Motion pictures

From street level, the lobby of Frameless Immersive Art Experience looks as if it might lead to an urban co-working space. 10am on a saturday morning in January and it is already filling up with the tourists who flock to this westerly part of town. We are, after all, just around the corner from last year’s most notable new souvenir shop, sorry, venerable scholastic museum; decals in the window of Moco indicate no surprises.

My ticket is scanned and I feel quietly expectant. My pet theory, that immersive artworks are twentyfirst century prehistoric caves, is bolstered by the beckoning escalators. Studded with mirrors, lit by animated screens, they carry me down into a subterranean realm of bright light, a gift shop, a welcoming cafe and a lobby from which we can jump off into one of four art caverns.

I spelunk my way into the first of these huge gallery spaces. One can, if one wishes, read that all of the art in this room goes ‘Beyond Reality’. We have the Surrealism of Dalí and Max Ernst, and we take in Klimt, Munch, Bosch and Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Rousseau’s Dream is also spun out for a bit of added familiarity. But as that roll call unfolded I found myself trying to name the painter at the first hint of each famous painted motif. A petty bit of trainspottery which could not be avoided. Not sure who else was engaging in this pedantry.

As all six walls of this art container flooded with imagery, I looked around and saw how, every one of us bathed in moving light and colour, visitors to Frameless tended to be more perambulatory and wide-eyed than visitors to, say, the National Gallery. As the surrounding projections oozed into every corner of my field of vision, it seemed no one quite knew where to stand, where to focus, whether to sit, whether to move, what to capture with my phone and whether to video that or take a still.

Let me just say a word on the treatment of masterpieces by a phenomenon such as this. Frameless has blown up and animated more than 50 venerable art treasures, then it has added a soundtrack. Klimt’s decorative eyes wink. Dalí’s attenuated elephants march. Damned children in the Garden of Earthly Delights giggle and wriggle. All of which means that these iconic moments, so carefully preserved on canvas by some fine artists of yore, are broken up into fragments, mapped onto 3D space and, of course, sped up. Art has been repurposed for spectating rather than contemplating.

I marvel, for example, at the effect which makes it look as if the gallery floor has become a moving platform of decorative brushwork. I can see groups of fellow visitors sliding as if on a carousel, if I gaze at their feet. Then I discover the mirrors which border the space and tile the ceiling. Even the projectors are painted silver. Looking down I can see an infinity of spectators, and just a passing periphery of Great Art, plus the opportunity to take a mindbending image for my Instagram feed.

The looping installation runs for just over 20 minutes. Then I make my way to a second chamber of wonders, this one seemingly themed around colour. There are flecks of paint all over the floor which scatter like leaves when you kick them. This is the expressive surplus of a work by Monet; a similar trick is deployed to zhuzh up Van Gogh. As I entered, a twinkling galaxy of light dots served to introduce me to pointillism; this rippling mural also responds to visitor activity.

Throughout Frameless there is a general rhythm in which elements of a work dance in towards the spectator from all sides and then coalesce to offer a fleeting moment, in truth worthy of a frame, a pause in which the word ‘voila’ might come to mind, as spoken by an educated conjurer, before all of the daubs or the details fall apart again and make way for the next big reveal. For some reason this is a trope which reminds me of a television ident. It is unrelenting and the works are flattened into a single frame of pointless equivalence.

Let’s be generous and call it levelling up. Frameless is not the first to liberate works from canvas, frame, bricks and mortar. French writer André Malraux is sometimes credited with the invention of the first virtual museum. In 1949, this took book form and displayed works, in a canon of Malraux’s learned judgement, from across a wide expanse of time and space. Page after page, each of these works appeared contiguous and in black and white. They were perfect for comparison and for study in a library or in a seminar. This new ‘Museum without Walls’ was for a different age.

Big windowless box number three, the third gallery, was given over to landscapes or, more specifically, seacapes. I was struck by the way in which individual boats on Canaletto’s Grand Canal in Venice have been cutely animated. They move independently of each other in a feat which illustrates that tech rather than artistry is in the foreground. Have you ever seen a Turner until you’ve seen the tug boat wheel rotate, as it tows the Fighting Temeraire to its final resting place? Well, yes, but that is not an intervention one can easily forget.

One more elaboration, apparently crying out for some creative technology, was made to Hokusai’s Great Wave. As you can imagine, Frameless has rewound the Japanese masterpiece so that you can see the swell build and the foam begin to crash. (Keenly aware of what was about to happen, I began to video this. See above.). I’d like to say that a time-based interpretation is an affront to the eternal calm which, for me, The Great Wave expresses, but this painting has already spawned a tsunami of prints and pastiches, so, like most of the works here in Marble Arch, it is probably fair game.

Worth noting also that later in this space: I resisted the temptation to thread my way to the edge of the screen in order to stand proud in romantic solitude and contemplate The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Casper David Friedrich. But I did contemplate some fellow wanderers who, to the sound of Wagner, raised smartphones aloft, captured the abyss-like panorama for later ready reference should they be feeling too much like data nodes or target markets. It was interesting to see such an icon of poetic individualism subsumed into the cavalcade of mass spectacle.

The final gallery space was devoted to abstract art and offered a very basic maze of ceiling-height screens which popped with skittering elements taken from Mondrian, Kandinsky, Klee and so on. The former’s Victory Boogie Woogie came to life and one had to say perhaps, ‘It’s what he might have wanted’. The soundtrack was jazzier and the lighting was darker. There was a nightclub vibe, enhanced by a couple of stewards on the door of this one. Don’t touch the screens, we were told, as if to say Don’t do drugs. After more than 20 minutes of this, I was ready for coffee.

Frameless does not compare with the framed experience offered by a non-commercial museological institution. It is carnivalesque to see these works stretched and realised in, actually, four dimensions. That really is something. But innovation, trickery, creativity for its own sake… these are not aspects of art that get my dopamine receptors firing. Nevertheless, Frameless is thought-provoking. In taking us underground and enveloping us in darkness and light the experience is surely primal. But the magic was that of a creative design studio, not shamanic lair, not artistic garret, not chapel pew. Unless I’ve got it all wrong, Lascaux was not a co-working space for graphic designers.

Back on the surface of this contemporary cave. Marble Arch is dematerialising before our eyes. It is under wraps in tarpaulin, which hides the London landmark like a conjuror’s sheet. Printed right across this tarp is a 1:1 image of the structure underneath: a gentle illusion. The Arch needs some restoration work. Nothing it seemed was permanent. All that was solid melted into air. Dalí’s watches are speeding up.