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16/1/2007

Doug Aitken

The Museum of Modern Art - MoMA, New York

Sleepwalkers

The Museum of Modern Art and the New York-based public art organization Creative Time present Doug Aitken: sleepwalkers, a major public artwork comprising eight large-scale moving images that will be projected onto the exterior of MoMA, enlivening the building’s architecture with the nocturnal journeys of five city dwellers—a bicycle messenger, an electrician, a postal worker, a businessman, and an office worker.

Conceived by Doug Aitken (American, b. 1968) specifically for the Museum’s broad expanses of glass, steel, and granite, sleepwalkers was inspired by the densely built environment of midtown Manhattan and portrays the metropolis as a living organism fueled by the desires, energies, and ambitions of its inhabitants. It will be viewable from various vantage points around the Museum and in The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. The Sculpture Garden will be open to the public free of charge during the month of nightly projections.

Doug Aitken: sleepwalkers was commissioned jointly by Creative Time and MoMA and is the first collaboration between the two organizations. Its origin grew out of discussions between the artist and MoMA Director Glenn D. Lowry and Creative Time President and Artistic Director Anne Pasternak. The project is organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator, Department of Media, The Museum of Modern Art, and Peter Eleey, Curator and Producer, Creative Time.

“Ambitious experimental projects like Doug Aitken's take a tremendous amount of vision, resources, and belief in the ability of art to transform people's experience of place," said Ms. Pasternak. “Sleepwalkers began as a conversation seven years ago with Creative Time, but it was the partnership with MoMA that made it possible to fully realize this extraordinary artwork, turning the museum's iconic building into a stunning flow of cinematic images, and making architecture come to life with rhythmic human presence, for the public to enjoy."

“A project like this creates a very different dialogue with the public, who we hope will be inspired to think about art in relation to the city itself, and to the larger urban experience," said Mr. Lowry. “Sleepwalkers will be easily accessible to a broad and diverse audience of New Yorkers and visitors to the city, who can engage directly with an artwork in a vital and unexpected context.

Sleepwalkers entwines distinct storylines constructed around five archetypal New Yorkers, nocturnal beings who awaken as the sun sets, prepare to set out into the night, and make their way through the city to their disparate destinations. As they move from the solitude of their personal and professional lives into the chaotic and rich interrelationships of their urban existences, their individual narratives are shown in juxtapositions on different surfaces of the Museum’s exterior, with moments of parallel synchronicity in their movements emphasizing both the solitude of their lives and their membership in the same urban community.

The synchronous composition and editing dissolve as each character undergoes a transition from the everyday to an abstract, dreamlike state. While walking down the street, the businessman collides with a taxi; he then climbs onto the hood of the car and ecstatically dances on it. The bike messenger drums on a bucket on a subway platform, quickening his beat until he attains a state of frenzied rapture. Amid the routine of her job, the postal clerk enters a trancelike state and begins spinning in a tight axis, accelerating until her surroundings seem to fall away. The motion of a roomful of photocopiers dissolves to reveal the office worker onstage in a concert hall, sawing a bow back and forth across the taut strings of a violin amidst an ensemble of musicians. And the electrician, following some cables running along the street, coaxes one from a manhole, knots it into a lariat, and circles it above his head in a reverie.

The five narratives of sleepwalkers are each 13 minutes in length and continuously recombine throughout the course of each evening, offering new juxtapositions of characters in a continual cycle. Because each narrative has essentially the same duration and structure, an everchanging symmetry evolves throughout the night.

Throughout the work, Aitken explores not just the constructed landscape upon which sleepwalker is projected, but also the architecture of the video image itself. At key moments, the images break down into abstraction, sometimes into pixels that are the building blocks of most of the moving pictures we encounter today.

“Doug Aitken’s use of the volumes, surfaces and translucencies of architecture and specifically the dynamic urban fabric of midtown Manhattan is brought to a new level of complexity, scale and visibility in sleepwalkers, the first installation that was conceived and realized for the Museum’s monumental facades. Aitken envisions sleepwalkers' audience as active participants in the process of experiencing the work, engaging them as nocturnal movers throughout the city similar to the protagonists of the work itself," said Mr. Biesenbach.

“Sleepwalkers is a work of art that engages the turbulence of city life, interacting not simply with the architecture of MoMA, but also with the rhythms and energies of the city that surround it," said Mr. Eleey. “As one of the most ambitious efforts to place film in direct dialogue with the metropolis, it provides a multiplex spectacle on the scale of a drive-in for a city whose pedestrians form a significant part of its traffic."

Building on Aitken’s interest in collaborating with a range of artists, musicians, and filmmakers, sleepwalkers features a diverse cast of actors, including New York City street drummer Ryan Donowho (Broken Flowers, Strangers with Candy) as the bike messenger; musician and actor Seu Jorge (City of God, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) as the electrician; Chan Marshall (singer Cat Power) (North Country, V for Vendetta) as the postal worker; Donald Sutherland (M*A*S*H, Klute) as the businessman; and Tilda Swinton (Orlando, Chronicles of Narnia) as the office worker.

The protagonists of sleepwalkers take viewers through the physical and psychological archaeology of New York, through its subways, electrical grids, manholes, office buildings, and processing centers. The work’s setting also serves as an artistic point of departure; filming for sleepwalkers took place in all five boroughs of New York City, at locations including the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel in Brooklyn; the Staten Island Skating Pavilion; the Lettera Sign Company, where Times Square signs are repaired, in the Bronx; a mail-sorting facility in Queens; the New York Transit Museum; and numerous other settings, including the streets of Harlem and the Lower East Side. In addition to many recognizable locations, sleepwalkers takes viewers to virtually unseen areas of the city, including the abandoned subterranean tunnels under Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a long-closed heliport atop the MetLife Building in Manhattan, and behind the monumental neon lights of Times Square.

Eight projectors installed around the Museum will project sleepwalkers onto eight surfaces: five on the Museum’s facades surrounding the Sculpture Garden, two that face west and are viewable in a mid-block open lot, and one above the Museum’s main public entrance on West 53 Street.

Doug Aitken: sleepwalkers continues Aitken’s exploration of the ever-evolving ways in which people experience memory and narrative and relate to fast-paced urban environments. During the past decade, the artist has created innovative contemporary video art by fracturing the narrative structures of his films across multiscreen environments. His work has been exhibited in museums around the world, including The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris. In 1999 he was awarded the International Prize at the Venice Biennale. In 2004, Aitken’s installation Interiors (2002) was shown as part of the exhibition Hard Light at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, a MoMA affiliate.

Creative Time presents the most innovative art in the public realm. Launched in New York in 1974, it works with artists who ignite the imagination and explore ideas that shape society. It initiates a dynamic conversation among artists, sites, and audiences, in projects that enliven public spaces with free and powerful expression. Creative Time first worked with Aitken in 1996 for Art in the Anchorage 13, in which film/video, audio, and digital media artists created environments in the Brooklyn Bridge anchorage’s vast chambers, introducing viewers to a range of new digital artistic processes through sound, moving image, and interactivity.

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Artistic Collaborations: 50 Years at Universal Limited Art Editions

Until April 9, 2007

Prints and Illustrated Books Galleries, second floor

In 1957, a pioneering and creative woman named Tatyana Grosman founded Universal Limited Art Editions, a workshop for making prints and books on Long Island, just outside New York City. Passionate about lithography, she tirelessly coaxed and cajoled the leading vanguard artists from New York—including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Lee Bontecou, Barnett Newman, and many others—to try their hand at this unfamiliar and reputedly old-fashioned medium. These collaborative experiences with master printers at ULAE led many artists to become prolific printmakers and to make the medium integral to their overall practice. By the mid-1960s, artist-printer collaborations at ULAE and at other such print workshops in the United States gave rise to an explosion of contemporary printed art. By the 1980s, a new generation of artists had begun to work at ULAE, already aware of the aesthetic possibilities offered by printmaking and eager to experiment with its myriad techniques. Painters Terry Winters, Susan Rothenberg, and Carroll Dunham and sculptors Kiki Smith and Richard Tuttle have all found new artistic outlets collaborating with master craftsmen at ULAE. This installation showcases work by artists from both generations, highlighting the rich variety of ULAE prints and the continued relevance of printed art to contemporary thinking.

Organized by Wendy Weitman, Curator, Department of Prints and Illustrated Books.

Image: Doug Aitken

MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York, NY 10019-5497
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Children (sixteen and under). This policy does not apply to children in groups. Free

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