FLAUNT

Doug Aitken | That Tirelessly Trained Curiosity

Via Issue 195, Where Are We Going?

Written by Matthew Bedard

Doug Aitken is one of LA’s finest cultural figures. He does art—film, sculpture, paintings, multi-media, etc. This art’s been exhibited in hundreds of museums and galleries around the world. He’s also a really swell guy, as uniquely curious and considerate in his courtesies as he is with his craft. Aitken resides in Venice, CA and likes to surf often. His shows are some of the coolest I’ve had the privilege to see.

I meet up with Aitken at his studio in Venice to discuss his new artwork, Lightscape, which is many things—a feature- length film, a forthcoming multi-screen installation, and a series of live music performances, some of which will stage in 2025 at the Marciano Art Foundation in LA. Over a chamomile tea Aitken pours me, I witness segments of incomplete but nearly finished Lightscape. It leaves my arm hair standing in some scenes, and in others I can’t help but shake my head at the stubborn endearment of the human species.

While cast and populated with humans, Los Angeles and its surroundings are as critical a character in Lightscape, treated with a tough tenderness we don’t often intersect with when considering Southern California: its beauty, its brutality, its relentlessly coarse and candied hues all treated with a sort of subdued respect and neutrality, and without question, stunningly photographed.

Where Lightscape takes the Aitken canon and exceeds itself into a new—and frankly masterful—arena is in its sound design. To accomplish this remarkable viewer experience, spread over a dozen song cycles, Aitken collaborated with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Music and Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Master Chorale. How you like them apples? Woven in are original compositions created by Aitken and collaborator Grant Gershon, which at various intervals blend into works by seminal minimalists such as Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Meredith Monk. Even Los Angeles stalwart Beck gets in on the music.

The composite results of this unequivocal film—images of which are scattered throughout this issue—are the stuff of guttural glory, fed through the ears but felt in the spine, the sphincter, the heart. In numerous ways, as we pan across The City of Angels and its deserts, its coast, we’re made aware of the rabbit holes we’ve tunneled down, the vistas we’ve summitted—where we’ve been—but the film could also be said to ask where we might be headed. For Aitken, as you’ll read below, the answer, however inconclusive, is as much about the will of the viewer—that critical curiosity we must fight to keep kindled—as it is in his impassioned treatment.

Talk to me about relics in the film. You’ve got what appear to be inactive airplanes and machinery, for instance. Would you agree that beyond physical relics in the film, there are psychological ones?

I think Lightscape is this composition of locations, people, and places. I wanted something that was very diverse and very broad. I wanted a narrative that was fragmented. I think in a lot of ways, like when you look at the way we live our lives now, we don’t live the straight story. There isn’t a beginning and a middle and an end. There isn’t a perfect conclusion anymore. Everything is like a river of information that’s constantly flowing—points of light are connecting. I wanted to make a project that made a different kind of structure. A structure that, to me, felt more honest to how I live my life and how we’re moving forward.

In the work, there is a diversity of places.There’s abandoned parts of Death Valley to airplane graveyards. The relics that you’re talking about really speak to the past, this idea of the Industrial Revolution, this idea of the 20th century moving forward, but not quite making it. Then there are other aspects to the film that are very future-forward, like robotics factories. We find a scene where a young guy is working there, and he starts moving faster and faster, and he’s kind of moving at the speed of the machines and almost surpassing them. In this work, for me, it’s an attempt to make a different kind of format and to express these questions instead of giving you an answer, “Like, let’s make an artwork that is a journey. Let’s go downstream together and see where it takes us. Let’s go into darkness where things aren’t undefined and everything isn’t spelled out.”

To me, that’s really what art can do, and that’s what art needs to do now. It needs to give us a space for that, art isn’t absolute, and it isn’t black and white.

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