The sadness in Van Gogh’s exhibition
ON WEDNESDAY (JANUARY 31ST) I WENT WITH MY MOTHER TO THE IMMERSIVE EXHIBITION BASED ON THE LIFE AND WORK OF THE PAINTER VAN GOGH. I had already seen photos and reports about the experience and I was very curious to immerse myself in it. I just didn’t expect to feel so strange in there. You see: not because of the exhibition, far from it. In fact, it was worth every penny of the ticket to have the opportunity to spend almost an hour sitting there, looking at details that I spent a lot of time studying when I took painting classes or when I was studying Visual Arts at University. Anyone who knows Van Gogh’s life knows that it was an absurd and exciting creative explosion, painful and even unfair. I believe that the exhibition, with its gigantic projections and a thousand effects, managed to overflow these feelings. Do you know what my “problem” was? My way of seeing people.
I see people.
A lot of people are going to think it’s silly, I know. But when you have an exhibition of this magnitude, with the chance to swim through the life and work of an artist as visceral as Van Gogh, and you prefer to see it all through the screen of a cell phone, that hurts me.
Okay, maybe you who are reading this aren’t bothered and have even rolled your eyes thinking “Oh my God, another boring person with all this talk about screens and cell phones and people and blah, blah, blah…”. But I can’t. It’s stronger than me. I’m sorry.
I didn’t take my cell phone, I only took a picture when we were leaving (on my mother’s cell phone and at her insistence). I spent a lot of the time talking to my mother about each work, the techniques used, how difficult it was to make a painting like that, the insertion of pigments and oils, the time-consuming drying process, the painstaking brushstrokes, the details… And most of the people around us posing for the cameras, being illuminated by the lights of Van Gogh’s canvases.
Van Gogh was called crazy for seeing the world the way he did and transposing that into his paintings. Now, people see Van Gogh through 15cm-long canvases, unable to experience that immersion and thirsty for crumbs of likes, but they aren’t called crazy.
In a world in decline, madness is normalized, isn’t it?
I’ll be fair: there were people who were experiencing it. Many were sitting, or even lying on the floor, still, observing, in silence. But they were in the minority. When the famous sunflower projections came on, for example, one girl kept jumping up and down, rubbing herself against the projection screen (which was forbidden) while her colleague filmed from every possible angle. Then they both edited the video on their cell phones while Van Gogh’s life unfolded around them. There were only a few places to sit. Two women chose one, left their bags and water bottles on top to mark the spot, while they went to the other side of the shed to, of course, take hundreds of photos.
Will we empathize with the elderly people who would like to sit down? I don’t think so. After all, who can see old people when you need to pay attention to a small screen in the palm of your hand, right?
A man accompanied by his wife, in a display of boredom, looked at WhatsApp messages while his mistress took selfies with “The Starry Night”. He only raised his head to take a selfie kissing his wife and then went back to his chores. Another girl was writhing on the floor to take advantage of the projections and make a cool video for TikTok — I know because she said loud and clear which channel it was.
One peculiar moment was when an old lady caught me looking at all the madness around us and shook her head in my direction as if to say: “Yes, my dear, we’re all fucked.”
And we are.
Sometimes I wonder how I got to this point, you know. I’m a Millennial, generation Y, I was born in 1988, I saw the arrival of the internet, I’ve been using computers since I was 13, I live with social networks, but I miss not having a cell phone or any of this absurd paraphernalia; I miss a time when we could go out and no one could find us. And guess what: life went on the same even if you didn’t know what was going on at that very moment. We went out, people didn’t find us at home, and life went on. We took a cab, and the driver didn’t put our lives at risk because of a damn cell phone. And the coolest thing was that everyone understood the concept of “I don’t think he can pick me up now, I’ll call him later”.
Later. Thanks to WhatsApp, people have forgotten what that word means…
No, I’m not against technology. As the great writer Isaac Asimov, the father of science fiction, used to say, it’s foolish to fight against the technological inevitable. My problem is that, clearly, all this necessary technological apogee has merged with a society that is increasingly apathetic and in need of attention — a society that still hasn’t understood that these needs and fears won’t be met by social networks.
I see people.
In squares, shopping malls, on the streets; in banks, with my family, on trips I take. There’s a cry in their eyes. If you’re on a bus, for example, look at the people. They’re shouting. They’re smiling for the cameras, but their eyes are screaming with desperation in a crazy reality in which everything suggests that you’re obliged, obliged, to be some kind of mini influencer of their mediocre life.
I’ll give you a challenge I did about 10 years ago, and it was wonderful: spend a week without social media and see if anyone misses you. Don’t tell anyone you’re leaving. No Instagram posts, no TikTok videos saying you’ll do it for a week, no WhatsApp messages. Just go without for a week. See how many people miss you. It’s simple.
Seriously: just live. Really. I think the exhibition on Vincent Van Gogh is a metaphor for reality: there are colors out here, there is life, music, singing, sounds, souls, possibilities. And if you pause for a moment, you won’t even need a projection to zoom in on a sheet of paper for you to notice its grooves: you’ll see them with the naked eye. By living.
A friend of mine says that many of my talks sound like “Zen self-help” and that I should have been born in the 19th century. I agree. But it’s exactly this “Zen self-help stuff” that makes me never have insomnia because I don’t have to keep my cell phone stuck to my pillow, desperate for notifications. And I’m not in WhatsApp groups, not even my family’s, and I’ve long since left Instagram, Facebook and the like.
It’s this “Zen self-help thing” that made me come home and pick up each of the songs playing at the exhibition because I paid attention to each one and absorbed them.
And it’s by listening to this soundtrack while writing this article that I say to you: try life, or you’ll be like that girl who was writhing on the floor. When she left the screening room, still editing the damn video for TikTok, she turned to her friend and asked:
“Whose exhibition is this again?”.
Please don’t succumb.
