Doug Aitken, These Restless Minds, 1998
Looking at Doug Aitken's installations, it becomes apparent that they epitomize how the shift from the industrial age to the digital age - from the machines extending the muscular to the machines extending the nervous system - alters the way we breath, walk, watch and listen. In his electronic topographies, as nature and technology seem to invade each other under your feet and over your head, sound and image seem to do so as well. Central to Aitken's show at the Secession's main exhibition hall, which integrates older and entirely new pieces into the installation entitled Glass Horizon, is a large X of suspended screens, with 4 projections spanning almost 40 years of pop history, condensing it into a series of audiences screaming and stamping themselves into a frenzy of noise. Hysteria (1998) tells a story of ecstasy and void, as the early Sixties audiences seem to awake to a polytonal scream of liberation from the rigor of post war nuclear families, until the sound of their screams seems to be sucked into the vacuum of an implosion at the end of the decade, when at Altamont, during a Rolling Stones concert, Hell's Angels stage security stabbed a fan to death. And then pop history starts anew as if nothing happened.
The noise cascades of Hysteria inevitably permeate into the other pieces that glow from behind polypropylene dividing screens like a blurry memory, adding to the contained pressure present in Glass Horizon I and II (2000) to the left and right of the space. A tennis court at nighttime, illuminated, a naked protagonist playing tennis; an abstracted organic pattern of streets and houses like remnants of an alien civilization on another planet. Time's arrow is broken, 'flexibility' is taken to the point where compulsive movement collapses.
The all-pervading fragmentation of vision and sound is concluded with These restless minds (1998) at the back of the hall, translating the undercurrent theme of flexibilization of the socio-economic sphere present in Aitken's work into a concrete and manic flux of numbers. On monitors suspended from the ceiling, making you circle them constantly in order to get the full picture, Midwestern American auctioneers that usually probably sell cows, or used cars, perform their skill. With money itself the singular subject of their endless stream of incredibly fast chattering and calling, the syllables almost seem to merge into one ringing sound, while no one is actually present to make a bid.
Doug Aitken has won international acclaim with the video installation Electric Earth (1999), shown at last year's Venice Biennale, a piece that had a similar feel of hyperactive stasis, with its single protagonist navigating deserted streets, trying to readjust to the new conditions by dancing to their tune.
In opposition to the Romantic notion of landscape as a realm reflecting the individual's character, Aitken's moving protagonists in turn become part of the electrified landscape, they try to tune in to its conditions rather than the other way round. Yet pieces such as These Restless Minds or Glass Horizon I & II are not about elegantly mastering the social gravity of the mass-mediated world, but trying to deal with the preposterous stereotypical gestures media offer, working both with and against the conventions.
Aitken's concept concludes with a nighttime projection of a pair of eyes, blinking to an increasingly grainy image, onto the front facade of the Secession building - as if Aitken's haunted palace of pop and restlessness forced it's eyes open, against this grain, trying to remind us that art shall never sleep.
PUBLICATION
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DOUG AITKEN 14 pages, 8 colored illustrations author: Jörg Heiser Secession 2000 ___________________ available in the shop |
Doug Aitken was born in 1968 an now lives and works in New York and Los Angeles. His exhibtions include: I Love New York - Crossover of Contemporary Art, Museum Ludwig, Köln (1998); Concentrations 33: Doug Aitken, Diamond Sea, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; dAPERTutto, Biennale, Venedig (1999); The 2000 Whitney Biennial, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Biennale, Sydney; Let's entertain, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; I Am In You, Galerie Hauser & Wirth & Presenhuber, Zürich (2000)
PUBLIC DISCUSSION
Wednesday, 18 October 2000, at 7 p.m.
| AA BRONSON
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EXHIBITION PROGRAM 2000 |
For further information and photographic material please contact:
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Secession, Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession
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