Doug Aitken

• sweeping cinematic experiences in the context of video installations
• exquisitely filmed works; difficult to tell difference between his video art and studio films, though content is not the same
• “In my installations I don’t see the narrative ending with the image on the screen”
• “Narrative can exist on a physical level – as much through the flow of electricity as through an image”
• “I’d rather attempt to set up a system that brings a set of questions to the viewer”
• breaks down standard cinematic barriers and ways of formulating narratives
• uses multiple screens – “I want to expand the realm of perception”
• “I make forms of communications. I use mediums as they suit the concepts”
• shoots mainly on film and transfers to video for projection
• “I am constantly piecing things together, finding fragments of information, splicing them, collaging them, montaging them to create a network of perceptions”
• Electric Earth (1999) – ‘splicing’ and ‘collaging’; a colour film transferred to eight laserdiscs for projection; uses late night shots of an African-American youth dancing solo through abandoned LA streets; an elegy for a life lived in the shadows; cannot experience the work passively, the viewer must enter into it; images projected onto walls around the viewer; Aitken creates a kind of surveillance environment in which the viewer is thrust into the man’s life.

Works include:

Autumn (1993)

Monsoon (1995)

Diamond Sea (1997)

Electric Earth (1999)

Black Mirror (2011)

 

Key points for me

The moving image is not confined to mainstream cinema, nor is it restricted to traditional narrative forms. In Aitken’s work, the moving image exists on a much more physical level, ‘splicing’ and ‘collaging’ fragments of information into alternative narratives, creating environments into which the viewer is thrust.

 

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Rush, M. (2007) Video Art London: Thames & Hudson