Artillery Magazine

Tag: immersive experience

  • OUTSIDE LA: Cornelia Parker at Tate Britain Small Island Energy

    OUTSIDE LA: Cornelia Parker at Tate Britain
    Small Island Energy

    Cornelia Parker’s landmark retrospective at Tate Britain journeys through her multimedia work to narrate a country willingly stuck in small-island-energy. Parker (b.1956) examines objects by considering how they change when their associated value is disrupted, destroyed or dismantled. The juxtaposition between large scale installation and Parker’s accompanying text, dissecting her process and interest, creates an exhibit that is subtly scathing of the geographical entity it is taking place in. 

    The exhibition begins with Thirty Pieces of Silver (2015), a sculpture of over a thousand pieces of low hanging flattened silver, suspended from the ceiling and gathered in plate-like rounds. It’s a visually pleasing entryway into Parker’s installation work.

    The second gallery delves into Parker’s political intrigue with two neighboring sculptures Embryo Firearms (1995) and Embryo Money (1996). Her partnering text tells us the firearm is a cast metal sculpture of a gun from the first step in its manufacturing process that she acquired from visiting a factory in Hartford, Connecticut. The second piece is a metal disc from the Royal Mint, Pontyclubn, Wales. A coin before its currency, value and power are asserted for mass circulation via the addition of someone’s face. Parker’s words, like object poems, make the work accessible whilst ensuring her intrigue and intentions are not misconstrued by the viewer.

     

    Anne-Katrin Purkiss, Cornelia Parker, studio, London, 2013. © Anne-Katrin Purkiss. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2022.

     

    The screening room plays a selection of Cornelia Parker’s film: a Palestinian father and son weave crowns made from thorns in Bethlehem, machinery makes and throws out poppies at a factory for the UK’s remembrance day, a trio of videos on UK politics includes Parker’s submission as the official artist for the general election in 2017. This depicts a dizzying display of the fast pace chaos of the 90 day election cycle and British tabloids. This is followed by a film of halloween celebrations in New York, a week before the election of Trump, partnered with a video of Trump supporters outside Trump Tower in the piece American Gothic (2017).

     

    Cornelia Parker, Perpetual Canon, 2004. Collection of Contemporary Art Fundación “la Caixa”, Barcelona © Cornelia Parker

     

    There’s a disturbing lack of sound that carries through much of the later exhibit. It begins with the echoing noise of the machinery in an empty warehouse in the video of the poppy factory in Richmond. This leads into the installation War Room (2015) a huge tent constructed of suspended strips of material that poppies are cast out of. In Perpetual Canon (2004), marching band instruments are flattened and hung in a round, the orchestral noise instead comes from the many shadows of the instruments on the walls.

     

    Cornelia Parker, War Room, 2015. Image © the Whitworth, The University of Manchester. Photography by Michael Pollard

     

    The silent presence felt is also a result of the tension created from the spaces Parker visits in order to make her work: from visiting gun making factories, border control in Texas, to a poppy making factory. A photograph of clouds was taken with a camera Parker borrowed from the Imperial War Museum that belonged to Rudol Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz. Parker describes looking through the same lens as a mass murderer; the resulting photograph is uneasy and sinister. Her work exposes the most unsettling parts of society, and at times it feels at the expense of herself with the heavy process underlying the artwork. 

     

    Cornelia Parker, Avoided Object. Photographs taken on the sky above the Imperial War Museum with the camera that belonged to Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, 1999. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London. © Cornelia Parker

     

    The last piece Island (2022) is a glass garden shed. A bulb inside slowly lights up and dims out like breaths. White lines are painted on the glass using chalk from the White Cliffs of Dover, a quintessential English landmark. Dover is also a politicized transportation entrypoint and departure for the UK, the use of this chalk alludes to the country’s obsessive anti-immigration policies. The white lines keep the light in and the heat away, as Parker would do to her shed as a child to protect tomatoes from the summer heat. The covered shed signifies the UK looking inwards, alone, a small island. Parker is addressing a post-Brexit England not wanting to be part of Europe; a prevalent topic amongst artists and art institutions attempting to evolve and reimagine understandings of Europeanness as the UK chooses a more distant relationship with the continent.

    Cornelia Parker at Tate Britain is an immersive critique of the frequent devastation humanity causes, through her intrigue at seemingly arbitrary objects. As the exhibition closes in on the UK with Island, the overarching message that lingers is that not only is small island energy in the UK detrimental and sickly, but nonsensical.

    The exhibition runs until October 16th.

     

  • It’s a Vincent Van A Gogh-Gogh! Review of the Van Gogh Immersive Experience

    It’s a Vincent Van A Gogh-Gogh!
    Review of the Van Gogh Immersive Experience

    Doubtless you’ve seen the billboards: the Immersive Van Gogh exhibit has shown in cities across North America, and now it’s Los Angeles’ turn. It’s Time To Gogh! commands the sign, and I oblige, stepping into the old Amoeba building on Sunset Boulevard, which will serve as the event space for the duration of its local run.

    I pass through security and walk into the dark hallway that begins the “immersive experience.” Overhead, a voice actor murmurs lines from Vincent Van Gogh’s letters. This hallway opens onto a tunnel of empty gilt frames that ends at the main foyer, which has a mural of the Hollywood sign painted in the manner of Van Gogh. The voice actor is replaced by classical strings covers of Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games.” FIND BEAUTY EVERYWHERE is scrawled on one of the promotional leaflets.

    The foyer serves as another hallway, and I follow the crowd to the projection rooms. With the lights on, it would be like standing inside an enormous blank cube. Now, however, the darkness is broken by projections of Van Gogh’s paintings. Heavy bass electronica thrums through the air, while farmland and flowers flow across the walls as if they painted themselves. The animated autonomy of Van Gogh’s works seems strangely fitting.

    The first time I remember seeing a Van Gogh, I was an elementary school tot. My teacher wheeled out the projector and cast Starry Night onto the wall. I can still feel the nubby carpet under my hands when I remember this, how it is like the texture of the paint. It seems strange that a painter who found God in the world would have his work transformed once again into that least material of mediums—into light.

    It’s impossible to know the first time most people saw his vision of the night sky over Saint Remy, though almost certainly it wasn’t the painting in New York City, hanging on MoMA’s 5th floor. Most likely it was a replication of the image on a poster, a phone case, fridge magnets, backpack or bed sheets, and now this “immersive experience.” Van Gogh reportedly painted many of his works through windows; the replications are now like thousands of miniature windows on his actual paintings, wherever they may really be housed.

    I notice a sign near the bathroom advertising an app that allows you to write a letter to Van Gogh and receive one in return, inspired by his lifelong conversation with his brother Theo. “Hi Vincent,” I type, “How’s the asylum?” The loading wheel spins, and a moment later the bot replies, “My painting goes well, despite my worsening circumstances…”

    The sense of the prophetic is too strong about his life to have any other relation to it. Each brush stroke brings him a step closer to his death, to the 7mm revolver in the wheatfield. I watch Bedroom at Arles dissolve into another wheatfield painting; Edith Piaf’s “Je Ne Regrette Rien” thunders through the speakers. He suffered exactly as he needed to so that we can experience his life after death, his pervasiveness in pop culture, his penetration into the deepest, oldest corridors of memory. A painted bird drifts against blue walls that were once the painted sky of Arles. Across the world, his work and his words continue to swirl forward in countless repetitions like snow blowing through an open door.

    Still, it’s nice to sit in the middle of the floor, as you’re encouraged to, and just look around. The room is filled with families, couples and young children with benches for people who might not have the flexibility to stand up and sit down again. “Irises” floods the wall, and the blue light of the painting washes upon the veined hands of an older woman, sitting quietly, holding her walker. Thankfully, the entire thing is rather hard to take a photo of—the projections are too large to capture anyway and the projections are a little grainy. Instead we sit and look. The whole video lasts about an hour and is on a continuous loop, but you can stay as long as you want.

    It is no small irony that we can’t avoid the figure of Van Gogh as the archetypal impoverished artist. The lines of the Bedroom at Arles start to take shape: the bed frame emerges out of thin air along with the chair and the boots, then color splashes into it, and the famous painting looms on all sides; and his legacy seems suddenly, painfully inescapable.