I am not the target audience for Immersive van Gogh, the roving digital installation of the post-Impressionist’s drawings and paintings, blown up and animated in a 38-minute-long, 360-degree projected light show. I am not the target audience for most things that brand themselves as “immersive,” claim to be “museums of” something, or promise to deliver unto me an “experience.” And yet, I keep subjecting myself to these newfangled fine-art-adjacent business endeavors.
Maybe I’m looking for a cure to my antipathy. Sometimes even when one isn’t personally moved, seeing others find joy in new environments brings about a kind of appreciation. That’s what happened to me at the Color Factory in 2017. I couldn’t begrudge others their pure glee in the yellow ball pit. Perhaps, I reasoned, the same vicarious feels would grab me within the walls of SVN West, a low-slung but cavernous building at the corner of South Van Ness and Market—the former site of Bill Graham’s Fillmore West concert hall.
But about halfway through my morning visit, sequestered in my own projected circle of light to maintain social distancing among the dispersed crowd, I inadvertently snorted out loud.
Besides the booming soundtrack, my nasal honk was the only noise in the room. Forgive me, dear reader, but I truly couldn’t help it. There was something far too serious about the swelling, melodramatic score and the way animated candles atop one of van Gogh’s self portraits were going out one by one. (This collaged image is apocryphal, by the way: a researcher at Amsterdam’s van Gogh Museum confirms the artist did not place candles on his hat brim to paint Starry Night, as the internet likes to believe, but rather worked by gaslight.)
But one does not go (or, as the abundant puns in the installation’s interior signage would say, GOGH) to Immersive van Gogh for facts, or even a linear sense of the artist’s brief yet wildly productive career. One goes to feel his paintings, to be inside them, and to watch them come to life across four white walls. Practically, this aliveness often looks like the mushroom-induced scenes of wobbly nature in Ari Aster’s 2019 film Midsommar, an effect that’s particularly disturbing when applied to the now-giant faces of van Gogh’s portrait-sitters.
There’s also a lot of what I described in my notes as “watercolor ink-blot effect,” where sections of a painting spread into being from a single droplet. My crankiness asserting, I found this tactic particularly annoying, as van Gogh’s canvases are mostly thickly layered with oil paint, the application of which looks nothing like watercolor.
