Would Frida Kahlo have liked “Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva,” the eye-catching immersive art experience currently at Foro Polanco in Mexico City? I can’t really say no. Kahlo was a complicated person, obsessed with promoting a personal legend but also passionately politically concerned.
What does Kahlo’s leap to immersive art status suggest about contemporary “Frida-mania”? “Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva” has the stamp of approval from the Kahlo family itself (as does “Immersive Frida Kahlo,” another Frida attraction opened in cities across North America). Keep in mind, though, this is the same arm of the family that announced last year that it was planning a Frida Kahlo and Family Metaverse (supposed to launch in the second quarter of this year, but until present silencer).
Lasting approximately 45 minutes, this immersive Frida experience fills two large chambers (there’s also a side chamber with additional selfie ops, kids’ activities, and interactive Frida-themed games). The walls are animated with super-scale, high-resolution projections featuring swirling images from Kahlo’s greatest hits, the Two Fridas (1939) at the Broken column (1944) to its funny final tableau, a still life of a watermelon with the words “Viva la Vida” (Live life!) engraved on it.
The images are animated and repeated so that crowds can enjoy versions of the same show wherever they walk through the galleries. Foliage grows and moves. The atmospheres of his paintings change from day to night.
The giant central figures are sometimes invaded by tides of brushes, human hearts, chairs or nails. Sometimes these animated swarms only leave Frida or Diego Rivera’s eyes, unwittingly conjuring up that meme of a frozen Homer Simpson sinking backwards into a hedge in embarrassment. Warm, shimmering music plays.
by Frida Kahlo Portrait of Diego Rivera (1938) projected within Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva. Photo by Ben Davis.
A handful of Kahlo quotes on the soundtrack create an atmosphere of biographical communion. These hit the familiar fat beats of Frida’s lore: the accident that left her in pain for life, her all-consuming passion for Diego, her shame for her business. It ends with a quotation, pronounced in the tone of a wise and mischievous grandmother: “No vale la pena irse de este mundo sin haberle dado tantito gusto a la vida” (something like: “It’s not worth the hard to leave this world without taking a little pleasure in life.”)
Like “Immersive Van Gogh,” which it echoes in style, “Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva” does the job it sets out to do very well: providing an effective and spectacular take on visual arts mythology and a pause family in the air. conditioning. Just as Vincent Van Gogh was honed by media culture into his most commercially simple idea of ”tortured genius,” so Frida Kahlo was honed into becoming a “passionate woman.”
An animation by Frida Kahlo The wounded deer (1947) to Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva. Photo by Ben Davis.
This particular immersive Frida doesn’t really go out of its way to tell Frida Kahlo’s actual story, but the new Batman movie doesn’t bother to retell Bruce Wayne’s origin story either. The point of today’s bestselling IP-based media is to provide you with content so familiar that you don’t have to read up on it. Instead, you can just enjoy watching it creatively reinterpreted.
In Mexico City, Frida Kahlo is more than familiar, of course. Dolls and tchotchkes in his image are sold everywhere; she looks at murals and T-shirts, in cute cartoon form. But there are also plenty of readily available Fridas that give a sense of the harsher, less marketable political side that nearly every modern take on “Frida-mania” seems bent on burying in kitsch.
See Diego Rivera’s famous cycle of murals at the Secretariat of Public Education. Inside there is an image called At the Arsenal, from 1929, centered on the image of Frida in a worker’s red shirt, with a communist red star on it, distributing weapons to the workers. The Soviet flag flies behind her.
Diego Rivera, At the Arsenal (1929). Photo by Ben Davis.
Even in the disappointing and overly touristy Frida shrine that is Casa Azul, where they sell all sorts of harmless Frida products, they still keep her bed with the five pictures staring down at her at night, like saints watching over her sleep . : Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. When I was there for my time slot, the American tourist in front of me was very angry to find out that Frida was a Marxist. “You know, I read that shit in college, but I’m an adult now, and it’s not cute anymore!” he shouted at his girlfriend.
No one will have similar adverse revelations during “Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva”, which is sponsored by a bank, Citibanamex.
Defending “political Frida” from “commercial Frida” is now its own critical trope. But the topic of Frida’s politics is also tricky, and I wouldn’t trust Citibanamex or its immersive art engineers with its intricacies. Usually, this goes in the direction of a simple heroization of “political Frida”. But his politics were complex and contradictory. For example, Frida was an anti-Stalinist, then an ardent Stalinist in her last days. (She returned to the Mexican Communist Party, Hayden Herrera argues, because her vision of a muscular, actually existing world communism offered an image of strength that served her psychic function while her own body was failing.)
by Frida Kahlo The broken column (1944), animated in Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva. Photo by Ben Davis.
You might actually be able to create an immersive show that would give a sense of Kahlo’s complexity, but that would require some creativity and thoughtful engagement with the story, which could take away from the smoothness of the audience. It would also be necessary to break with certain emerging clichés of “immersive art”, which privilege the floating atmosphere and the predigested narration.
The introductory text that welcomes you outside “Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva” almost says that it expects its audience to come mainly to the show prepared by Salma Hayek’s 2002 film, Frida (which, by the way, some Mexican critics criticized at the time for its glamorous Hollywood treatment of the entertainer). It is said:
There are many paths that lead to the famous Frida Kahlo: the medical path, the scientific path, the historical path, the biographical path, and the emotional path. Since the release of the Hollywood film, it is this last path that has led the greatest number of people around the world to Frida Kahlo: it has moved them and awakened great empathy.
And now, that multimedia immersive experience is here…
What does this mean – taking the “emotional path” to Frida, as opposed to the “biographical” or “historical” paths?
Perhaps because we’re already talking about how Hollywood today deals with art, my immersive experience of Frida reminded me of an article by critic Alison Wilmore, who recently asked in Vulture: “Jane Is Austen just a vibe now?” Wilmore takes a look at the contemporary “Jane Austen Industrial Complex” (but specifically the new Netflix Persuasion) and how a set of tropes – “beanie hats, country walks, piano sessions in the living room, a vague sense of a stuffy British accent” – came to crowd out the complex psychological and social observations that made reality of Austen. books so durable.
“Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva” in Mexico City makes me think that immersive experiences are perhaps best understood as agents of a similar process – or perhaps what happens when that process takes its final shape. They are a preeminent contemporary vibration-ification technology.
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