HYPERALLERGIC
The Slouching Beast of Southern California
Alternately ominous and transcendent, Doug Aitken’s panoramic Lightscape cycles through scenes of human movement enthralled by highways and city streets.
Brian Karl March 3, 2025
LOS ANGELES — Walking into the massive Scottish Rite Masonic Temple to watch Doug Aitken’s Lightscape is like arriving backstage mid-movie at an old-fashioned drive-in. Extensive wooden struts buttress the installation’s seven large-scale screens — each more than 20 by 15 feet (six by four and a half meters) — that enclose viewers in a panoramic field of ceaselessly moving images and a soundtrack that includes actors’ spoken ruminations; location sounds such as car tires, lawn sprinklers, train horns, and boots on asphalt; and snatches of minimalist musical compositions.
Built in the mid-20th century to house the arcane rituals of the Masonic Order fraternity, the Temple is located near the Hollywood production enterprises that have long made LA the epicenter of make-believe. This overlap of purpose between the industrial Dream Factory and the lapsed Masonic project, which created ceremonial spaces and corralled invented imagery to transform the cultish into the cultural, makes the Temple an apt context for Lightscape’s quasi-mystical spectacle.
Aitken is a virtuoso at framing human movements through built landscapes out in the world, going back to his 1999 installation Electric Earth, which won a prize at that year’s Venice Biennale. Lightscape masterfully shifts through such scenes in simultaneous pairings, triplets, and larger ensembles. Simple yet emotionally charged and dynamic tableaus of a raking gardener, lone drivers on journeys to nowhere, and dancing warehouse workers build in cycles to various peaks without overarching narrative. The ultimate form for the piece, then, presents as a centripetal loop, a montage of vignettes with the feel of old-school music videos or ads for designer jeans.
Lightscape’s message seems to be that we are not just impelled to follow but should celebrate movements prescribed by modern infrastructure of highways and retail stores, automobiles, and factories. And however beset we are by the pressures of capitalism and modernity, going with the flow can yield certain pleasures — for instance, that of being a moving body, even if one responding to machineries’ mandates. In Lightscape, peaks of these human behaviors play out as a cast of assembly-line workers, subway passengers, and pedestrian rave-seekers burst into ecstatic dancing.
The majority of depicted scenes are sited on cars, city streets, and overhead highways, with extended sequences displaying highly polished modern homes, backyard swimming pools, and lush gardens. Though proposing a sort of universal connectedness of all things, Lightscape’s settings remain circumscribed to very Southern Californian milieus. Sun-drenched deserts, seashores, suburban residences, and landscaped backyards alternate with networks of roadways, gritty urban facades, and subway and warehouse interiors. The soundtrack straddles the ominous (deep wind noises, pulsing rhythms) and the transcendent (angelic voices), with music excerpted from Philip Glass and Steve Reich compositions. Semi-melodic voiceovers repeat banal mantras; one hooded, walking woman muses, “Every day, the seasons change.”
It’s the appearance of animals sporadically through Lightscape that leaves uncertain the question of machinations in our shared world. Non-human creatures make cameos throughout the piece, reminding us that they, too, are trying to find some place or traction in the built world. A tentative coyote briefly wanders a city sidewalk, a big cat prowls inside a moderne residence in several longer appearances, and a recurrent horse carries a cowboy through varied landscapes. These urban adaptors do not look at ease in the world. They’re mascots, victims of the human impulse that marginalizes nature to the edges of pavement and infrastructure. Like Lightscape’s actors and immersed viewers, they’re careening through the detritus of built environments, succumbing to the rhythms of commerce and its mechanisms, awash in their stimulations.
Lightscape: Doug Aitken continues at the Marciano Art Foundation (4357 Wilshire Boulevard, Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles) through March 15. The exhibition was organized by the artist.