L´ENTRÉ

DOUG AITKEN’S FIRST MULTIMEDIA

EXHIBITION

LEAD THE WAYIN PARIS

EXPLORE THE WORLD OF INSTALLATION ART#1 2011

INFORMATIONWhen? -1th of april to the 30th of september, 2011

Where? - Centre Georges Pompidou, Place Georges Pompidou, 4th arron dissement, Paris, France.

How much? - €5 for adults, €3 for children (under the age of 16). Free entrance for Seinors/Students (with a valid student ID).

“I have always been a lost soul, - a woundering soul. I was lost dur-ing highschool, lost in relationship. This exhibition is my timeabout all this - it’s my fucking time to lead the way. Sex, dreams, rain and myself are all a part of my leading univers.”

Installation art can be either temporary or permanent. Installation artworks have been constructed in exhibition spaces such as muse-ums and galleries, as well as public- and private spaces. The genre incorporates a very broad range of everyday and natural materi-als, which are often chosen for their evocative qualities, as well as new media such as video, sound, performance, immersive virtual reality and the internet. Many installations are site-specific in that they are designed to exist only in the space for which they were created. A number of institutions focusing on Installation art were created from the 1980s onwards, suggesting the need for Installa-tion to be seen as a separate discipline. These included the Mat-tress Factory, Pittsburgh, the Museum of Installation in London, and the Fairy Doors of Ann Arbor, MI, among others.

Installation art came to prominence in the 1970s but its roots can be identified in earlier artists such as Marcel Duchamp and his use of the readymade and Kurt Schwitters’ Merz art objects, rather than more traditional craft based sculpture. The intention of the art which influenced American installation pioneers like Allan Kaprow.

In 2008, Aitken produced another large scale outdoor film instal-lation, titled Migration for the 55th Carnegie International show titled “Life on Mars” in Pittsburgh, PA. The work features wild ani-mals of North America curiously inhabiting empty and desolate hotel rooms filmed across America. He also produced a collection of photographs, 99 Cent Dreams, which captures “moments be-tween.

DOUG AITKENEXHIBITION LEAD THE WAY

PIECE;SEXPECTATIONDOUG AITKEN, 2010

PIECE;99c DREAMS

DOUG AITKEN, 2010

There are a few loose ends I wanted to address visa vi Doug Ait-ken’s Lead the way, most of which were brought up by Tom Moody last Friday. My original write up can be read here for a bit of back-ground, and let the Q & A begin!

TM: If the piece is supposed to be about a day in the life of ordinary New Yorkers, isn’t that ruined by using celebrities such as Cat Power, Tilda Swindon, and Donald Sutherland, in the roles? If Aitken wants to flout the conventions of cinema, why use movie stars? Is Sutherland’s “dancing on top of a cab” something ordinary people do, or only Michael Jackson?

is more about the symbiotic relationship that the body has with the city (both being nervous systems of a sort) than it is a day in the life of an average New Yorker, though ordinary characters represent “the body”. I’m not going to take issue with the fact that he’s used

celebrities to play these roles, as I can suspend my disbelief, but I am rather skeptical of his practice of employing stars in light of his professed interest in thwarting the conventions of cinema. He talks about distrusting the “safety of the screen”, but I remain uncon-vinced that his choices are risky. The work reminds me of the subur-ban raver phenomenon, or “alternative music” in the 90s, in the sense that he flouts conventions conventionally.

TM: Isn’t a “non-linear narrative” the ultimate art world cliche at this point? What does this piece do to surmount that?Nothing.

TM: How do the moving images on sides of buildings differ from the corporate displays a few blocks over in Times Square?

Sleepwalkers is put together better than the average ad, but it

AITKENS AWARDS * 2009

Aurora Award, Aurora Picture Show, Houston,

Texas

* 2007 German Film Critic’s

Award, KunstFilmBien nale, Cologne, Ger-

many

* 2000 Aldrich Award, Aldrich

Museum of Contem porary Art, Ridge-

field, CT

* 1999 International Prize –

Golden Lion, Venice Biennale, Venice,

Italy

D O U G A I T K E NT H E I N T E R V I E W

PIECE;ENTER THE ROOM OF YOUDOUG AITKEN, 2010

PIECE; RAIN ON ME

DOUG AITKEN, 2010

mr. DOUG AITKENBORN 1968 - REDONDO BEACH, CALIFORNIA

NATIONALITY AMERICAN

FIELD MULTIMEDIA ART

never surmounts the connotations associated with being a projec-tion on the side of a building. Were it projected on the apple istore, the piece would be indistinguishable from a mac ad. As it stands now the video is a promotional piece for Douglas Aitken’s thoughts on what video art should be, and while his thoughts on the subject may be more complicated than the piece, he really In the winter of 2007, Aitken’s Sleepwalkers 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.[7] 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

presents a limited vision at best of what video art can be.