Immersive Van Gogh: Should you go?

“Immersive Van Gogh”, which premiered in Toronto in 2020, has become the best selling exhibit in the world and is now touring to nearly 30 cities in the U.S. Its popularity has spawned several similarly named imitators. (Buyer beware!) 

 

My friend Mary and I, like many art lovers, are familiar with Vincent Van Gogh’s sad biography and we’ve enjoyed seeing his original paintings in museums in France, Holland and New York. But we headed to Charlotte, North Carolina, with mixed expectations. Some had questioned if this was really art. A few critics had panned it as “cheap appropriation of genius…a perversion of traditional art with a glaringly commercial intention.” (Elena Foulidi); “a series of rather jarring juxtapositions…” (Sarah Hotchkiss). The expansive gift stop attests to the commercialization of the experience and maybe if you’re stodgy the kaleidoscope of images could be called jarring, but we came away awestruck and amazed. 

 

In Charlotte, the Blumenthal Performing Arts Center is staging the exhibit in the Ford building, a cavernous former missile plant in the city’s redeveloping Camp North End. Unlike passively attending museum shows or reading erudite books that elucidate Van Gogh’s work, psychosis and techniques, Lighthouse Immersive creators Luca Longobardi and Massimiliano Siccardi and their collaborators compel us to plunge into a new way of looking at art. Perhaps staid museum experiences play down art’s emotional impact. 

 

The show’s technical wizardry made it impossible for us to observe passively as waves of booming music enveloped us and images crawled along the floor and up the huge walls. We felt in touch with the creative tsunami that compelled Van Gogh to create 2,000 oil paintings in 10 years. We understood Siccardi’s vision: “We are witnesses to a life filled with passion and unstoppable desire and we abandon ourselves into this timeless beauty.”     

 

Van Gogh said, “I dream my painting and I paint my dream.” We floated into that dream. It was cathartic and emotional. Jason Farago wrote in The New York Times that audiences “should bring a fully charged camera phone; some might also enjoy a psychedelic supplement.”  

 

Many were trying to capture the trippy images on their phones where they looked paltry in comparison.

 

Mary and I will never stop strolling through hushed museums to look at beautiful art but this was a more visceral experience. It‘s like the difference between walking on the beach and swimming in the ocean. A stroll on the shore is beautiful but diving into the waves is an all encompassing sensory experience.   

 

Roadtrips Charleston highlights interesting destinations within a few hour’s drive of Charleston, as well as more far flung locales. For information, go to peaksandpotholes.blogspot.com.