Doug Aitken
"Editing a film is like writing music. Ultimately, it has little to do with the images. The most interesting thing about editing would be to remove the images altogether and simply see flickering tones of light. That’s what editing creates: transitions and movements of light. It’s like wallpaper – the narrative is wrapped in moving light,” explained Doug Aitken in a recent interview. By emphasising the profoundly abstract nature of his work, the artist highlights one of its paradoxes. He initially trained as a magazine illustrator, and the video work he has been developing since the mid-1990s draws heavily on popular imagery.
His work therefore seems to belong more to the realm of commercial cinema or music videos than to the history of art. Whilst she occasionally turns away from video in favour of photography or sculptural installation, her work is characterised above all by the omnipresence of screens in our environment. The image is omnipresent in Aitken’s work, but it is through the attention paid to editing and the spatial arrangement of these images that the artist transcends their mere framework to explore underlying notions of perception. In his internal editing, as in his exhibition installations, Doug Aitken’s cinema bears the mark of twentieth-century film experiments and the idea of an expanded cinema, transcending narrative and figuration. In 2006, the publication of a collection of interviews entitled Broken Screen (published by DAP), in which the artist interviews figures such as Claire Denis, Kenneth Anger, Bruce Conner and Pierre Huyghe, demonstrates his place within this lineage. Presented across various media, combined with sound and sometimes fragmented across space, Aitken’s imagery achieves quasi-physical sensory qualities that transcend the boundaries of mere vision.
Whilst human figures are at the centre of many of his short films and installations, their depictions contribute to the composition of a broader flow and environment. The landscape, whether urban (Electric Earth, 1999) or desert (Diamo
