Interview with Doug Aitken

Doug Aitken was born in 1968 in Los Angeles, where he is currently based. The artist and filmmaker has broken the boundaries of genres, exploring every medium from film and installations to architectural interventions, to investigate the spatial and temporal dislocation of images and the vulnerability of individuals in a period of massive industrial and environmental change. In 2012, he began a series of filmed conversations—a “living artwork”—known as “The Source,” which sees him interviewing renowned cultural figures such as French artist Philippe Parreno, British actress Tilda Swinton and Italian-American architect Paolo Soleri about creativity in the 21st century. He has been featured in numerous exhibitions at institutions including New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art; the Vienna Secession; the Serpentine Gallery in London; and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

In March, during Hong Kong’s art week, Aitken presented his debut show in Hong Kong with Massimo De Carlo gallery. Included in the exhibition were three works; among them, Inside Me(2018) is a hexagonal sculpture that carries both stillness and uninterrupted, kaleidoscopic movements. The four-minute video documentation of Aitken’s installation, Mirage (2017), an entire house covered in mirrors located on a hillside of the Californian desert, was also screened. Future (2017), on the other hand, is a wall-based installation that comments on society’s fast pace. ArtAsiaPacific sat down with the artist on the occasion of the show to discuss his process and the artworks displayed.

Are you familiar with Hong Kong and China?

Just a little; I’ve been here before, but I’m not so familiar.

How do you think the audience from Hong Kong will perceive your artwork?

I don’t really think about what kind of audience will be encountering my artworks when I’m making them. I work more with ideas and concepts. The exhibition here at Massimo De Carlo is a very minimal show, very reductive, and I was interested in this idea of bringing the viewer into the works. I think when we look at an object, which is considered finished and which is authored by someone else, the tendency as viewers is to merely judge. I wanted a different approach—I wanted to create this sense of reflexivity throughout the exhibition. I was really interested in making the viewer see themselves and the landscape around them. Along with the viewer’s perspective, there is a chance for these works to change radically. If these works were hanging in some place such as in the sky, an urban space, or a natural setting, they would shift continuously. So, in a sense, the sculptural works are more like moving films.

What’s your relationship with the viewer? Would your work be the same with the absence of a spectator?

It’s more like setting up a system. I see my work like a kind of choreography as opposed to something that is fixed—a system where you can author and write your own story. I like moving away from more formal approaches where things are frozen, and instead look to creating projects that can be living and changing. One of the works here is a short film, Mirage, which captures a sculptural work of a house, located on a hillside in the desert, entirely covered with mirrors from the inside out. It was interesting because I had that idea for years. The work has its own life. We would make trips out to the desert to work on it. When I’d see it I wouldn’t recognize it. Sometimes it seems to just vanish—the landscape would simply erase it.

A lot of my interest right now is based on how an artwork can become a system for the viewer, a kind of place for the viewer to have an experience that is as unique for them.

How does an artwork begin for you? What is your process?

Every project I make is a journey and an investigation. The artworks create questions. I’m more interested in questions and provocations rather than having a convenient answer, which is one of the values of making art now, at this moment in our lives. Art is something on the horizon, it’s kind of that space that we look to that isn’t quite defined; there is still ambiguity and there is still abstraction and reflection. Without these characteristics, what are we doing? We are just surviving.

When you come up with an idea, do you also work on keeping the idea alive and do you see if an artwork can never have an end?

What you said is beautiful—“if an artwork can never have an end.” If an artwork can be something, which changes with you over time, it’s in dialogue with different views. Those are things you aspire to. I’ve heard some people say certain artworks have a life span and can die and become irrelevant. Maybe that’s true, but there are also pieces that continue to live. Look at the pyramids of Giza or the Nazca Lines in Peru, or even Gerhard Richter’s “October 18, 1977” series (1988). You keep going back to these pieces because there is something that keeps giving you more by their degree of complexity and beauty.

I’ve been working at the hexagonal sculpture for three years—it was in my studio and I never thought about finishing it, it was just something I kept on shaping. And then in 2016, I started working on my underwater sculptures, the Underwater Pavilions, which are the exact same geometry. I think if I hadn’t taken the time to make this sculpture, despite not really knowing where it was going, I wouldn’t have found the way to make the underwater ecosystems.

So that’s why the sculpture is titled Inside Me…

Yes, I think so. The work references meteorites and natural aggregates, in contrast with this very beautiful geometry, from this kind of divine crystallization. I am personally attached to it—it made itself through the years.

Inside Me features two strongly contrasting materials—mirrors and concrete, which you often use, in addition to aluminum and stainless steel, such as in Future. How do you decide on what materials to include in your artwork?

All my pieces are different, some are glass, some are steel, but I think Future stands out.  I was very interested in creating a work that was more architectural and modern, with these bisecting lines coming out of the canvas. There is an industrial feel to it as well. Only when they walk around it do visitors discover the work in its entirety—it’s a (sort of) readable word that disappears and contains these layers of abstract representations.

And the word itself?

It’s coming off the walls, out of the architecture, but also you are the subject as you can’t avoid your own reflection. The idea of reflexivity in these kinds of pieces comes from film and cinema. I remember I was working on a film installation that had a story with characters, and I was thinking to myself how it would be amazing to erase the characters so you could just have the viewers in the film. I also started thinking about the history of cinema, which goes back to optics, glass and mirrors, and I thought that maybe I could try to not make the film, but bring the viewer into it.

Is the concept of the future something you focus on?

The idea of the future is something that we are always moving towards, but we don’t have a definition for it. It’s always ambiguous and that’s one of the things that is interesting about it. I was in conversation with an Italian artist—Paolo Soleri—who said to me, “How can you talk about the future if the future is just speculation—the future is just a conjuncture, there is nothing to talk about.” That is one answer, but on the other hand, if you don’t have a vision or a will then what are we doing in the present? This is the value of culture. From music to dance and art, they all try to move the human condition onwards, to where we haven’t been before.

I think we are thinking too much, it’s become out of hand. Do you think society has lost the perception of now?

We are living in a world that is very much powered by technology. Technology has moved faster than the ethics of technology: an engineer can create more inventions than a society can decide how they’re used and in what ways they will or will not become part of society. It is, however, a very important moment in human evolution.

There is also the aspect, or simply the fact, of the consumer always demanding, always wanting something more and new. It’s difficult to think about our society without the aspect of consumerism…

It’s funny you would say that. A project that we are finishing right now and will be showing in two weeks in New York is called New Era (2018) and it’s a film installation, which is based on a kind of mythology and an actual man called Martin Cooper, aged 89, who is the inventor of the cellphone and the first person to make a phone call ever. It’s fascinating to see how, as an example, you go outside here in Hong Kong and you see everybody is using a cellphone, everybody’s life has changed and everybody is looking into a screen. This isn’t something that came about only because of technology. It stems from a person and an idea this person had. They created something that was very simple but very powerful in the early 1970s and now things will never go back. It’s like life before electricity, or before fire!

It’s a strange time to be alive: we are simultaneously finding moments of incredible harmony and relentlessness where everything is in motion, but then we find other moments where we’re struggling to keep up. The acceleration of everything is so great that we question ourselves and struggle with our identities.

We also don’t know how to communicate anymore. In your conversation with Tilda Swinton during one of the episodes of “The Source,” she strongly states that language does not exist. Your works often feature language—what drives this?

I started using words as a reaction to walking outside and seeing a thousand billboards, signs and advertisements and feeling the sense of aggression within the landscape, pushing the viewer, making them want something more. I wanted to make these artworks to turn it around, to reclaim language, a word or sentences, which would create a soft space where you would fall into the word and reflect on it, rather than the word coming at you violently.

Have you seen the signage here in Hong Kong? It’s crazy! However, at the same time, people want to escape this constant and overwhelming buzz of mass media communication.

You are absolutely right. The pendulum now reaches a spectrum that is wider than it’s ever been. On the one side of it, you reach a point where it’s too much and you need to go out and hike, swim, or find some place in nature. We are discovering this new desire for reality again and we want physical, tactile reality—we want experiences, a moment that will never be repeated.

Sophie von Wunster is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.

Doug Aitken’s solo exhibition is on view at Massimo De Carlo, Hong Kong, until May 19, 2018.

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