As a communications professional, however, it felt dangerous to ignore this increasingly popular evolution in storytelling. A show focused on David Hockney soothed some of my anxieties. Hockney has always been interested in incorporating new technologies into his work, from his Polaroid camera as a tool for collages in the ‘70s to his ravishingly beautiful iPad creations today. He works in vivid colours and likes to go large. Splashing a Hockney up on giant screens feels a very natural evolution.
Most importantly, just as in the ABBA Voyage show I wrote about last, the living artist worked with a broader team to make this. David Hockney: Bigger and Closer (Not Smaller and Far Away) is a bona fide work within the artist’s creative CV, not a cash grab from some production company trying to exploit any artist with tea towel and fridge magnet popularity. Does that invalidate any production based on a dead artist? Not necesssarily. But it does sprinkle this one with the creative fairy dust of authenticity.
The experience is entirely entertaining, often educational and occasionally emotionally stirring. The last is down to the technology that has made these things so popular. At Lightroom, a venue in Kings’ Cross created for immersive video (from the folks behind the innovative Bridge Theatre), there are more than 1,400 speakers, 28 projectors and a digital canvas size of approximately 108 million pixels. Your average cinema screen is between two and four thousand. It’s like standing at the bottom of an enormous well, its sides looming more than two stories above you, being bathed by sound and light. The illusion is not only unbroken by the corners of the room, but projections carry onto the floor. When they combine gorgeous visuals with powerful music … for me, most notably, Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde with images from the set designs Hockney did for the opera … they’re tickling your tear ducts.
This isn’t a single story but a series of vignettes, some short as a pop song and others pushing towards eight minutes. It’s storytelling crafted for the age of short attention spans. The content plays out over an hour but doesn’t feel like it because of the quick pacing and Hockney’s enlightening narration. It runs on a continuous loop and though you’ll buy a ticket for specific entrance time that doesn’t deliver you into the room at an official start time. You’ll join in mid flow and, roughly an hour later, realise you’re seeing a repeat. You could, if you so desired, stretch out and watch everything again and again; the venue is deeply casual on timings and once you’re in, you’re in.
This system, of course, radically simplifies staffing needs. Flip the switch, run the video on a continuous loop, scan entry tickets and keep an eye on the room to make sure everyone is OK. I doubt any fights would break out at an immersive art experience but you never know: competition for the benches in the centre of the room is quite fierce. Management concentrates the greatest number of employees behind the bar, where you’re free to buy drinks you can carry in to the room with you in plastic cups. (If you hang out in the bar upstairs, you can have a glass.)
I suspect each visitor will have his or her own favourites from the vignettes. After the opera segment … I had no idea Hockney had done so much stage design … I was most drawn to segments about his love of the English countryside. It’s not all painting; in one powerful section he’s rolled a wide-screen camera down a straight (probably Roman) road in his native Yorkshire. He captures the exact same stretch but in four times of year: verdant spring, sleepy summer, blazing autumn, snow-draped winter. One season projects on each wall, the four cameras moving in time. It’s magical.
His house in Normandy, so familiar to anyone who saw the magnificent Arrival of Spring show at the Royal Academy two years ago, gets a new spin demonstrating to us how he actually creates his art. His iPad, Hockney explains, captures and remembers every stroke. So when he’s finished not only does he have a painting, but a video that shows the whole thing building with every dot, dash and squiggle. As someone who’s trying to do a little painting myself, this bit, and several other times the replays showed up, was fascinating. I also enjoyed his reminiscences about LA, a town bathed in light and colour but almost unknown to painters when he moved there. The bit on different kinds of perspective was interesting but seemed to miss the general population mark; it was the one part that started to feel worthy and academic.
This is a child-friendly, stress-free and uncomplicated story. While the section on swimming pools throws up a few naked male bottoms, there’s no discussion of the free-wheeling sex and bohemian lifestyle that made Hockney an edgy rebel in his early days. (And made my mother squirm so much when she had to include him in art history lectures to 16-year-old girls in a convent school.) We may see some of those early paintings here, but it’s all presented through the filter of the avuncular elder statesman of British Art who’s now best known for giving us pastoral idylls in Yorkshire.
If you think art should be challenging, you’re going to hate art as an immersive experience. If you think it’s important to introduce art to children from their earliest years, you’re going to love it. I have rarely seen so many little people at an artistic event, and I’ve never seen them so beguiled. The camera shot of the day, if I’d had a telephoto lens, would have been a little girl leaning forward against the wall, arms spread out, face turned up and mouth open as if drinking in the cascading colours. Other visitors wouldn’t welcome children at a traditional art exhibition, the kids wouldn’t enjoy it and few parents would want to splash out the £15 - £25 needed to get them in. The rules of the game are different in this immersive world.
Ultimately, this all feels less like an art exhibition and more like a film about an artist. In the same way Charlton Heston’s scowling stroll The Agony and the Ecstasy once lit a fire in my young heart for Renaissance Italy, perhaps these immersive experiences will spark kids to want to go to a museum and see the real stuff. Because as entertaining as this was, it’s a sideline and not the real thing. While I found much to appreciate, this show didn’t soothe my worries that money is going to the wrong place, and that if we don’t fund proper culture we’ll lose it.
After my Hockney: Bigger and Closer experience my frustration has shifted away from the producers capturing the cash of cultural opportunity and towards the art museums that I feel are missing a trick. Science museums around the world were quick to install iMax cinemas when they came out. Now those in-house screens pull in families with a steady diet of space and nature documentaries. Installing experiential spaces similar to Lightroom’s facilities in the National Gallery, V&A or British Museum would put the revenues for this trend into the hands of people who need it more, and have the responsibility for preserving our heritage. If these display spaces were museum-based, after their digital experience visitors could spill into galleries to see the real thing rather than walking into the rather soulless re-development that is the new King’s Cross. And the museums would also have a flexible, dramatic space easily flipped for cash-generating private events. Sadly, I’m not aware of any museums jumping on this trend; everything in the immersive art world seems entirely commercial.
So … check them out, but if you’re lucky enough to live in a city with proper museums, then do yourself a favour and go see the real thing.
My misgivings about immersive art pushed me to the very end of the Hockney show’s run before I jumped in. If you want to see this, you’ll need to move fast. Bigger and Closer runs until 3 December, after which it cedes its projection room to an adventure to the moon narrated by Tom Hanks.
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