Doug Aitken.
Conner, Jill
Museum of Modern Art, New York NY January 16--February 12, 2007
At the height of last winter in New York, Doug Aitken's
sleepwalkers (2006) was projected in eight continuous, 13-minute
sequences onto six external facades of MoMA, transfixing the museum with
this myth of a city that never sleeps. Screening five hours every night,
this awesome cinematic installation reveals Aitken's ongoing
fascination with the city as organism, represented here in the form of
five nocturnal journeys or metamorphoses, all of which act as stand-ins
for the five boroughs of New York and five of its "graveyard"
occupations.
Faced with the simultaneous challenge of potentiating audience
impact and the degree of optical displacement, Aitken employs a kind of
site-specific, dramaturgical Sensurround, interweaving these five
individual journeys in cross perspective. With three screens located in
MoMA's sculpture garden and three on the museum's exterior,
sleepwalkers portrays the separate yet architecturally integrated lives
of five "typical" New Yorkers--office worker/ violinist (Tilda
Swinton), postal worker/whirling dervish (Chan Marshall), bicycle
messenger/subway drummer (Ryan Donowho), electrician/urban cowboy (Seu
Jorge), and businessman/crash victim (Donald Sutherland)--as they awaken
late at night, ready themselves for work, and inevitably undergo a
spiritual awakening in Manhattan. Bordering on pure fantasy and reality
TV, these five New York "bedtime stories" are all interwoven with and inevitably lead into the mass transit system, bursting to the
seams with similarly driven worker drones.
Aitken is fascinated with the cartography of mass turbulence and
collective flight, as is also evident in his recent show at 303 Gallery
(through March 3), featuring don't think twice II (2006) in which
two overlapping concentric circles of light serve as the basic pattern
of modern-day telecommunication and transport systems. Forever swept up
by and against the flow, people's daily lives accrue as unexpected
convergences or collision points. But instead of offering an insightful
snapshot of New York's infinite mosaic of city life, Aitken's
"sleepwalkers" come across as little more than the usual
suspects often seen in the mass media, MTV music videos, action movies,
and fictionalized accounts of gang warfare. Nor is it believable that,
according to curator Peter Eleey at Creative Time (which jointly
commissioned the public art event), New Yorkers are sedate, sleepy
people--something we are most definitely not, mainly because many of us
have to moonlight to pay the rent, usually leading to complete burnout.
Despite the blue-collar (and maybe even middle-class) pretensions
of sleepwalkers, the lives of these ersatz somnambulists seem hopelessly
out of touch with the wide-awake, as-is attitude of NYC. Unlike, say Nan
Goldin, Larry Clark, or (Ground Zero photographer) Joel Meyerowitz,
Aitken smoothes away all evidence of urban grit in favor of a more
polished, networked, "upper crust" look. In his recently
launched book Broken Screen (2006), containing nonlinear interviews with
26 artists, Aitken compares his work to the restless cinema verite of
Warhol's Chelsea Girls (1966), which apparently accounts for
sleepwalkers's freshly mopped studio perfection. Most evenings,
however, the streets outside MoMA were a tad cold for general viewing,
placing Aitken's ice-misty dreamscape at the disposal of only the
hardiest out-of-towners--everybody else being trapped inside, of course,
eking out the dream of living New York.
