"Doug Aitken"
www.artforum.com, december 2002
Doug Aitken's exhibition RISE, which comes to Le Magasin from the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, is marked by the solitude of still objects, of desert landscapes, of solitary people, of songs without lyrics, of the interior monologue of a little girl.
One image opens the exhibition. Rise, 1998/2001, is a photograph of Los Angeles before dawn. The horizon divides the image into two equal parts-earth and sky. The plain is a grid of lines and luminous points, distant evidence of homes and traffic. In the middle, an avenue traces a line of light between the photographers point of view and the horizon. The artist places himself above his city and its activities, as if to gaze at its beauty in the unalterable character of the image.
the mirror, 1998, is a series of ten photographs, each of which shows an illuminated but empty billboard. Rectangles of white photographed in the black night in deserted streets: They've outlived the images that have passed through them. Mirrors without reflections, they establish emptiness around themselves. These photographs place the artist outside a world that he aestheticizes into a sort of permanent and romantic image, at once empty and truly beautiful.
The video installation these restless minds, 1998, in which auctioneers rattle off their litanies without a break, is less about situating them in the context of their socio-professional activity than establishing them as emitters of chants. Three women, mouths contracted and eyes focused, form a hive of buzzing bees. Otherwise, these are solitary people in the middle of nowhere carrying out their spectacles for the sole pleasure of the exercise of elocution in the middle of nowhere.
In the large installation i am in you, 2000, made up of five video screens embedded in a wood cabin, the aestheticism of the images and soundtrack creates the look of a music video. The little girl who whispers "you can't stop" over and over, children's clap games, and spirograph drawings lead us to a circular world where experiences evolve in a gentle rhythm... A formal reference point punctuates the film: triangles, squares, and lozenge-shaped pieces of wood are superimposed in a staccato rhythm of lights. This is a concrete version of a narrative intuition, a slow internal creation to the rhythm of the little girl.
One work is missing, however, from this exhibition, and may only be seen in the catalog: pacific ocean/atlantic ocean. swimming the panama canal asleep, 1998. The sleeping artist swims in the sea, traveling for miles. This is less a performance than the staging of a dream, with all the simplicity the imagination can offer the experience: to make strokes through water, to move forward while sleeping, calmly and without fatigue. A peaceful image of an isolated body. Solitude embodied.
Emilie Renard
Translated from French by Jeanine Herman.