Doug Aitken at 303 - Brief Article

Art in America, March, 1999 by Nicole Krauss

With film footage of a 75,000-square-mile mining area in Namibia that has been closed off to the outside world since 1908, and of the ghostly Jonestown, Guyana, where 900 members of the People's Temple sect committed suicide in 1978, Doug Aitken's work has explored abandoned, somehow tragic landscapes, where traces of human life can be found like fossils. In eraser, one of two new film installations on view, the site is the West Indian island of Montserrat, evacuated in 1995 during the devastating eruption of the Soufriere Hills volcano.

Aitken documents a 7-mile linear traverse of the Pompeii-like island that begins in the verdant north and heads south past rusted buildings, barren hills and puckered lava fields, the scene becoming more abstract until finally it dissolves into the mist that lies beyond the southern edge, a gray abyss that is neither sky nor sea but something less certain. The journey is divided into three parts (0 to 3 miles, 3 to 5, and 5 to approximately 7), the first two of which are each projected on paired screens placed at right angles, while the last is projected on three larger screens. The images are choreographed (there is no other word for such gracefully designed interactions) so that one screen mirrors, accepts or complements the images of the other. Panning a corrugated iron shed that served as a school house, the camera hovers before a paper on the tackboard that reads "Our Couplets and Tercets," as if to suggest that the installation's format was inspired by this clue to a life interrupted. The only sign of Aitken himself is the intermittent sound of footsteps, woven into an ambient soundtrack of wind and electronically generated rhythmic pulses. As the camera pauses over a pair of binoculars and a watch covered in volcanic ash, the viewer is left to contemplate the peace that eventually will erase all fingerprints of disaster, and to wonder about the inevitability of destruction and renewal.

The second installation, these restless minds, also explores themes of human compatibility with the landscape. On three monitors facing out from a ring that is suspended from the ceiling, shots of America--roads, deserts, gas stations, parking lots--are spliced with footage of rural auctioneers in nondescript places. The prices they cry have no apparent reference. As they gather speed, the nonsensical monologues take on a lyrical, comforting quality, though their connection to the fragmentary environments is never resolved.