Doug Aitken (born 1968) is an American multidisciplinary artist. Aitken's body of work ranges from photography, print media, sculpture, and architectural interventions, to narrative films, sound, single and multi-channel video works, installations, and live performance. He currently lives in Venice, California, and New York City.
Early life and education Doug Aitken was born in 1968 in Redondo Beach, California. In 1987, he initially studied magazine illustration with Philip Hays at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena before graduating in Fine Arts in 1991.
Work He moved to New York in 1994 where he had his first solo show at 303 Gallery.
Aitken's body of work ranges from photography, print media, sculpture, and architectural interventions, to narrative films, sound, single and multi-channel video works, installations, and live performance.Sleepwalkers exhibition catalogue, published by the Museum of Modern Art, 2007, Aitken's video works have taken place in such culturally loaded sites as Jonestown in Guyana, southwest Africa's diamond mines, and India's Bollywood.Doug Aitken, September 10 – October 8, 2005 Regen Projects, Los Angeles.
Site-specific projects
Aitken has created an array of site-specific installations, sometimes synthesizing interactive media with architecture. A recent site-specific work, New Horizon, revolved around a reflective hot air balloon and gondola that transformed into a kinetic light sculpture. The balloon sculpture was featured in a series of happenings that took place in July 2019 across the state of Massachusetts. Another project was Underwater Pavilions (2016), which consisted of three temporary sculptures that were moored to the ocean floor off Catalina Island, CA. Geometric in design, the sculptures created environments that reflected and refracted light, opening a portal that physically connected a viewer to the expanse of the ocean while simultaneously disrupting preconceived visual ideas of the aquatic world. By merging the language of contemporary architecture, land art, and ocean research and conservation, the Underwater Pavilions were a living artwork within a vibrant ecosystem. In contrast to areas of the sculpture that have a rough and rock-like surface, mirrored sections reflected the seascape and, when approached, activated to become a kaleidoscopic observatory. The environments created by the sculptures changed and adjusted with the currents and time of day, focusing the attention of the viewer on the rhythm of the ocean and its life cycles. The artwork created a variety of converging perceptual encounters that played with the fluidity of time and space, resulting in a heightened awareness of the physical world. The sculptures were created in partnership with Parley for the Oceans and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Another site-specific project, titled Mirage, premiered at Desert X, near Palm Springs, CA from February 25 to April 30, 2017, and evolved with presentations in Detroit, MI, as Mirage Detroit (2018), and Switzerland as Mirage Gstaad (2019).
Video installations Since the mid-1990s, Aitken has created installations by employing multiple screens in architecturally provocative environments. diamond sea (1997), for example, includes three video projections, one suspended video monitor, and one full-color, illuminated transparency photograph in a dimly lit space. Multiple speakers create an immersive sound experience; the multi-screen film explores a guarded region in the Namib desert in southwestern Africa known as Diamond Area 1 and 2. The territory, estimated at over 40,000 square miles and sealed off since 1908, contains the world's largest and richest computer-controlled diamond mine. Hysteria (1998–2000) uses film footage from the past four decades that shows audiences at pop and rock concerts working themselves into a frenzy on four screens in an X formation.Remix: Contemporary Art and Pop, 24 May to 26 August 2002 Tate Liverpool. Filmed and photographed in the dusty sound stages and film sets of Bombay, Into the Sun (1999) focuses on the frenetic activity of Bollywood, recreating the sound stages of the Indian film industry with canvas projection screens, a red dirt floor, and video shown in a non-stop, twenty-four-hour loop.Doug Aitken: Into the Sun, 7 October - 12 November 1999 Victoria Miro Gallery, London. diamond sea was presented at the 1997 Whitney Biennial and his electric earth installation, an eight projection, multi-room post cinematic experience, drew international attention and earned him the International Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1999. His ambitious show New Ocean, which included multiple sound, photo, and video works, began with a transformation of the Serpentine Gallery in London and traveled the world to Austria, Italy and Japan, each time in a new configuration. In 2010, Aitken exhibited his work House, a study of destruction featuring the artist's parents. In 2017, the artist displayed a three channel video installation titled Underwater Pavilions at Art Basel Unlimited, documenting sculptures of the same name. Aitken has shown NEW ERA, a kaleidoscopic multi-channel video installation in a mirrored hexagonal room, in various locations across the world, from New York to Zurich, Denmark, Beijing, California and London. The artwork maps the creation of the cellular telephone into a landscape of repetition and philosophical reckoning with its effect on the world. In 2023 in Zürich, he showed a five-channel video installation titled HOWL where "oil derricks spot the rolling, sun-bleached hills of a desolate valley in central California while plywood boards shutter local stores. Interspersed within these depictions of wide-open spaces, residents provide soundbites on the circumstances of living in this dying town. They tell of their hopes for the area, its oil-boom history, their lives and the wider future."
Outdoor film installations In 2000, the exhibition glass horizon included untitled "secession eyes", an installation comprising a projection of a pair of eyes onto the facade of the Vienna Secession building after it had closed for the night, showcased an interest in architectural structures and in art that interacts with urban environments. In 2001, Aitken's exhibition at London's Serpentine Gallery used the entire building for the complex installation New Ocean including transforming the museum's tower into a functional lighthouse at night.
In 2004, after having worked together in Berlin, Doug Aitken and Klaus Biesenbach co-curated Hard Light, a group exhibition at MoMA PS1. In the winter of 2007, Aitken's large-scale installation Sleepwalkers, curated by Klaus Biesenbach in collaboration with Creative Time, was presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The project included actors such as Donald Sutherland and Tilda Swinton, as well as musicians Seu Jorge and Cat Power. Five interlocking vignettes shown through eight projections were displayed upon the exterior walls of the museum so as to be visible from the street. Concurrent with the exhibition, Aitken also presented a "happening" inside the museum that featured live drummers and auctioneers, and a performance by Cat Power. In the same year, he created an interactive music table: "k-n-o-c-k-o-u-t".
In 2008, Aitken produced another large scale outdoor film installation, titled Migration for the 55th Carnegie International show titled "Life on Mars" in Pittsburgh, PA. The first installment in a three-part trilogy entitled Empire, the work features migratory wild animals of North America as they pass through and curiously inhabit empty and desolate hotel rooms.
Continuing Aitken's work in large scale outdoor video installation, his artwork "SONG 1" (2012), created for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, challenged the standard of public art in Washington D.C. The artwork, which deconstructed the popular song "I Only Have Eyes for You", created a 360 degree screen out of the circular facade of the museum. Rather than using a more typical concave surface for such a projection, Aitken projected the film onto the convex exterior of the museum creating a cinema experience that required moving around the building and could never be fully seen from any one location.
Another example of what the artist has called 'liquid architecture', his freestanding installation ALTERED EARTH (2012) explores the Camargue region of southern France in a maze-like flowing arrangement of twelve large projections in the hangar-like Grande Halle of the Parc des Ateliers in Arles. The work also inspired an app created by the artist and POST for the Apple iPad.
Commissioned by art patron Bagley Wright, Mirror (2013) is a large LED screen, wrapped around the corner of the Seattle Art Museum, with thin strips of vertical lights. For the project, Aitken had been filming for the project over five years, capturing images of central Seattle as well as the surrounding area. A computer program selects which parts of the footage to project in response to a live feed of information that ranges from the weather to the density of traffic in the streets of Seattle.Charlotte Burns (March 1, 2013), Seattle to unveil Doug Aitken’s digital Land Art The Art Newspaper.
Conversations In 2006, Aitken produced Broken Screen: 26 Conversations with Doug Aitken (Distributed Art Publishers, 2006), a book of interviews with twenty-six artists who aim to explore and challenge the conventions of linear narrative. Interviews included Robert Altman, Claire Denis, Werner Herzog, Rem Koolhaas, Kenneth Anger and others. The Idea of the West (2010) presents the collective response of 1000 people on the street who were asked “What is your idea of the West?” to create a manifesto from the quotes and comments of random individuals. Another interview project, Patterns & Repetition (2011) is a series of filmed conversations about creativity in the 21st Century in which Aitken conducts short conversations with pioneers in different artistic disciplines, including Devendra Banhart, Thomas Demand, Jack White, James Murphy, Mike Kelley, Jacques Herzog, Fischli & Weiss, Yayoi Kusama, Stephen Shore, and Dan Graham. Continuing his interest in the exchange of ideas, Aitken's work "THE SOURCE" (2012) explores the root of creativity. Six projections in a pavilion designed by David Adjaye, cycle through many more interviews with artists, architects, and musicians such as Adjaye, Liz Diller, William Eggleston, Philippe Parreno, Paolo Soleri, Tilda Swinton, and Beck among others.
Happenings Aitken has directed many live "happenings" including his Broken Screen happenings from 2006 in Los Angeles and New York. In 2009, Aitken orchestrated a real-time opera titled "the handle comes up, the hammer comes down" that assembled auctioneers performing against the rhythms of his Sonic Table, at Il Tempo del Postino, at Theater Basel.