Connecting art, video
Doug Aitken is coming to Spokane fresh off a highly successful four-week run on the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Yes, “on” the MoMA.
Aitken’s large-scale public art project, “sleepwalkers,” was a nighttime installation with eight drive-in-size silent films projected onto the museum’s facades.
The Los Angeles-based multimedia artist will be in Spokane on Tuesday as the final speaker in the 2006-07 Visiting Artist Lecture Series, “Who We Are: Art That Reflects the Everyday.”
Prior to his project for the MoMA, Aitken, 38, had shown his work across the United States and internationally in London, Mexico City, Rome, Tokyo, Berlin and France.
“Aitken is an increasingly important artist in the contemporary art scene today,” says Eastern Washington University art professor Lanny DeVuono.
“His work constitutes a new, complex form of realism where the everyday experience is intercut by multiple points of view, varying people and geographies,” she says.
The content or narratives in Aitken’s projects focus on contemporary issues.
“Doug works with ideas surrounding the speed of culture and with finding subtle moments of connections between people,” says his assistant and filmmaker, Brian Doyle.
With “sleepwalkers,” Aitken followed five New Yorkers of various classes – played by screen veteran Donald Sutherland, British actress Tilda Swinton, Ryan Donowho (“The O.C.”), Chan Marshall (who performs music under the name Cat Power) and Brazilian musician/actor Seu Jorge – as they wake up and make their way through a full day in the city.
The site-specific cinematic project was keyed specifically to the MoMA’s architecture and designed intentionally to engage pedestrians.
“Because the piece is spread around the museum’s exterior, viewers must circle the building to fully experience the work – in the process, becoming active participants in Aitken’s project,” MoMA chief curator of media Klaus Biesenbach wrote on the exhibition’s Web site (www.moma.org/exhibitions/2007/aitken/).
“Doug was really interested in the energy of the city and turning it into a kind of literal energy that you could relate to your own body,” Doyle says from his 303 Gallery office in New York.
Aitken, a former music-video and commercial director, is known for creating multiple-screen video installations that directly integrate exterior and interior architectural environments with contemporary culture.
His video tapestry, “interiors,” was on view at Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery in 2005. It featured four narratives projected onto three video screens within a larger screen structure that the viewers could enter.
” ‘interiors’ used the architecture of the gallery in an incredible way,” says Betsey Brock, communications and outreach manager for Henry Art Gallery.
“He is the only artist working today that so successfully divides narratives across multiple projections but cohesively ties them together with architecture configuration,” Brock says. “The viewer’s eye is drawn from screen to screen.”
The gallery will be showing Aitken’s “i am in you” video in June.
“Doug is a really fascinating person for art right now,” Doyle says. “He is bridging contemporary issues by using common communication tools you see every day on television and film, and he is bringing it into an artistic context.”
The Visiting Artist Lecture Series is sponsored by the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, Eastern Washington University and Spokane Falls Community College, with additional support from the Sahlin Foundation.