“Immersive” is one of the art world’s favorite words. The most publicized examples of a craze for enveloping environments are the vast digital projections of the works of Vincent Van Gogh or Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, etc., which appear all over the world. But the thirst for engulfment is widespread: in a single day, I received ten press releases announcing projects, involving artists as diverse as American sculptor Louise Nevelson and Chinese multimedia artist LuYang, proclaiming the immersive tendencies of their work.
There is nothing new in art involving multi-sensory experience. Installation is an artistic tradition with a long history. Part of its power lies precisely in its ability to overwhelm. Many examples have been among my favorite works in recent years, by artists from Philippe Parreno to Shilpa Gupta and Steve McQueen. It is also gaining in popularity: a little over a decade ago, in Yayoi Kusama’s 2012 Tate Modern retrospective, it could be seen Infinity Rooms with relative ease; now you have to book months in advance.
But the Infinity Rooms are the best example of a growing trend towards a sort of hybrid format between installation and sounds and lights, emphasizing spectacle rather than more resonant content. They are crafty, technically accomplished and extremely Instagrammable.
Much of immersive art encourages passivity. It happens For rather than imposing our own commitment
But what they have in common is a distinct void. And it seems to me that this is the danger of the primacy of immersive art in itself. Because much of it encourages passivity. It reminds me of 19th century seated audiences witnessing moving vistas, the high-tech immersive experience of late Georgian and Victorian times. It happens For rather than imposing our own commitment.
It was hammered home when I saw David Hockney Bigger and closer (not smaller and farther) at the Lightroom in London last month, where the most effective section involved revivals of his operatic designs, and the least enjoyable a sequence that quickly leafed through his sketchbooks, not allowing us to stop and inspect – in fact, to immerse ourselves – in the drawings.
Conferring agency
The best artistic experiences, whatever the medium, give us agency in our enthusiasm. When I saw the recent Cézanne exhibition at the Tate Modern, I was bewitched by his brushwork, those famous parallel lines, the shades and the bursts of color. You’re looking through [Cézanne’s] kaleidoscope in a world overflowing with indeterminacy”, as the painter Amy Sillman so aptly put it. The Frenchman’s paintings are mostly easel-scale but, like the best Van Goghs and Kahlos, can penetrate and engulf us as much as any room-filling projection.
But this is not to argue for the primacy of old-fashioned immersion over new. Two shows going on in London—Mike Nelson at the Hayward Gallery And Nalini Malani at the National Gallery (both described as immersive in their advertising) overwhelm the senses while sparking engagement beyond the worlds they surround and even bombard us with. They triggered mental journeys – geopolitical, literary, art historical – that sustained me long after I left the galleries that housed them.
More and more, then, when I read the term immersive, I recoil. Not only has it become synonymous with a superficial form of spectacle, but it is also a quality that any art can arguably possess. Its ubiquity only accentuates its insignificance.
