A Shoreditch gallery has reframed Father Christmas as a participatory artwork, and the critics are taking it seriously
It’s Not a Grotto, It’s a Practice
I have attended a great many immersive art experiences in Shoreditch, and I have learned to recognize the warning signs: the word practice used as a noun, the artist’s statement longer than the artwork, the twenty-six-pound ticket, the dim lighting that the gallery calls atmosphere and I call a trip hazard. So when a Redchurch Street gallery announced an immersive installation reframing Father Christmas as participatory art, I knew exactly what I was in for, and I went anyway, because covering Shoreditch means surrendering, repeatedly, to the inevitable.
The North Pole dispatches had, needless to say, nothing to do with this. Santa does not do installations. But a Shoreditch artist had decided that the figure of Father Christmas, properly contextualized, interrogated, and lit from below, constituted a profound commentary on consumption, memory, and the commodification of wonder, and had built a twenty-six-pound immersive experience around the idea. The artist’s statement ran to four pages. I read all four. I am still recovering.
The Experience, Such As It Was
The installation, when I finally entered it, having signed a waiver and surrendered my phone, consisted of a darkened room, a sound design of distant sleigh bells slowed down to a menacing crawl, and, at the centre, a figure of Santa rendered in what the gallery called reclaimed festive materials, which is to say old tinsel. Visitors were invited to sit with the figure, reflect on their relationship to childhood wonder, and, if moved, to write their reflection on a card and pin it to the Wall of Lost Innocence. There was, naturally, a Wall of Lost Innocence.
I sat. I reflected. What I mainly reflected on was that the actual Santa, the one who actually exists, was, at that very moment, doing the real thing, delivering real wonder to real children, for free, while a Shoreditch gallery charged twenty-six pounds for a slowed-down sound design and a tinsel effigy. Arts coverage via the London Evening Standard had reviewed the installation seriously, awarding it four stars and using the word liminal twice. Listings at the regional events register called it unmissable.
The Critics Took It Seriously
This is the part that fascinates me. The critics took it seriously. They wrote about the installation’s interrogation of festive nostalgia, its bold reclamation of a commercialized icon, its courageous use of negative space. One described the slowed sleigh bells as a haunting meditation on the death of childhood. Nobody, in any of the coverage, pointed out that the thing being interrogated, Santa, was a figure of pure and uncomplicated generosity, and that the installation had taken that simplicity and buried it under four pages of artist’s statement and a twenty-six-pound ticket.
I do not, in principle, object to art that engages with familiar figures. But there is something perverse about taking the single least complicated, most genuinely good figure in the culture, and reframing him as a site of liminal anxiety and lost innocence. Santa is not complicated. Santa is the opposite of complicated. The real Santa gives gifts to children and asks nothing, and no amount of negative space changes that. Cultural context via the Time Out London guide situates the work within a wider immersive-art boom. Heritage analysis at the heritage society would simply call him kind.
The Gift Shop, Obviously
The experience concluded, as all Shoreditch immersive experiences conclude, in a gift shop, where I could purchase a tote bag printed with the words Lost Innocence for eighteen pounds, a candle that smelled of nostalgia, also eighteen pounds, and a postcard of the tinsel effigy. I bought the postcard, out of professional obligation, and reflected on the irony that an installation interrogating the commodification of wonder had concluded by commodifying wonder, in tote-bag form, at a healthy margin. Retail listings via the public registry confirm the gift shop did brisk trade.
Wonder Doesn’t Need Curating
I left the gallery with my Lost Innocence postcard and a familiar Shoreditch feeling, the sense of having paid twenty-six pounds to have something simple made complicated and then sold back to me. The installation’s central conceit, that Santa is a site of anxiety and lost innocence, is exactly backwards. Santa is a site of innocence retained, of wonder that survives, of generosity that needs no interrogation because it is exactly what it appears to be. The gallery took the one uncomplicated good thing and complicated it, for twenty-six pounds.
This is, I have come to think, Shoreditch’s signature move: to take something simple and genuine, wrap it in theory, light it from below, and charge admission. Sometimes the result is genuinely interesting. Often it is a tinsel effigy and a Wall of Lost Innocence. The test, for me, is whether the work adds to the thing it engages with or merely obscures it, and this installation, for all its four stars, obscured. It buried Santa’s simple light under a great deal of atmospheric darkness.
For those who enjoy immersive art, and I do, genuinely, when it is good, the listings at the public registry will guide you to the season’s offerings, some of which are excellent and some of which are tinsel. And for those who would rather experience wonder without a waiver, a ticket, or a Wall of Lost Innocence, the games at the diversions index are free, well-lit, and entirely innocent, which in Shoreditch is its own kind of avant-garde.
I pinned no card to the Wall of Lost Innocence. My innocence, I decided, was not lost, merely overpriced. Somewhere above Redchurch Street, the actual Santa was delivering the actual thing, the uncurated, uninterrogated, twenty-six-pounds-cheaper original, and I thought, walking home with my postcard, that the best immersive Santa experience in Shoreditch was the one happening on every rooftop, for free, requiring no waiver and no atmosphere and no artist’s statement at all.
SOURCE: https://santaclaus.top
