January 13, 2004
Doug Aitken for Paper Sky magazine
Here is the text of a small feature article on Doug Aitken. It will be published in the next issue of Paper Sky, a quarterly travel-and-culture magazine published in Tokyo and New York. It is my first-ever feature article, and the original drafts read more like a close analysis of the three video installations Aitken presented during autumn 2002 in Philadelphia and New York. Subsequent rewrites tried to add more of the man behind the work, so to speak, and I feel that the tension between review and feature can be seen in the text. It's one of those pieces I wish I had more time to work on, but instructive to look at in the state in which it will forever remain. I remain a fan of interiors, the work shown in Philadelphia, and hope to consider it further at some point in the future.
For the past twelve years, Los Angeles-based Doug Aitken, now in his mid-30s, has made a string of seductively beautiful single- and multi-channel video installations along with films, installations, photographs, sound works, collages, and artist’s books. The varied output is indicative of his complete comfort with the image world: Aitken’s work has taken him to varied locations on five continents. Each time he returns to the studio with footage he begins an editing process that results in a fully resolved artwork loaded with memorable, refined images of the world in motion. Beginning with the completion of inflection, his first video, in 1992, Aitken has exhibited his work at film festivals and art exhibitions around the globe.
“I live in an image world. I store images,” begins the female narrator of new skin (2002), a recent four-channel video installation by Aitken. Projected into the corners made by two interlocking elliptical screens, new skin tells the story of a young woman, facing the loss of her eyesight, who endeavors somewhat frantically to mentally catalogue as many images as possible. She sits alone in a loft, chain-smoking cigarettes while flipping through magazines and books. The narrative is driven by interspersed shots of a digital clock counting down: as it moves closer to zero, the pace quickens. The characters and objects that make up her everyday life are gradually blacked out, isolating her in a constrained space on the screen. Near the end, the woman stands before a mirror, reaching toward her reflection in an attempt to physically capture the image disappearing in front of her face. The video image disappears into blackness and we hear the mirror crash to the floor.
Throughout the 1990s, Aitken’s largely non-narrative installations were preoccupied with notions of the landscape, speed, and our relationship to both. monsoon (1995) explored the left-behind tropical setting of Jonestown, Guyana, the site of a 1978 mass suicide; diamond sea (1997) rendered visible the hidden landscape of two diamond mines in Africa; and into the sun (1999) linked the culture of Bollywood to the streets of its birth in Bombay. Since electric earth (1999), an eight-screen installation shown at the Venice Biennale in 1999 and the 2000 Whitney Biennial, Aitken has gradually left behind the specifics of landscape to focus on the characters who inhabit them and the mechanics of viewers’ perception.
Technological progress not only changes the materials and objects we interact with in everyday life; it also alters our notions of speed, space, and time. Aitken amplifies these changes with his work and highlights our constant need for recalibration. The perambulatory nighttime journey in electric earth, set in Los Angeles, presents the sole character as almost mystically in tune with his surroundings, a condition to which the Aitken seems to aspire. “I see my artwork as challenging my way of living, allowing me to move at a constantly changing speed.” Pushing the human body and the mind’s ability to process information to find the moment when “what’s around you fuses with the work you’re making” fascinates him.
The peripatetic artist may very well have hit that point with the simultaneous presentation a year ago of three new video installations. new skin was accompanied at 303 Gallery in New York by on (2002), a three-channel work, while interiors (2002) debuted at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. Whereas new skin eschewed identification with place in favor of outlining the protagonist’s internal monologue, on can be seen as a culmination of the place-specific, non-narrative strand of his artmaking. Both new skin and on are beguiling, but each seems to lack the component that is the strength of the other.
The varied components of Aitken’s visual exploration were only—yet masterfully—tied together by interiors (2002), a three-screen installation that traveled to Austria and London after its stateside debut. In Philadelphia, visitors entered a large room filled by a cross-shaped space delineated by walls made of semitransparent scrims and one open end. Four short videos, each with its own soundtrack, were projected one at a time in varying combinations on the three scrims located at the end of each stem of the “cross.” Each of the four scenarios featured a different character: a helicopter factory employee, a Japanese auctioneer, a young female handball player, and Andre Benjamin of the hip-hop duo Outkast. Each scene begins with a quiet moment of reflection on their immediate environment, situating the activity to come. Then the action takes off: as each character’s activity increases in intensity, the viewer’s eyes bounce back and forth from screen to screen, unable to take it all in. The coordination in tempo and sound of all three visible scenarios gradually becomes apparent as each protagonist reaches a heightened state of concentration. The factory employee sands a painted helicopter before erupting into tap dancing; the auctioneer practices his delivery at increasing speed and volume; the pace of the handball player’s game picks up; and, after wandering L.A. in silence, Andre Benjamin bursts into rap.
Their internal focus is so extreme—a state that is likely paralleled by Aitken working methods in the studio—that all else falls away both on screen and off. Visitors bathe in the glow of images and are surrounded by the rhythmic crescendo of the soundtrack. It is at this moment we undergo Aitken’s fusion of body and environment, glimpsing the fruit of his effort to fuse image with sound and life with work. We come off the high with the characters as Aitken introduces a peaceful coda to each scenario that reintegrates protagonist with surroundings. And the loop begins again.
Aitken notes that after the completion of these video installations, the past twelve months have emphasized “aggressive experimentation. This year has been an attempt to step back, to not make fully resolved work.” Whether that involves tweaking further his masterful understanding of architectural video installations or tackling new mediums, traveling the world or staying at home in L.A., it will seem like a distillation of Aitken’s restless eye and a of our current moment.