Best known for having turned MoMA's exterior walls into projection screens for his acclaimed video piece "Sleepwalkers" in 2007, Doug Aitken has never shied away from experimenting with media. His latest venture, "Altered Earth: Arles, City of Moving Images," is an iPad app allowing users to investigate Arles, France and the surrounding region of Camargue. The South of France's marshy lands and salt mines are also the subject of a major 12-screen video installation, commissioned by the LUMA Foundation, that will be unveiled in Arles next April.
It's a busy time for Aitken, who has just opened a large solo exhibition at London's Victoria Miro Gallery. Spread over two floors, the show gathers text sculptures, light boxes, and a reconfiguration of "Black Mirror," the artist's meditative video piece on contemporary nomadism, buzzily starring Hollywood actress Chloe Sevigny. From his studio in Los Angeles, the artist talked to ARTINFO UK about earth art, collective memory, and the potency of single words.
For "Altered Earth," you used an iPad app as an artistic medium. Why this format?
"Altered Earth" was a kind of journey into the dematerial. I'm attracted to working in extremes and dualities. I've spent about four years working on a piece, which is a 21st-century earthwork -- site-specific and created entirely within the Camargue region. It's a very modern approach to the idea of earth art because it doesn't reconfigure the landscape as sculpture. Instead it uses the moving image to try to distill ideas from the landscape -- it takes a physical landscape and breaks it into different ideas, impulses, sections, and stories and then let that come together. The first piece was a single glass outdoor installation [shown during the Rencontres d'Arles last summer] situated within the landscape. It will never travel, nor be an edition. It will only ever be in Camargue.
At a certain point I thought that it would be interesting to take the opposite direction simultaneously. Could conceptual art become like pollen, go in the air and reach anyone? Can you make something where the artwork is a series of pulses of communication? That's how the decision of creating an app came about. And I really insisted for this app to be free, because I wanted something that had no commercial value at all, like a pure idea.
Do you see yourself using the app medium again?
I like the format. It's fascinating. I've always tried to work in a way where the content dictates what something will be. The potential for this project to use an app was only really interesting to me if I could use it as a core sample. If this insignificant small flat screen could allow you to go deeper, deeper, and deeper into these ideas, these systems, into different media, from writing to moving image, to architecture. And it became really compelling because I had to figure out how to sculpt the information that would bring this pedestrian object to life.
How did you react to the landscape when you first arrive in Camargue?
I was very surprised, and I was very drawn into how almost hallucinatory the Camargue was. Every landscape has clichés, and there's a certain cliché of the French landscape as being pastoral and beautiful. Camargue is really different. There's a wilderness, a sense of struggle, a sense of a surreal cohabitation between man and industry. The mistral wind is blowing and you find these abandoned lighthouses.
Through the app we were able to research things like, where does the salt produced in Camargue travel to, how it is produced? What do they do to dry and harvest these crystals? The ability of the app to explore these different layers made me realize that, in the contemporary world, we understand information differently. We are always compressing layers and layers of information onto one experience.
This makes me think about the idea of the enhanced reality through digital tools. Is this something you are interested in?
I'm actually not a very technology-driven person, but certain ideas have the urgency to be expressed in certain ways. Programming is not my forte. But I knew that I wanted the app to hopefully be very intuitive and something that could allow the viewer to personalize the cloud of experiences that we've created.
In the first room of your current show at Victoria Miro one of your pieces involves a cast of the microphone used by the Rolling Stones when they recorded "Sympathy for the Devil" in 1968. Another sculpture forms the date 1968 in broken mirrors. Why was this moment important to you?
The exhibition at Victoria's functions like a kind of spiral that moves from the first floor, with its broken fragments of a collective past, to the second floor which is a space denying any history and is forging into the present. All these works -- "Sympathy for the Devil," "Riot," "1971," "1968" -- share a quality which is almost like a flash in your memory. It's not a rigid picture you can study but an energy source, a moment in time, or a déjà vu that somehow fed into who you are now. I wanted to harness that language and look at these collective moments.
Many of the pieces in the show are signs. I worked with a factory that makes signs like "1-800 Buy Insurance." It was a way of reclaiming this landscape, claiming it for us and fusing it with questions instead of commercial promotion. Can you make a sign for an existential adult? Can you make a question advertising nothing?
Appropriating the visual language of commercial signs has long tradition -- particularly in California with artists like Ed Rusha and Allan Ruppersberg. How consciously are you inscribing yourself in this lineage?
I don't think about it too much. I actually started making these pieces in New York. I came across a factory that made signs for Times Square and it was so amazing seeing these words being made in front of me that I thought: it's not enough to watch these. I want to make them.
The show also includes the video installation "Black Mirror."
"Black Mirror" is very much a manifesto of the new condition. It captures the idea that there is a landscape that ignores boundaries and borders -- that is completely decentralized. Before making this piece, I wrote pages and pages of notes, but couldn't figure out how to work with that idea because it was quite abstract. Eventually these fragments collected together created the story. I wanted to have a strong female protagonist, who was living in non-nostalgic way. In the piece, short stories encapsulate different stages, or experiences.
In your text sculptures words and images are often at odd. "Riot" for example, spells out the word of the title with the images of a beach. In "Black Mirror" there's a sense of discrepancy between what is seen and what is heard. How would you define the relationship between text and image in your work?
One of the things I believe in is friction, and how to generate friction within an artwork. Often these juxtapositions are where my interest lies; it's where the energy is. My mother was a writer and my parents really valued long-form language. Maybe a word, or a letter, or a number, speaks to who I am, and the world that I live in, in the same way that "Ulysses" might speak to my father.
(Coline Milliard, ARTINFO UK)
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