“Song I,” projected on a big, circular scrim, is a variation on 2012’s outdoor projection on the facade of Washington, D.C.’s doughnut-shaped Hirshhorn Museum. Its video imagery of a rootless drifter (actress and clothing designer Chloë Sevigny) terminally disconnected in spite (or perhaps because) of our communication-stuffed environment is reflected into a kaleidoscopic, Cubist-style infinity. “Black Mirror” (2011) is a disorienting, octagonal mirrored room. In "Black Mirror," images are reflected in a kaleidoscopic, Cubist-style infinity. The work now feels like space-filler for a vast gallery.ĭistended spectacle overtakes much of Aitken’s work from the last decade. He often reconfigures compositions, but here the inflation to a commercial communication format is unfortunate subtle, elegant poetics become a kitschy harangue. At the Geffen, Aitken projects it in quadruplicate on four industrial-strength, double-sided billboards. In Pittsburgh, “migration” was shown to good effect in a small theater. Animals become surrogates for people bumbling about inside culture’s fabrications. The motel, a transient habitat for roaming humans, is temporarily occupied by denizens of a world that humanity has pushed aside.Īitken’s style is frankly commercial - “migration (empire)” could be a Dolce & Gabbana perfume ad or a Vogue magazine spread - but pointedly without the product pitch. incongruously caged inside motel rooms in a remote wilderness location. The centerpiece shows wild animals one by one - bison, owl, cougar, horse, etc. SIGN UP for the free Essential Arts & Culture newsletter »īy contrast, Aitken’s other memorable work is a single-channel video first shown at Pittsburgh’s prestigious Carnegie International in 2005. But the slowly emerging discovery of fluid connections among disparate pictures mostly produces a shrug. Circles, in fact, are themselves a recurrent motif, partly suggesting the shape of his camera’s lens. The “99 cents” motif repeats discount-store images from “Electric Earth,” one of many examples of Aitken’s art circling back on itself. Most are related to air, water and light, but individually and collectively they’re dull. The work’s energizing correspondence between mundane subjects and the fluidity of camera work later gets pictured in “99 cents dreams” from 2008, a room filled with a gridded installation of 216 snapshot-like photographs of ordinary scenes: a kitchen ceiling light, sky glimpsed through airplane windows, a layer of snow on a parked motorcycle, a prickly and penis-shaped cactus, the shoreline, desert sands. As the young man roams, his intermittent shaking and tumbling unfolds as a faceted metaphor for sudden trauma, blissful aesthetic reverie and sudden bursts of intuitive perception within drifting consciousness. Projected onto multiple screens in a series of four permeable chambers, images of the city are corralled and contained within confined interior spaces. He seems propelled by an unseen power source - something along the quixotic lines of Henri Bergson’s mysterious, unknowable élan vital. Visual static flips into Tilda Swinton singing "I Only Have Eyes for You," which shifts into twinkly nighttime LAĪ lone young man, intermittently jittery, traverses a deserted, nighttime Los Angeles, sliding past brightly lighted discount stores and across shadowed parking garages. Its dreamy, nonlinear narrative of urban isolation seemed to herald the arrival of an important new voice. MOCA acquired the eight-channel, multiroom video projection the year it was made - it won that year’s International Prize at the Venice Biennale - and the installation was a high point when presented at the 2000 Whitney Biennial in New York. The title work, “Electric Earth” (1999), remains Aitken’s most compelling piece. Seven large-scale, moving-image installations anchor the event. “Doug Aitken: Electric Earth,” a large survey of the Los Angeles artist’s career at the Geffen Contemporary, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Little Tokyo outpost, was organized by director Philippe Vergne and includes sculptures, collages, photographs and project documentation. Usually the musing is wrapped in a sleek, even slick package of easily consumable commercial design.Īnd too often, unfortunately, it is undone by a grating aura of chic ennui. Smashed hopes, lost love, inevitable decay and social dissolution, all within a seamless Mobius strip of passing time - Doug Aitken’s work in sculpture and immersive video installations during the past 20 years has taken a romantic view of life’s predictable unraveling.
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