Too much, too soon

Rethinking immersion.

13 Jun

Drake’s Turrell-inspired background in the music video for Hotline Bling.

Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, on James Turrell, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s VR concert, and immersive installation culture.

I remember two things about the first time I saw one of James Turrell’s Skyspace installations at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA). Everything inside the concrete domed “room” was a vibrant shade of green, while the telescope-like hole above revealed a purpling sky. During the half hour or so I spent in the skyspace, the colors gradually inverted, then dissipated entirely. Was the sky green or purple or, as I knew it to be, blue?

The second thing: I was deep in the throes of seasonal depression (it was a very cold March) while also contemplating the slow demise of a relationship that I, for whatever reason, had naively thought was “it.” The revelation that “it” wasn’t working distressed me, so I thought I could temporarily stave off this sense of impending romantic doom by driving four hours to witness this “Light and Space” art, art that promised to alter the viewer’s perception of the ubiquitous and elemental, things that I thought I knew very well. The metaphor writes itself, but this was how I first came to Turrell: melancholy and desperate to see the world and its accompanying colors and textures upended before my very eyes.

In Perfectly Clear (1991), also on view at MoCA, a ten-minute-long installation, the visitor stands before a large screen in a room with curved walls. The experience is akin to being bathed in shifting gradients of light; the screen and walls fade into pure color. Unlike Turrell’s pitch-black sensory deprivation room Hind Sight (1984), which I also saw during that visit, Perfectly Clear doesn’t seek to repress the viewer’s senses or bodily instincts—although I felt at once obliterated and renewed. I left more conscious of my physicality. I staggered down the installation’s pyramid of stairs slightly teary-eyed, unsure of what I was exactly moved by. Color? Light? The unbearable lightness of being?

I have since grown suspicious of Turrell and of any exhibit or artist that brands itself as “immersive.” My qualms are primarily with the term, as I believe that good art, regardless of medium, can be immersive to the inquisitive observer. The viewer doesn’t necessarily have to enter an enclosed space where they’re bombarded with visual stimuli to feel “immersed.” In a recent review of Maria Gainza’s novels, the writer Lucie Elven remarks that the novelist frames “absorption [as] only one kind of attention: becoming distracted in the course of looking at something might be a sign of meaningful engagement.” During the 15 minutes I was in Turrell’s Hind Sight, a black room devoid of any visual or aural stimuli, my mind was not focused on the darkness, which is presumably the “point” of the artwork. Instead, I was thinking about what I was going to do after I left the chamber. Yet, I was still “immersed.”

Immersion exists on a mental and physical spectrum. And since so much of modern life is polluted with distractions, it’s no wonder that we’re motivated to seek out its complete opposite. We look for experiences that blind our senses and overwhelm any sense of self. (It’s there in the word immerse, from the Latin immergere: to plunge in, dip into, sink, submerge. Immersion also refers to the disappearance of the sun during an eclipse, an image that Turrell frequently invokes in his work.) With AI, there’s the impulse to expand the boundaries of an existing artwork, to figure what more of the world within an Edward Hopper painting, for instance, contains. But more isn’t necessarily better or truer to life.

Recently, I was invited to attend Kagami, a “mixed reality concert” at The Shed featuring the late Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. Attendees were given VR headsets to wear for the duration of the “concert,” which was presented in surround sound. There’s a quote from Sakamoto that accompanied the press release: “There is, in reality, a virtual me. This virtual me will not age, and will continue to play the piano for years, decades, centuries.” For the purposes of Kagami, the virtual Sakamoto can be seen in hi-definition as well as heard: his past self is optically projected into viewers’ retinas to maximize the show’s immersive potential.

Kagami was a tasteful postmortem VR concert, in the sense that it was produced with Sakamoto’s approval and permission before his passing. (Improved hologram tech has given rise to a bizarre genre of projected musician performances, exploiting a nostalgic impulse to revive the dead. VR will probably do the same.) But virtual versions of Sakamoto are also preserved across the internet and on vinyl records. It’s not necessary to see the musician himself to feel moved. As I frequently do at most in-person concerts—and at Kagami—I found myself closing my eyes to shield myself from distractions, any stimuli that might yank me from this immersive state. I didn’t need nor did I really want the headset. To Gainza’s point on absorption, I find myself most moved by Sakamoto when I’m listening to him on the train, with the faint noise of the subway in the background.

Yayoi Kusama deserves most of the credit for the proliferation of immersive installations. Even so, her Infinity Rooms are old news—older than the Trump-era “Museum of X” phenomenon. It’s surprising then to learn that people are still lining up to “experience” (aka document on social media) Kusama’s latest trypophobic obscenities at David Zwirner. But considering how the latest commercial art craze is “experiential exhibits” based on famous dead artists with works in the public domain, I hesitate to say that Turrell is bad. He’s just basic.

Over Memorial Day weekend, I returned to MASS MoCA only to feel let down by the overwhelming incuriosity of Turrell’s installations. Perfectly Clear doesn’t offer the same obliterating effect, seen a second time with a murmuring crowd. When I told a friend this, she jokingly replied: “Has Turrell changed or have I changed?” Turrell talks a big game about “[using] light to construct an architecture of space” but after seeing his light works once, there’s not much more to look at and the novelty fades. With good art, I want to look at it again and again and again. Each viewing is akin to peeling another layer off the metaphorical onion. Perhaps the point of Turrell is to see him once and retain that meditative shift in perception. Maybe that, too, can be considered “immersive.” 🌫️

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PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

  • The Hollywood Reporter is publishing anonymous “strike diaries” from writers on the front lines of the WGA strike.

  • “If he hadn’t become a film director, Wes Anderson would’ve made an excellent watchmaker”: A review of Asteroid City. (Spike Magazine)

  • I saw Comrades: Almost A Love Story (dir. Peter Chan, 1996) at the Metrograph this weekend and loved it.

  • Max Read on what’s wrong (and what’s right) about hating MrBeast aka Jimmy Donaldson:

    • “Donaldson’s study of YouTube success had probably also shown him that decency, morality and generosity, properly calibrated, could be extremely successful characteristics in a YouTuber, whereas resentment and transgression could, by the current rules of the platform, get you only so far. Donaldson can wield YouTube to his own benefit, at least as much as any one person can, but that also means the limits of his project are, in essence, the limits of YouTube itself.”

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MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

  • Popular Reddit communities went dark on Monday to protest the platform’s policy to charge third-party apps higher fees to operate on the site. (The Verge)

  • It’s hard to find the right words to describe this essay by Blake Butler on his late wife, Molly Brodak. (Paris Review)

  • Another white man is crowned “the face of fungi”... (NYT Magazine)

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