INTERVIEW MAGAZINE

Doug Aitken and Beck on Making
Art in an Age of White Noise

By Beck

January 6, 2025

For the artists Doug Aitken and Beck, making art nowadays is an attempt to counter the constant white noise of a culture so rapid and fragmented that it’s hard to discern the value of any one thing. “It’s like a caterwaul of unimportance,” said Beck, the eight-time Grammy winner, when the two got together in Los Angeles last month for a wide-ranging conversation about creativity and inspiration. “This shrieking of tiny, small, inconsequential moments and blips of existence all screaming at the same time.” Aitken, whose new project Lightscape debuted at the LA Phil in November and is currently on view through March at the Marciano Art Foundation, agrees. “The culture and the information world is like an endless kaleidoscope,” he explained. “For me, the creative process is an attempt to navigate this and perhaps temporarily make some sense it.” Hence the 57-year-old multimedia artist’s prolific output as of late; on January 11th, his new show Psychic Debris Field opens at Regen Projects. Below, the two artists talk about artistic intuition, being reckless with their work, and the question of authorship in an age of technological innovation.

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DOUG AITKEN: I was speaking to my friend who has this awful ringtone. And I thought, “I want my ringtone to be Werner Herzog’s voice.” So when it rings, it says something like, “Yah, you have a phone call. And you need to get this immediately. It’s urgent or you may die…”

BECK: I want him on my navigation system. “You’re gonna want to turn left on Sepulveda, the 405 is completely fucked. There’s an apocalypse, you might as well go home. Hollywood Boulevard is completely backed up and is an emblem of the decay of our civilization and societal breakdown.”

AITKEN: Even though, ironically, Werner Herzog lives in the Hollywood Hills.

BECK: I got bit by a Brown recluse spider this week. It sort of feels like the world has a hex on me, some sort of benediction to unravel the bad mojo of 2024.

AITKEN: It’s been quite a ride, but I feel optimistic for the next chapter.

BECK: I think that we share an optimism, which is unusual for the time that we came up in, when pessimism was a badge.

AITKEN: And irony was front and center. But this period we’ve in now is really filled with white noise.

BECK: Oh my god, its unending.

AITKEN: And within the white noise is the constant question of what’s real and what’s false? I think everything is moving with such turbulence, it’s really hard to find a mooring. 

BECK: It’s like a caterwaul of unimportance. This shrieking of tiny, small, inconsequential moments and blips of existence all screaming at the same time and there’s no sense of which thing is important or if any of it is important.

AITKEN: It’s a weird and surreal time to be creating, because you’re often working with fragments. The process of creativity now is almost like welding little pieces of information together. The culture and the information world is like an endless kaleidoscope. For me, the creative process is an attempt to navigate this and perhaps temporarily make some sense it. 

BECK: I think that we always tried to get closer to the fractured, fractal nature of our thoughts and our senses. I think the media is becoming like this scattershot of rippling fuselage of impressions, of little moments and things that add up to something. There’s a power of finding stillness in it. But it’s really hard to do. I’m kind of drawn to that musically. Something like Brian Eno just seems like some sort of medicine, you know? Something that allows for more space. 

AITKEN: How are you creating now? What’s your process? Because there’s always been a lot of multiplicity in the way you work.

BECK: I think the multiplicity has multiplied. I find myself now working on multiple projects or albums at the same time and I’m just jumping between them, sort of creative schizophrenia, but it does make sense. I used to be a little more single-minded. I would just dedicate myself to one thing completely and see it through. If it took a year or two years but now it’s just kind of, each idea is sort of spawning another idea. There’ll be a really interesting thread of something. And I go, “Wait, that’s its own project.” That would be a footnote on this album, but if I take it and expand that idea out more, it might be a whole other world. So I was working on three things, and I think now I’m sort of moving into working on five or six. My only challenge is time to be able to execute it all properly. The ultimate commodity is time, and it’s the ultimate luxury. It’s the currency of creation and life, having time. I think I’m trying to figure out how to somehow cartwheel through a lot of things to get to all of it before there is no more time.

AITKEN: Creatively, I find myself working in a broader and broader way. And I work on something in one medium, like a film or music that’s really de-material. And then I want to make something simultaneously that is completely different, maybe a project that is insanely physical, and tactile. I’m attracted to a radical diversity as part of my working process. In art, I want a sense of disruption, because when things become too formal or too defined, there’s no oxygen left. So you have to lean into it and go downstream, and sometimes you’re going through rapids. And don’t hold on to something that you think you know. Just let it go.

Installation view of Lightscape by Doug Aitken at Marciano Art Foundation. Image courtesy of Marciano Art Foundation. Photo credit: Brica Wilcox.

BECK: Well, I think jumping between the mediums and the approaches helps give perspective, because for me to see what I’m doing clearly and to get it to where what it needs to be, I need to have as much perspective as possible, which is almost impossible when you’re in the center of creating it. It’s like trying to have some sort of distance or perspective on your own body or your own hand in it. In a way, it’s sort of a trick of the mind to displace yourself so you can come back to whatever the other thing you’re working on with a new perspective. That’s why I’ve liked working with other artists, because I’ll get into the space of what they’re making and how they’re creating it, and then I go back to my own work and see things a little differently.

AITKEN: It’s amazing how the things that we create in culture are actually like bridges. It’s such an incredible tool, to be able to work with that electricity and flow. We were just watching Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders. In the film, you see this crystallization of Berlin before the fall of the wall, a very edgy Berlin. The film is pulling in everything from Nick Cave to a scene in a public library with old German actors and Peter Falk. The things that we create, such as that film, can be amazing stages that crystallize periods of time. Art can create moments that can burn that into the retina and record in the memory.

BECK: I think the art that’s always drawn me in is the art that lives and swims in this vast space of possibility. And there’s certain artists and films, there’s certain creations that just feel like anything can happen. Like a film, like Wings of Desire, you could see that for the first time and go, “Okay, what is that?” Somebody not used to that kind of a narrative and all of the philosophical and emotional places that it’s exploring might say, “But wait, I’m lost.” But if you live in it, and you get lost in it like I did—I saw that film when I was a teenager and watched it over and over—sometimes just waiting to see the Nick Cave scene because we were fans. After a while, you sort of lived in the world of that film,  like you said—a multiplicity of different worlds and people, interconnecting. To me, it really goes back to [Federico] Fellini, who was a master of orchestrating this circus of intersecting lives and personalities and culture. There’d be some old world nun and then a 60’s Go-go dancer and then an old, matronly wealthy woman with a big hat, and a little beggar man. To me, it goes back to one of my favorite pieces of art, which is Hieronymus Bosch.

AITKEN: “The Garden of Earthly Delights”?

BECK: Yeah, a collision of fantastical worlds and representations and of humanity and the world of his time, mixed with the fears and the fantasy at this time. That’s something that I aspire to. I think it might be almost too ambitious for this time. I think the culture now really loves something that’s ephemeral and unfussy and kind of badly made. You know, for instance, I’ve made music videos where we spent $100,000 and weeks and weeks of work. And then I’d done things where I just played a song on my guitar in my backyard which somebody filmed on a phone and got five times more views. 

AITKEN: Do you think that’s because the viewer is suspicious of things that are over-produced? We have this desire for authenticity so we see it in the lo-fi, unrehearsed moment. We see a rawness to it, and we seek it out. We want to find something with more oxygen and we want to break the screen. The artist John Baldessari said to me over lunch, “Doug, the greatest tool that an artist has is the ability to say no.” He says “You can just say no to anything.” I thought to really own that was just such a provocative idea.

BECK: I struggle with that. I struggle being discerning and saying no, because often when I really try to push and I’m making a song and I’m trying to will it to what I want it to be, it fights against me, and it comes out as kind of something disingenuous and and doesn’t really connect. But then sometimes, if I just surrender and say yes, even though I don’t really like it, it does work. The problem is, I do end up with songs that I don’t actually really like that much, but they do work for what they are. And I made them for some reason, I don’t know why. Then they sort of belong to the world, and, you know, people either forget them or they love them. I’ve only a few times been able to conceive of something and have it align with my taste and my aspirations and projections. But often it’s just sort of a mystery to me how it ends up the way it does.

AITKEN: Fast and loose. I think there’s a lot to be said for intuition and letting things go and allowing one thing to lead to another very, very rapidly. When you’re making a move, one to another, creatively, and you find a rhythm, and things take over on their own. Sometimes, when you’re creating there’s a sequencing that happens that is really exciting, and it’s like an energy source. I think it’s actually at the core of creativity. When things become really fascinating is when you don’t really know where they’re going to go, and there’s no real safety net, and there’s a sense of taking things further, maybe even to the point of collapse, but you keep going. You need that kind of energy to get somewhere new. And if it’s all familiar, then why do it? You make it, you break it, and keep moving.