but it’s only resonant air, and your head, like the singer’s, remains above the merely symbolic water.
The immersion promised by an array of art exhibitions throughout London is also a harmless metaphor: at worst, you are inundated by light. Even so, there’s something alluringly mystical about these shows, now so popular that they have become a cult. Experienced in this way, paintings no longer exist to be viewed from an analytical distance and appraised in formal terms; their purpose is to supply sensation and alter consciousness. The freestanding work of art disappears as we are fused with it, merged in a detonation of colour or submerged by images that cascade down the walls, gush on to the floor and wash us away.
