Virtually there - touring closed exhibitions
Launching a new site seems the perfect time for a post about virtual experiences. With all museums and galleries closed at the moment due to Coronavirus, many of us have been turning to online ways of connecting with collections and exhibitions. I’ve been interested to see the different ways in which institutions have harnessed online options to make their exhibitions accessible. Largely called ‘virtual tours’ these are taking a variety of different approaches.
Hastings Contemporary have taken the high-tech route by offering robot tours of their spaces while closed. I am very intrigued by these but tours are, quite rightly, being prioritised for the most vulnerable and isolated, who can book their own free 30 minutes with the robot. It seems a wonderful opportunity for privileged access to an exhibition for those who might otherwise not have it.
Most approaches, however, are using some sort of filmed content. Some museums have put excellent video introductions to shows online. Ones that really made me want to go and see the shows themselves included the Hayward’s ‘Among the Trees’ and Tate’s ‘Andy Warhol’. It’s great to have these ways to access shows in isolation, and the introductions to themes, works and curators are excellent. But I’m not sure that they’re virtual tours. They’re related films that introduce content, and act as a teaser for the show, but they don’t really show me the exhibitions properly in the way that I’d have hoped.
More along the lines that I expected was a filmed curator tour of the Guildhall Art Gallery’s exhibition ‘The Enchanted Interior’ which was on my list of things to visit before I was confined to online. The curator is a very engaging presenter and the film gives you a nice sense of the different sections and key works, as well as the space itself.
Others have created new tours specially for a stuck-at-home online audience. I greatly enjoyed the curator’s tour of Compton Verney’s ‘Cranach: Artist and Innovator’ show, which, to be honest, I might well have missed in person anyway. They made an impressive tour from combining the curator’s filmed intros at home with installation shots and object photography, and gave me a real flavour of the show and its importance to Compton Verney. Likewise, I was delighted to find the director’s introduction to the Ghent Museum of Fine Art’s much-anticipated exhibition of works by Jan van Eyck ‘Van Eyck: An optical revolution’. It’s an enjoyably informal and personal tour with a chance to look in detail at the extraordinary works.
I was particularly impressed by the RA’s virtual tour of ‘Picasso and Paper’. Most of the previous tours are 5-20 minutes, but the RA’s is a nice, slow 40 minutes. No presenter, just scrolling text intros to each room and then panning shots of works. It’s the closest that I’ve got so far to the experience of visiting an exhibition myself. I hope that content like this will continue to be produced once we can visit exhibitions in person again. They are both like and not like visiting a show, they give a different experience of the works and only make you want to visit in person more, while giving a glimpse of the content to shows, like the Van Eyck, that you might never see.
More ‘authentic’ virtual experiences have been best embraced by the commercial galleries. Without closed physical shows to film, and still needing to sell works, they have produced very successful virtual viewing rooms that give you introductions and engaging online layouts alongside the ability to focus fully on the works. David Zwirner has pioneered this with ‘Platforms’ running since 2017 and existing as their own independent gallery spaces. With the pandemic, the gallery has opened its viewing rooms to smaller independent galleries. Hauser and Wirth have also unveiled a bespoke entirely virtual reality version of its new space in Menorca. It’s really remarkable. You can tour the gallery space using similar functions to Google Streetview, look at artworks from multiple angles and click on links for the related labels. You can even view related reading material and merchandise from the shop.
As I understand it, each artwork from Hauser and Wirth has been re-built in the online platform so they are new, born-digital versions of the artworks, even the Louise Bourgeois spider that poses outside the gallery under the immaculate blue sky. And, of course, artwork designed for online is perhaps best suited to our current viewing options. A public gallery that has long made digital artworks a feature of its online offer is the Serpentine. My particular favourite at the moment is Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s virtual forest Catharsis (Online). Based on field work, he has crafted a digital simulation of an old growth forest (one that has developed undisturbed over hundreds of years). The piece provides much needed slow, calm immersion in the natural world set up as a single continuous shot that takes you from root to canopy with rich 3D textures and sounds. Born-digital nature straight to your device might encapsulate what we need from art in our pandemic times.