There’s one pretty notable difference between ‘David Hockney: Bigger & Closer’ and the other immersive experiences in town: the artist is alive. All the other ones just involve the organisers taking pivotal historic – dead – artists like Vincent Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo and Gustav Klimt, wiping their arses with their legacies, and then charging the public to look at the smears. Frida and Gustav didn’t get to have a say in what’s been happening to their art. But David Hockney is fully involved in this shit.
And that matters. Immersive art is big business, but it’s just projections of old paintings. Hockney’s installation at brand new immersive art and theatre venue Lightroom is meant to be different. It’s meant to be better.
Lightroom sends you descending deeper and deeper into the bowels of King’s Cross, until eventually you stumble on a room erupting with digital colour. Wall to wall, floor to ceiling projections show Hockney paintings of flowers and valleys and fields and copses. There’s a section on the history of perspective, a little live-action bit about theatre. Rousing, throbbing classical music soundtracks every eruption of green and yellow. Hockney narrates, talking about how he likes painting and flowers and spring.
It’s just photos of goddamn paintings
Some of the works are adaptations of his digital iPad drawings, others are huge renderings of his massive recent landscape paintings, or classic older Hockney images. And then it sort of hits you that you’re just looking at photos of paintings. Very, very high-res photos of paintings, with bits that move and nice music, but still photos of paintings. It’s not new work designed for the tech, or a new approach to digital representation, it’s just photos of goddamn paintings.
But there were hundreds of people there on my Monday morning visit. Hundreds. At one point they burst into applause. When it said ‘LOVE LIFE’ in bus-sized lettering across the wall, they cooed and ahh-ed. Had they never seen a cinema screen before? Or… lights? It was like watching cavemen being shown fire for the first time.
I’m being unfair. This is a very pretty-looking, four-screen documentary about David Hockney. And some of it is projected on the floor. Great, fun, go for it. I don’t hate it. I don’t think it’s evil, or some kind of symbol of our society’s dwindling cultural intelligence. I just think it’s expensive, boring and not that special. And looking for the art in it is like looking for the music in a bacon sandwich.