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Doug Aitken at 303 - New York

Art in America, Nov, 2002 by Eleanor Heartney

This pair of video installations dealt with the intersection between vision and understanding. In the front gallery, on was a single-channel video played simultaneously over a series of circular screens that had been set in a line within a mirrored room. The effect was of an infinitely extended cylinder of light and color. For most of the duration of the work, the viewer assumed the position of observer, as short clips of largely unpeopled settings--parking lots, highways, industrial sites, gas stations, moving trains and the like--were apparently invaded by glowing white orbs, which expanded to fill the circular screens and obliterate the surrounding world. These obliterations were accompanied by an electronic beat, which ticked regularly, like an invisible clock. The orbs had the presence of supernatural entities: one was reminded of the monolith in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the blinding white light in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, mysteriously announcing the coming of a new order.

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Gradually, the ticking beat accelerated and was overlaid with other, more sustained electronic sounds. Then, abruptly, the flow of images reversed direction. Suddenly, the orbs became still, and images similar to those already seen lapped in quick succession against them, creating an effect of kaleidoscopic movement. At this point, the viewer's role seemed to change. We became the eye itself, installed in a still center, bombarded by inescapable visual phenomena. The work concluded as a flat black invaded the outer edge of the round screens and moved in to encompass the whole visual field.

The abstract concerns about perception explored in on became more concrete in new skin, the other video installation on view here. In this work, questions of vision, memory and meaning become urgent for a young Japanese woman who is losing her sight. The four-channel video, projected on four oval screens that intersected in the center of the room like petals of a flower, shifted back and forth between images of the woman in a room crowded with books and picture albums, and depictions of her interactions with the world outside. In a voice-over while she leafs through pictures in the hundreds of albums piled in her apartment, she talks about trying to hold on to the images fading from her sight, and remarks." The more I see, the less I believe in the images I find." The narrative is periodically interrupted by an electronic number countdown, presumably denoting the increasingly limited time she has left to expand her visual archive. Again, the work ends when all goes black.

In both these works, Aitken overcomes the apparent banality of the images that are his raw materials by manipulating our perception of them in time. We are left with an awareness of the preciousness of sight and a sense of the inescapable strangeness of the "real" world.

Doug Aitken at 303 - New York

Art in America, Nov, 2002 by Eleanor Heartney

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