KultureFlash ::: Artworker of the Week ::: Catherine Yass

ARTWORKER OF THE WEEK #19

interiors, 2002
Three screen DVD installation (random loop)

Additional installations shots / DVD still from interiors
A-Z Book (Fractals) images
Various images

LA-based artist Doug Aitken gained international recognition in 1999, after receiving the International Prize at the Venice Biennale for his video installation electric earth. His current solo exhibition at Victoria Miro Gallery, I don't exist, is his first in the UK since the hugely acclaimed new ocean at the Serpentine Gallery in 2001. This latest show will include Aitken's most recent film work interiors (featuring Andre Benjamin from OutKast), three large futuristic meta-landscape lightboxes, and a hanging, modular mobile construction that the artist describes as a "narrative cloud".

Show runs till 06/12

Andreas Leventis: Can you first of all tell me a bit about the new film piece interiors?

Doug Aitken: The piece is a multi-screen work, an architectural installation, featuring a number of stories filmed in different locations. It's about polyrhythms, and so is equal part sonic, equal part visual. At a certain points the different characters voices come into a rhythm, whether it is self generated or environmentally produced, and then it locks at a certain bpm -- first 70, then 90, then 100 bpm, into a tight sonic composition. The piece will always change, there are too many stories for the amount of screens, and the ordering is random.

AL: Has the Sonic become an increasingly important preoccupation in your video installations?

DA: Audio has always been a terrain I've been fascinated by. Looking for different way of bringing concept and content into audio works, it's mainly a restless interest in looking for different approaches to generate and create relationships with the sounds to the works, whether it's recording real sounds, then deconstructing them and turning them into a composition or using other music.

AL: Whether it be in the sentiment of your titles, or in your choice of imagery, one could draw parallels in your work to the Romantic Tradition or ideas of the Sublime in 19th Century and early 20th Century American Painting.

DA: My work is not a grand gesture by any means. Nor is it autobiographical. The show's title I do not exist came incredibly casually. I just found myself writing it down on a Post It next to my computer when I was working on something. I looked over and it seemed to make sense. But it came about in a lot of ways relating to this idea of de-materiality and vanishing.

AL You once said that you wanted to convey a sense of information being pulled in, like a vortex. I visualize it as a car wheel that is spinning at an increasing speed. It gets faster and faster until it goes into slow motion and changes direction. I think that is also similar to how your multi-narrative structures function.

DA: Our generation has a very interesting relationship with speed, and I think it’s no longer about the overwhelming mass of speed and information. Nor is it about a cultural stance, like, this is the enemy. I think instead it's a harmonising with speed, coming to terms with acceleration and increasing velocity. An idea that says it will just keep getting faster and faster. Does it reach a point or are there select moments in your life where it will cause complete stillness or complete presence? In some of the pieces like Interiors which are very human based, you find individuals situated in landscapes or places which are very new, which are futuristic in a way and are void of emotion. I think in a lot of ways, within this body of work, you find an investigation into different forms of narrative, non-linear narrative and I associate that with the de-material approach to things. The idea of being able to move more and more rapidly through cultural society, lighter, more freed up, communication being more efficient and effective.

AL: When we begin to consider Physics, the World as a spinning object, together with advances in communication technologies, it does seem to render singular or linear narratives useless.

DA: That's really where we are at in the 21st Century; we are all looking for new ways to handle perception and the influx of what's around us there. We recognise that linear structure, whether it's gone from mythology storytelling, literature or cinema, has reached an endgame. It’s not going to go any further. It's fine for communicating a sound-bite or a fable or a morality tale but it somehow is a little bit obsolete for how we are really running and moving and looking. It's without question a kaleidoscopic, montage world. But now the question is how do you take those sound bites or fragments and sculpt them into new ways of communicating in a personal way with each other. This is for me of the greatest interest in my work; using it as a kind of laboratory to look into those ideas and follow those pursuits.

AL: Was electric earth a turning point? Before then, in works such as monsoon (1995), you had been making investigations into the idea of the historical Event as narrative. Then in diamond sea (1997) you began dealing with the alienating consequences of corporate industry. It seems there has been an increasing interest in technology, and perhaps also a shift from the Landscape to the Urban, as a means to locating the Now.

DA: Today the Library is being replaced by the Internet; the Library has value but it's a fake value. Art and museums are seen as a space for slowness and stillness as a sanctuary against a rapid society. In fact, I think it is very much an illusion. Work can illustrate it's slowness by being minimal or following traditional steps like painting or traditional sculpture, but it is only a signifier of what we think stillness is and what we think a sanctuary can represent. Maybe with some of the works in this exhibition I have almost found myself looking in opposite ways and looking in terms of creating a density of information, or in my film works using editing devices to collage, jam images, and create juxtapositions, blowing one second into one hundred images... I think in a strange way I'm interested in creating a system that is continuously branching out. I just see works as investigations and provocations. That for me is really the value. I am not so much interested in aesthetics or a single style, or formal concerns, but more in seeing how many branches you can spread out on that tree.

Andreas Leventis is an art consultant and critic based in London.

Image © the artist, courtesy Vitoria Miro Gallery