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Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Doug Aitken: new ocean (long version) Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan. Doug Aitken: new ocean (long version)by John McGee  Doug Aitken, new ocean floor,
2001, video installation Venice Biennale? Whitney Biennial? Been there. Fatboy Slim music video director? Done that. Now Los Angeles-based artist Doug Aitken, 34, takes on Tokyo with new ocean, a group of seven multi-screen video installations at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery. Entering the blackened interior of the museum is like stepping into a movie theater after the show has already started. With an eye on the screens, you try not to step on anybody while looking for a place to sit. These are not films so much as stylish video music boxes: short, rhythmic clips of sound collage and landscape synchronized and projected onto sculptural arrays of screens. Water stars in three of the pieces. It's a well-loved actor with great range and decorative properties. In three-screen thaw, giant glaciers groan and crunch while ice crystals snap, crackle, pop and shatter. In one second expansion, dueling water drips mirror and invert each other across the room. New ocean debuted at London's Serpentine Gallery last year, but Aitken re-mixed and modified the installations for Opera City. He says he tried to connect the works by opening a dialogue between them, "I wanted to create a virtual architecture through film, editing and sound to create a psychological topography without physical tangibility." The four waterless pieces in the middle of the show interrupt the flow. In Window 2 (set to a relentless taiko drum beat), the camera zooms in quickly on a series of white circles set in store fronts, street scenes and construction sites. Projected onto four sides of two intersecting, round, translucent screens, the different circles and their backgrounds become disjointed overlaps. The large light box photo Rise is an out-of-focus postcard view of the Los Angeles street grid just past dusk. The picture glows with strings of streetlights and speeding cars.
Doug Aitken, new ocean, 2001, video installation New ocean floor and new ocean new machine, shown on separate pairs of intersecting, rectangular screens, feature isolated figures wandering in natural and artificial wildernesses. A solitary man walks through empty landscapes—the desert, parking lots, escalators, etc. He falls through the bottom of the screen and drops into another scene. A woman rides the subway, walks, falls into a black space. There, she grabs the intersection point of the projection screens with both hands, swinging around it like a gymnast. There's no narrative in either video, just motion in emptiness. The final installation, new ocean cycle, summarizes the weaknesses of new ocean. A 360-degree Disneyland Circle-Vision style panorama of screens envelops viewers in a series of watery landscapes—a Sugimoto-inflected endless ocean horizon, dark rivulets running along asphalt, slowly rotating shots of thundering waterfalls. The main thing separating the video from a UNESCO World Heritage Sites documentary or late night Japanese TV "healing time" music and landscapes is an ambiguous figure—a struggling swimmer treading water seen from far below—projected onto an overhead screen. But even he fades into shifting blue diamonds. While the "dry" pieces have some of the intriguing narrative suspension and ambiguity of Aitken's earlier photos and videos, his watery videos are all wet. Uncritically combining Romanticism and stoner kaleidoscope gazing is more appropriate in nightclub chill-out rooms. There's an old cliché that drowning is supposed to be a pleasurable way to die, once your body stops fighting. Most visitors to this exhibition recline on the floor, zoning out. _______________________________________The Doug Aitken: new ocean exhibition was held Oct-Nov 2002 at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in Hatsudai, Tokyo. ©2006 John McGee |
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