Cultured Magazine
November 15, 2024
“Lightscape,” Artist Doug Aitken’s Latest Work, Takes on the American West—With a Little Help From Hollywood
The artist's latest work required five years, one mountain lion, and countless friends to realize. Its first iteration—presented in collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic—blends film and live music to conjure a vision of our collective future.
"It's kind of a Gesamtkunst work," muses Doug Aitken from his studio in Venice, Los Angeles.
The "it" in question is Lightscape—the artist's latest multidisciplinary undertaking. The project, five years in the making, is difficult to describe: "It's like a planet," Aitken continues, "occupied by music, film, narrative, and many tactile sculptural works made from foraged materials."
At the core of this "total artwork" is a feature-length film that unfolds like a lucid dream. Aitken takes as his setting miscellaneous landscapes of the American West—desert vistas, multi-level parking garages, Neutra houses, highway gas stations, and 24-hour donut shops—staging cryptic encounters between people (including the likes of Natasha Lyonne and Beck), wild animals, and the built environment. "I like this idea of embracing the world as a sprawling, hallucinatory space and not trying to make sense of it," Aitken muses. Tensions build, but questions remain unanswered.
The project is the result of pure exploration for the 56-year-old artist, who was working pre-pandemic on a Philip Glass-inspired "minimalist song cycle" when he was approached by the Los Angeles Philharmonic to collaborate on a mixed-media work. Lightscape took shape from there, with Aitken's vocal compositions brought to life by the Los Angeles Master Chorale, accompanied by the Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel. This captivating sonic collage propels a tangle of narratives forward, eschewing conventional dialogue in favor of language so sparse it feels abstract.