Let’s just be honest right off the bat: an hour and a half in a room full of photo-and-video-taking strangers gawking at artworks of a famous dead post-impressionist painter doesn’t ordinarily top our list of Friday post-work wind-downs. That said, this time, it was actually kinda nice.
“Van Gogh Alive: The Experience,” despite laying claim to being the world’s “most visited multi-city sensory exhibition” (15 million have attended so far), and having toured 130 cities across the globe, has only just debuted in Manila over the weekend, and Coconuts Manila was lucky enough to check out an advance preview just before One Bonifacio High Street officially opened the fourth-floor exhibition room to the public.
If you read our earlier story about the exhibit, you may be expecting soaring ceilings, a guided tour, and a TED-Talk-type affair to go with the many large-scale screens and surround sound (as did we), but alas, the fourth-floor mall space was lacking in grandiosity, not to mention guided tours and TED Talks. It was a small defeat in terms of expectations, but the promise of a beyond-3D experience was still undiminished.
As a preamble to the main multi-sensory experience, visitors pass through a room hung with replicas and informational blurbs covering a handful of Van Gogh’s more than 2,100 artworks, which in the painter’s own time were mostly uncelebrated oil paintings produced in the last two years of his life. (Van Gogh only catapulted to renown after his death.)
Included in the room is a 3D replication of Van Gogh’s bedroom in Arles — as made famous in the painting of the same name — in the south of France, where he stayed in 1888.
Van Gogh painted it from memory while he was staying in an asylum in Saint Remy de Provence, where he confined himself voluntarily after a mental breakdown that led him to famously cut off parts of his left ear.
Crossing the lighted area into the main showroom where the multi-sensory experience runs on autopilot, and without introduction, evokes a wistful melancholy.
The show itself, however, seesaws between awe and joy — with perhaps a tinge of sadness — and succeeds in producing a sudden, clear affection for, and connection to, a person on the other side of the world who was dead a century before many of those in attendance were born.
Music and moving images carry the lion’s share of the credit for the exhibit’s emotional heft, which is such that the less-than-ideal periphery — a room full of people walking around taking photos, videos, and selfies — disappears into the background just long enough when you need it to.
Benches scattered across the room let you sit down and take in the hour-and-a-half show, which often feels like hallucinations being projected in a black room. The artist’s quotes, self portraits, and the thickly painted oils that comprised his odes to flowers, gardens, and France — both its countryside and its cities — blanket the columns and walls.
“Van Gogh Alive: The Experience” is by no means a definitive guide to the painter’s life, but in a way, the experience manages to take the mental turmoil that the Dutch famously painter experienced and translate it to a thing of calm and oversized beauty that weirdly brings a sense of pleasure to viewers.
Seem ironic? Check it out for yourself.
FIND IT:
Van Gogh Alive: The Experience will run at 4F One Bonifacio High Street until Dec. 8 (Sunday), 10am to 9pm; Ticket prices start at PHP750 (US$15), PHP450 for students (US$9), and are available on a first-come-first serve basis on site. To purchase tickets online, visit the Mind Museum’s official website.
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