Doug Aitken

Doug Aitken
Doug Aitken

Aitken's Sleepwalkers displayed at the Museum of Modern Art 2007
Born 1968 (1968)
Redondo Beach, California
Nationality American
Field Multimedia art

Doug Aitken is an American multimedia artist.

Contents

Early life and career

Doug Aitken was born in Redondo Beach, California in 1968. In 1987, he initially studied magazine illustration[1] with Philip Hays at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena before graduating in Fine Arts in 1991. He moved to New York in 1994 where he had his first solo show at 303 Gallery.[2] He currently lives and works in Venice, California, and New York.[3]

Work

Aitken’s body of work ranges from photography, sculpture, and architectural interventions, to narrative films, sound, single and multi-channel video works, and installations.[4][5] Aitken's video works have taken place in such culturally loaded sites as Jonestown in Guyana, Africa's diamond mines, and India's Bollywood.[6]

Since the mid-1990s, Aitken has created installations by employing multiple screens. Diamond Sea (1997), for example, includes two video projections, one suspended video monitor, and one full-color, illuminated duratrans image in a dimly lit space. Four speakers create a surround sound experience; the film shows a guarded region in the Namib desert in southwestern Africa known as Diamond Area 1 and 2. The territory, estimated over 40,000 square miles, has been sealed off since 1908. Within its borders exists the world’s largest and richest computer-controlled diamond mine.[7] Hysteria (1998-2000) uses film footage from the past four decades that shows audiences at pop and rock concerts working themselves into a frenzy.[8] Filmed and photographed in the dusty sound stages and film sets of Bombay, the twenty-four hours screening of Into the Sun (1999) focuses on the frenetic activity of Bollywood.[9] Diamond Sea was presented at the 1997 Whitney Biennial and his Electric Earth installation drew international attention and earned him the International Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1999.[4]

Aitken has collaborated on his videos with a wide variety of musicians, from hip hop artist André 3000 of Outkast, who was in Aitken’s 2002 multiscreen Interiors to indie bands like Lichens, Fury in the Slaughterhouse[10] and No Age, which contributed to his score for his 2008 film Migration and 2011's Black Mirror, respectively.

Conversations

In 2006, Aitken produced Broken Screen: 26 Conversations with Doug Aitken (Distributed Art Publishers, 2006), a book of interviews with twenty-six artists who aim to explore and challenge the conventions of linear narrative. Interviews included Robert Altman, Claire Denis, Werner Herzog, Rem Koolhaas, Kenneth Anger and others.[11] The Idea of the West (2010) presents the collective response of 1000 people on the street who were asked “What is your idea of the West?” to create a manifesto from the quotes and comments of random individuals. Another interview project, Patterns & Repetition (2011) is a series of filmed conversations about creativity in the 21st Century in which Aitken conducts short conversations with pioneers in different artistic disciplines, including Devendra Banhart, Thomas Demand, Jack White, James Murphy, Mike Kelley, Jacques Herzog, Fischli & Weiss, Yayoi Kusama, Michael Nyman, Stephen Shore, and Dan Graham.[12]

Outdoor Film Installations

In 1998, Glass Horizon, an installation comprising a projection of a pair of eyes onto the facade of the Vienna Secession building after it had closed for the night, showcased an interest in architectural structures and in art that interacts with urban environments.[13] In 2001, Aitken’s exhibition at London’s Serpentine Gallery used the entire building for the complex installation New Ocean.[14]

In the winter of 2007, Aitken's Sleepwalkers was presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The project included actors such as Donald Sutherland and Tilda Swinton, as well as musicians Seu Jorge and Cat Power.[15] Five interlocking vignettes shown through eight projections were displayed upon the exterior walls of the museum so as to be visible from the street. Concurrent with the exhibition, Aitken also presented a "happening" inside the museum that featured live drummers and auctioneers, and a performance by Cat Power.[16]

In 2008, Aitken produced another large scale outdoor film installation, titled Migration for the 55th Carnegie International show titled "Life on Mars" in Pittsburgh, PA. The first installment in a three-part trilogy entitled Empire, the work features migratory wild animals of North America as they pass through and curiously inhabit empty and desolate hotel rooms.[17] He also produced a collection of photographs, 99 Cent Dreams, which captures "moments between interaction" to create a 21st century nomadic travelogue.[18]

Happenings

Aitken has directed many live "happenings" including his Broken Screen happening in Los Angeles and 99 cent dreams happening and Sonic happening in New York. He often borrows Allan Kaprow’s term “Happening” for such performances and invokes Fluxus as a precedent.[19] In 2009, Aitken orchestrated a real-time opera that assembled auctioneers performing against the rhythms of his Sonic Table, at Il Tempo del Postino, at Theater Basel.[20]

Continuing his work in innovative outdoor projects, Aitken presented his latest large-scale installation, Frontier, on the Tiber river’s Isola Tiberina in the heart of Rome in November 2009. The film featured a protagonist played by the iconic American artist Ed Ruscha, as he's seen caught in a landscape between fiction and non-fiction. The work creates a futuristic journey from day to night in a world where reality is put into question.[21][22] First shown at the Deste Foundation’s project space "Slaughterhouse" on the Greek island of Hydra, Black Mirror is projected on five screens reflected “into infinity” across black mirrors and stars Chloë Sevigny tethered only by brief conversations over the phone and through voiceover in such disparate locales as Mexico, Greece, and Central America.[23]

Photographs and Light Boxes

Passenger, a group of still photographs made in 1999, shows planes in flight, most of which focus on the faint traceries of takeoffs and landings over desolate airport landscapes.[24] More recently, Aitken has created aluminum light boxes that combine photgraphic image and text.

Sound Experiments

Interested in the uneasy intersection of nature and culture or narrative variability, the artist has incorporated into his scores what he calls "field recordings," such as jungle noises from Jonestown, Guyana (in his 1995 monsoon), and the reverberations of tremors generated by the eruption of the Soufrière Hills volcano on the Caribbean island of Montserrat (in eraser, 1998). In 1996, for the public art organization Creative Time, Aitken conceived an installation piece in the Anchorage, a cavernous space inside the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, that used recordings of the traffic noises overhead. In 2004, he completed a sound sculpture for the Barcelona Pavilion composed of a central post supporting a few sweeping steel branches that rotated while highly directional speakers at the end of each branch played snippets of scripted conversation.[25] In October 2009, Aitken's Sonic Pavilion opened to the public. The pavilion is located in the forested hills of Brazil, at Inhotim. The Sonic Pavilion provides a communal space to listen to the sounds of the earth as they are recorded through highly sensitive microphones buried close to a mile deep into the ground and carried back into the pavilion through a number of speakers. The sound heard inside the pavilion is the amplified sound of the moving interior of the earth.[26]

Books

Aitken also produced several books: I AM A BULLET: Scenes from an Accelerating Culture (2000) where he supplied the photographs to be seen alongside Dean Kuipers text, Broken Screen, a book of interviews with 26 artists pushing the limits of linear narrative, 99 Cent Dreams, a collection of photographs, Alpha, published in 2005 by the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Sleepwalkers, published by the Museum of Modern Art, in correspondence to the short film of the same name, Write In Jerry Brown President (2008), a folded artist book published by the Museum of Modern Art,[27] The Idea of the West (2010) which asked 1,000 people what their idea of the west was, and was in collaboration with a happening at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,[28]

Exhibitions

Doug Aitken has participated in over 150 art exhibitions throughout the world.[29] His work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions in such institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Among others, he had solo exhibitions at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Serpentine Gallery, London, Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Deste Foundation, Greece and Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Japan. In 2006, the Aspen Art Museum mounted the first exhibition dedicated solely to Aitken's photography.[30]

Aitken is represented by 303 Gallery, New York; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich; and Victoria Miro Gallery, London.

Prizes

  • 2009 Aurora Award, Aurora Picture Show, Houston, Texas[31]
  • 2007 German Film Critic's Award, KunstFilmBiennale, Cologne, Germany[32]
  • 2000 Aldrich Award, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT[33]
  • 1999 International Prize – Golden Lion, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy[33]

Aitken's installation "electric earth", a non-linear portrayal of one man’s journey through an anonymous urban wasteland, was included in the Whitney Biennial, 2000 and was awarded the International Prize at the Venice Biennale, 1999.[34]

Collections

Major works by Doug Aitken are held by the Art Institute of Chicago; Astrup Fearnley Meseet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo; the Broad Collection, Los Angeles; Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Centre pour l’Image Contemporaine, Geneva; Dallas Museum of Art; Foundazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo per l'Arte, Turin; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; Fundacio “la Caixa”, Barcelona; La Colección Jumex, Mexico City; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Sammlung Goetz, Munich; The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.[35]

See also

References

  1. ^ Dorothy Spears (July 21, 2011), Can You Hear Me Now? New York Times.
  2. ^ Dorothy Spears (July 21, 2011), Can You Hear Me Now? New York Times.
  3. ^ Media Art Net | Aitken, Doug: Biography
  4. ^ a b UC Berkeley Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium - Bio: Doug Aitken
  5. ^ Sleepwalkers exhibition catalogue, published by the Museum of Modern Art, 2007, ISBN 978-0-87070-045-3
  6. ^ Doug Aitken, September 10 – October 8, 2005 Regen Projects, Los Angeles.
  7. ^ Doug Aitken: Diamond Sea Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe.
  8. ^ Remix: Contemporary Art and Pop, 24 May to 26 August 2002 Tate Liverpool.
  9. ^ Doug Aitken: Into the Sun, 7 October - 12 November 1999 Victoria Miro Gallery, London.
  10. ^ http://www.devlinpix.com/blog/2011-08-17/music-video-fury-slaughterhouse-every-generation-got-its-own-disease
  11. ^ Bryant Rousseau (May 6, 2006). Doug Aitkens Happening: Can You Hear Me Now?. ARTINFO. http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/15467/doug-aitkens-happening-can-you-hear-me-now/. Retrieved 2008-05-20 
  12. ^ Patterns & Repetition
  13. ^ In a First, ‘Sleepwalkers' Lights Up MoMA's Facade - January 17, 2007 - The New York Sun
  14. ^ Adventures in white space| Showbiz | This is London
  15. ^ Smith, Roberta (January 18, 2007). "The Museum as Outdoor Movie Screen". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/18/arts/18moma.html?ex=1326776400&en=4f0ed9ce0acf1e98&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss. Retrieved May 1, 2010. 
  16. ^ Doug Aitken Happening, The Museum of Modern Art, New York - artreview.com
  17. ^ Smith, Roberta (May 9, 2008). "An Alien Sighting on Planet Pittsburgh". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/09/arts/design/09carn.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=roberta+smith+carnegie&st=nyt&oref=slogin. Retrieved May 1, 2010. 
  18. ^ 99 Cent Dreams, published by the Aspen Art Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-934324-37-3
  19. ^ Andrew Berardini (June 7, 2011), [Doug Aitken: Infinite Regress] Art in America Magazine.
  20. ^ Art Knowledge News
  21. ^ The Art Newspaper
  22. ^ Frieze Magazine
  23. ^ Fan Zhong (June 2011), June 20: Doug Aitken's Black Mirror W Magazine
  24. ^ Doug Aitken: Passenger (2004) Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
  25. ^ Jori Finkel (October 1, 2009), Doug Aitken ARTINFO.
  26. ^ New York Times
  27. ^ Doug Aitken Victoria Miro Gallery, London.
  28. ^ Idea of the West
  29. ^ http://www.artnet.com/Galleries/Artists_detail.asp?G=&gid=796&which=&aid=1315&ViewArtistBy=online&rta=http://www.artnet.com
  30. ^ Doug Aitken: A Photographic Survey, June 1 – July 23, 2006 Aspen Art Museum.
  31. ^ Spacetaker
  32. ^ The Winners of the KunstFilmBiennale 2007
  33. ^ a b Narrative remixed
  34. ^ Doug Aitken: Migration, September 20 - November 1, 2008 303 Gallery, New York.
  35. ^ Doug Aitken Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo.

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