Doug Aitken

Fülszöveg

American artist Doug Aitken has quickly risen to international prominence with works such as his rivetting, multi-screen video environment electric earth, which captivated viewers at the 48th Venice Biennale (1999) and the Whitney Biennial (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2000). electric earth traces a young man's nocturnal journey through deserted, neon-lit streets, stores and parking lots of Los Angeles. Like Aitken's other large-scale installations, electric earth immerses the viewer in a hypnotic, mesmerizing environment where images of locations, actions and the passing of time are reconfigured in startling ways by highly skilful editing of images and sound. Aitken's vivid, dreamlike environments he describes as 'a twilight of perception where ideas and iconography flicker and reinvent themselves'. In other works he has explored the eerie, deserted atmosphere of Jonestown, Guyana, the site of the notorious mass suicide of religious cultists (monsoon, 1997); a remote... Tovább

Fülszöveg

American artist Doug Aitken has quickly risen to international prominence with works such as his rivetting, multi-screen video environment electric earth, which captivated viewers at the 48th Venice Biennale (1999) and the Whitney Biennial (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2000). electric earth traces a young man's nocturnal journey through deserted, neon-lit streets, stores and parking lots of Los Angeles. Like Aitken's other large-scale installations, electric earth immerses the viewer in a hypnotic, mesmerizing environment where images of locations, actions and the passing of time are reconfigured in startling ways by highly skilful editing of images and sound. Aitken's vivid, dreamlike environments he describes as 'a twilight of perception where ideas and iconography flicker and reinvent themselves'. In other works he has explored the eerie, deserted atmosphere of Jonestown, Guyana, the site of the notorious mass suicide of religious cultists (monsoon, 1997); a remote diamond-mining region of Namibia, closed to outsiders since 1908 (diamondsea, 1997); and the collective dreams of India's Bollywood film industry (into the sun, 1999). Portraying some of contemporary art's most unexpected and beautiful imagery, Aitken's installations encircle the viewer, creating a suspended, hyperreal reflection of contemporary life.
European curator and art theorist Daniel Bimbaum surveys Aitken's work in the contexts of contemporary philosophy and of late twentieth-century artists, such as Robert Smithson, who have explored expanded notions of time and space. New York-based publisher of fr/eze magazine Amanda Sharp discusses with Aitken in the Interview the processes and recurring themes in his work. Berlin-based art historian and critic Jorg Heiser focuses on Aitken's i am in you (2000), a multi-screen environment centring on the imaginative experiences of a young girl. For the Artist's Choice Aitken has selected a short story, 'Funes the Memorious' (1941) by Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), whose descriptions of reality transformed by the distortions of memories and mirror reflections echo the artist's own preoccupations. Doug Aitken's writings reflect upon his travels to haunting, elusive locations, where chance encounters have served as the basis for subsequent works.
Doug Vissza