Doug Aitken
dal 5/6/2003 al 10/8/2003
Segnalato da
5/6/2003
Doug Aitken
Kunsthalle Zurich, Zurich
The power of Aitken's work derives from his specific use of elements drawn from pop culture, from Hollywood and documentary films, and from media art. His works deal with human beings and how their perceptions are changed by media images and the influences of technology-ridden everyday life, with their relationship with nature and civilization and the way they relate to space and time.
Doug Aitken's films, media installations and photographic works have been
widely familiar to the public at the latest since his prize-winning video
installation 'Electric Earth', which he presented at the 48th Venice
Biennial. Doug Aitken (b. 1968, lives in Los Angeles) has made a
considerable impact in contemporary art, especially with his video
installations, which choreograph image, sound and space equally
fascinatingly. The artist is offering a selection of rarely shown early
films and installations in the Kunsthalle Zürich, revising and restaging
them to a certain extent. They are linked to the most recent photographic
and film works, which use an abundance of images to present the construction
of our media-driven present as a large-scale kaleidoscope, and then lure us
into it.
The power of Aitken's work derives from his specific use of elements drawn
from pop culture, from Hollywood and documentary films, and from media art.
His works deal with human beings and how their perceptions are changed by
media images and the influences of technology-ridden everyday life, with
their relationship with nature and civilization and the way they relate to
space and time. To this end, he sends his audience on journeys through
spookily empty landscapes, urban deserts and floods of media images, moving
the individual into the frenzy of electrified acceleration or the emptiness
of abstract white noise.
Our experience of Doug Aitken's films and installations is imbued with a
sense of movement. This quality applies both to the artist's pictorial
worlds and to information and organization relating to our encounter, which
the artist initiates through his images and installations. We are entangled
in an 'environment' made up of images, sounds and architecture. We are
moving in a complex simulated space that transforms the way we perceive
familiar images and their meaning. Linear experience of time, space and
linear narrative are cancelled - psyches, images, spaces, contents and sound
are reorganized in a variety of relations and geometries.
Aitken's projects constantly refer to each other, using a kaleidoscopic
logic of repetition and change. In his works, acceleration can increase to
the point of spasm and thus of motionlessness, automatisms are liquified,
remnants of civilization are neutralized. All these processes are
essentially renaturized, and revealed as infinitely beautiful images.
The essential elements are already present in 'Inflection', one of Aitken's
first films. Here he uses the simplest of resources to combine abstract with
familiarly bizarre images, the real with the fictional. The film shows
images from a camera he fixed to a rocket. 'Inflection' simulates the great
enterprise of flying in exactly the same way as our images and ideas of the
earth: shaped by space travel, satellite photographs and the media, and the
associated shift away from a particular point of view that is measured
against human dimensions.
The American Land Artist Robert Smithson remarked that it is not possible to
escape from landscape through abstract representation, but that - on the
contrary -, abstraction can bring us closer to the physical structures of
nature itself. Aitken's 'landscapes' are determined by this relationship
between abstract and real images - and even when he films real landscapes or
spaces, these become fictions, and thus above all psychological
topographies.
In a series of films, Aitken looks for places whose identity has been
'occupied': an area closed off by the army in the Namibian desert ('Diamond
Sea', 1997); Jonestown in Guayana, where the Reverend Jim Jones's adherents
followed their guru to death in mass suicide: this work is called 'Monsoon'
(1995), and moves through a landscape that that is frozen in ominous
stillness. Images of remnants of civilization are juxtaposed with intensely
coloured nature shots, and the concrete landscape constantly transforms
itself into an abstract view. The film 'waits' for a storm to break out, but
the monsoon holds back despite all the signs - the metaphorical act of
cleansing does not take place, and precisely for this reason both the
landscape and the film are liberated from their symbolic aspects. In
'Eraser' (1998) we are wandering through a landscape that has been destroyed
by a volcano on the island of Montserrat. The chief features of the journey
are ghost towns, desolate landscapes and remnants of civilization. In both
these films, Aitken 'erases' nature's symbolic charge by the way he
approaches it, but in 'These Restless Minds' (1998), he successfully
eradicates linguistic meaning through acceleration. We see auctioneers
outside telephone boxes, in car-parks, in subways. They are in total command
of the speech acceleration particular to their field, their individual
'song'. Figures, words become a meditative, meaningless hammering. The
ecstatically endless litanies create the sound of machines that sound
inhuman, turning the sought-after individualization into its opposite.
It is almost a commonplace to say that the contemporary subject is made up
of multiple images and identities. Nevertheless, Aitken manages to question
the way we are steeped in the media today. He goes a step beyond the mere
constitution of this fact and initiates multiple perception-modes on the
plane of the two-dimensional presence of images and openness to
three-dimensional experience. While 'I'd die for you' (1993) strings
together film material in which John Wayne dies in 14 different ways in the
course of his film career, 'Me amour' (1998) shows human beings duplicated
by the media. In more recent works, the kaleidoscope of our coinings
increasingly becomes the composition of the images themselves, which are
shaped by a visually fascinating treatment of perspectives, geometries,
reflections and kaleidoscopic constructions. 'I store images - one after the
other' repeats one of his film figures, the world of images has replaced the
image of the world. An encounter takes place at the two-dimensional,
thin-skinned pictorial surface of the world, which updates itself as a
sensual and thus once more multi-dimensional one through the installations.
In 'On' (2002) images of everyday scenes repeatedly zoom in to an empty
centre. The images of the world assemble around this void, and are then
swallowed up in the black-and-white contrasts of two concentric circles. As
though you are looking outwards from inside your own pupil, the 'eye' opens
and closes in an increasingly accelerated movement.
CATALOGUE: Doug Aitken A - Z Book (Fractals). Ed.: The Fabric Workshop and
Museum, Philadelphia, Kunsthalle Zürich. Dialogue Dan Kish / Doug Aitken and
Russell Ferguson / Doug Aitken Texts by Philippe Parreno and Michael Speaks
PREVIEW FOR PRESS: FRIDAY, 6 JUNE, 10.30 A.M., DOUG AITKEN WILL BE PRESENT
LECTURE: Thursday, 17 July, 6.30 p.m.
Jörg Heiser (Editor 'frieze', Berlin): On the work of Doug Aitken
PUBLIC TOURS: NEW NOW ON THURSDAYS AT 6.30 P.M. Medea Hoch: 12.6. / 26.6. /
10.7.
OPENING HOURS: Tue / Wed / Fr 12 a.m. - 6 p.m., Thur 12 a.m. - 8 p.m., Sa /
Su und Holidays 11a.m. - 5 p.m.
SPECIALLY OPEN: Su, 15.6. 11 a.m. - 8 p.m., Mo, 16.6. 12 a.m. - 6 p.m., Fr,
1. 8. 11 a.m.- 5 p.m.
Kunsthalle Zurich
Limmatstrasse 270
Zurich
t 01 272 1515
f 01 272 1888