Q & A: Doug Aitken
VAULT spoke with internationally recognised multi-disciplinary American artist Doug Aitken about making art during Covid, collaborating with dancers, and his upcoming immersive survey show New Era, at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art.
Image credit: Installation view, Doug Aitken, New Era, 2018. 3-channel video installation (colour, sound) 303 Gallery, New York. Photo: John Berens. Courtesy the artist; 303 Gallery, New York; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; Victoria Miro, London; and Regen Projects, Los Angeles © the artist
Tell me about this survey show for the Museum of Contemporary Art. Did you think about it in terms of what you wanted people in Australia to see?
This show is a survey, a collage of different works from different periods of art-making, but it also spans so many different mediums. I think the show is very immersive. You really fall into the exhibition, and I think that empowers viewers to make their own journey through it. We’ve actually been working on the show for about three years, myself and the curator, Rachel Kent. We saw it almost as a musical composition, like a series of notes. We wanted to create sequences, allowing the viewer to move through the exhibition and spend as little or as much time with each work as they wanted, with one artwork leading to another.
It’s a radically diverse show. It ranges from a series of sculptures we created out of the Pacific Ocean (Underwater Pavilions, 2016) to works where we excavate the floor of the museum and water kind of pours through the ceiling to create a musical composition to a film installation (Migration, 2008) that’s set inside thousands of miles of motel rooms, each one inhabited by wildlife – mountain lions, bison and other creatures.
To me, the exhibition New Era is very much about this period we’re living in now. And I recognise the fact that we’ve all universally been through this completely disruptive and incredibly surreal period of time – a radical disruption. It’s completely changed the way we see ourselves, our society, our daily lives. And I think that in a lot of ...Subscribe to read this article in full
