Over at the Park Avenue Armory they’re corralling visitors into a dark and mysterious space the size of a NASA hangar. The willing prisoners enter a kind of giddy unknown, not unlike the expectant huddles that are herded into the Haunted Mansion attraction at Disneyland. It’s a bit spooky, but you take it on faith that astonishment will follow.
Once through the foyer’s towering old wooden doors, you’re inside the Armory’s 19th-century drill hall, an engulfing black space where forests of flickering screens fashion a panoramic tumult of light and sound. Music thrums and swells. Your head swivels as you both stand and stroll, eyes chasing a hyper-impressionistic visual tour of Italian cities and their famous epicenters of great art.
Your group is then ushered into the next area, erected as a precise replica of the refectory in the Santa Maria delle Grazie monastery in Milan, where, past vaulting arches and columns, a high-tech copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous (and long-imperiled) 1498 mural painting “The Last Supper” is gigantically projected.
A life-size replica of the “Last Supper” table strikingly divides the massive space, its contents — cups, plates, bread rolls, pieces of chicken — painted frosty white like a canvas. At points during the presentation, the table glows orange underneath. If invited, viewers could easily sit down and fill the table like the painting’s familiar inhabitants.
This is artist-filmmaker Peter Greenaway’s grand multi-media meditation on “The Last Supper,” brought to thunderous life with layered projections, dramatic classical music, Power Point-like laser effects, scrolling panels of text and imposing details of the painting, all of it presented with Sensurround intensity.
Try as he might, Greenaway can’t extract himself from film, and the cinematic close-ups and fades, bowel-rumbling sound effects and orchestral timing make his spectacular a youth’s dream version of an art class — part movie, part high-tech symposium. It melds the shrewdly pedagogic and lushly phantasmagoric.
See it how you will, but this is not just a bewilderingly complex art installation; it’s a full-throated theatrical production, sans live performers. And it’s not the product of one man but a committed arsenal of sound, video, lighting and theatrical creators. Greenaway is the maestro.
Equal parts euphoria and education are its aims. What it means isn’t pressing; how it makes you feel — awe, ecstasy — seems more to the point.
After “Supper,” there’s dessert. The 45-minute journey concludes with a surprise epilogue, a jaunty and visually busy exegesis of Veronese’s “Wedding at Cana,” whose connecting tissue to “The Last Supper” is another scene of Christ holding court at the center of a long and crowded dinner table. This time it’s the site of his signature miracle of turning water into wine for an overbooked wedding bash. Greenaway, using his taped voice, brings erudite humor to this kinetic exploration of a great painting. He asks questions of it. The answers are speculative jokes, but curiously plausible, only adding to the dizzying magic at hand.
(Details. Through Jan. 6 at the Park Avenue Armory.)
