How Doug Aitken Thinks in Music

0:02Sharon Louden:Sometimes when you have a project or an idea, you know, you can be working on it for so long and you can see it just kind of collapse. It's just not right. And push it a little bit further and let it totally collapse and then take the pieces and pick them up again and make something different.

0:21Doug Aitken:I'm Min Chen and this is DR Angle, a podcast by Artnet News.

0:58Doug Aitken:Dock Aiken's new installation Lightscape has just landed at The Shed in New York. It is many things at once. A seven-screen film, an immersive environment, and a stage for live performances. But at its heart is music.

1:16Doug Aitken:The work unfolds across multiple screens, following different characters as they move through desert scenes, freeways, and other landscapes in flux. What binds these worlds and narratives together is sound.

1:36Doug Aitken:Aiken built lightscape around an original song cycle he wrote. The soundtrack also incorporates compositions by minimalist pioneers like Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Meredith Monk, performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Last week, the work opened with a live performance by the Los Angeles Master Chorale, but they won't be the only musicians activating the installation. Upcoming performances will feature William Bozinski, Suzanne Chani, and the Soundrar Orchestra. In that sense, Lightscape picks up on a thread that has long run through Aiken's practice. One of his earliest works, Diamond Sea, was set against an ambient soundtrack featuring Aphex Twin and Nine Inch Nails, among other musicians.

2:19Doug Aitken:His 2012 project, Song One, a moving image work projected onto the facade of the Herschel Museum, was built around the song, I Only Have Eyes For You. And in 2013, for Station to Station, he staged a series of art happenings by transporting artists and musicians by train across America. In an art world that often prefers tidy categories and boundaries, Aitken has built a career out of collapsing them. His works have moved between film, sculpture, performance, and sound, asking viewers to not just look, but to listen, move, and gather. So the ambitious Lightscape felt like the perfect opportunity to speak with Aiken.

2:58Doug Aitken:In our conversation, he opened up about working across disciplines, the communal power of live performance, and the role music has played in his life and practice. Hi, Doug.

3:09Sharon Louden:Hello.

3:10Doug Aitken:Thank you for joining us on The Art Angle today. We're speaking on the eve of the opening of Lightscape, your new seven-screen installation at The Shed in New York. It sounds like an incredibly ambitious project, a work that brings together film, architecture, live musical performances in a constantly evolving environment. So I wanted to start from the beginning. With so many moving parts to this work, what was the original seed for it? Did it start with an image, a space, a sound, all of the above?

3:38Sharon Louden:I think with Lightscape, for me, it actually really started with music that I was writing. It was a song cycle that I wrote about five years ago. It was kind of seven or eight different chapters, and each section of the song cycle was using language in a very kind of reductive, minimalist way, deconstructing phrases and words. And all of it really kind of had a sense of movement forward, a kind of sense of looking towards what the future might bring and how we navigate this.

4:16Doug Aitken:Music is so central to Lightscape, as it is in many of your works. Lightscape features a collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, incorporating minimalist compositions by Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk. Could you talk about the role that music plays in connecting Lightscape's different worlds and stories?

4:36Sharon Louden:Yeah, I was really interested in creating kind of a Gesamtkunstwerk, something that kind of had a totality of all mediums. And I want to ignore that idea that an artwork can be defined by one format. So I think with Lightscape, it was created out of these different passages of music that I wrote. And they kind of built into a narrative structure, almost like architecture. And that was kind of early on, like pandemic time. And then the second phase of the project really happened when the Los Angeles Philharmonic contacted me. They asked about collaboration, and it was at the height of the pandemic, when you absolutely could not play live as a performing arts center.

5:14Sharon Louden:And I said, you know, yeah, I would like to collaborate. I'd love to work with you on creating more music for this. So we really looked at the canon of minimalist music. We looked at Meredith Monk, you know, Terry Riley wrote original music, Reich, Glass, people of that kind of milieu. And we reduced it down to a series of compositions that were conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. After we had that and the narrative pieces I had written, we started the journey of really kind of creating a visual piece of film, a kind of graphic story. And that was really something that was very long, very challenging.

5:50Sharon Louden:We filmed for about eight months. Within that, a lot of the filming was improvisational. And it was really kind of finding yourself in a location, a robotics factory or the middle of Death Valley, and almost creating a story in situ. With Lightscape, I wanted to create something that was very much a graphic narrative that didn't rely on language or drama. Instead, it was something that was almost a kind of a choreography of the landscape around us. And that kind of intersection between the individual and the landscape, that merging or dissolving.

6:20Doug Aitken:It kind of calls to mind Koyaanikatsi. I've not seen the work yet, but yeah, it brings that to mind. I want to get back to your compositions that you created. Could you tell us more about it? And also, what is your approach to creating music and how does it differ from creating visual art?

6:36Sharon Louden:Well, to me, that question about creativity is like a very open one. And I don't really have a formula. I don't have an approach. You know, you have to be open to impulses of different kinds, you know. And there are projects where there's a very single, minimal idea. And that idea becomes an essence and it might take you years to make. There's other things which are wildly different where there are little breadcrumbs, little pieces. And you kind of like mine and chip away. one after another, and eventually they create a totality. I'm fascinated by the creative act, but I'm also very cognizant that I don't want it to be a predictable linear path.

7:10Sharon Louden:I think every artwork should be different. And if you can use an artwork almost as an excuse to create a new journey, a new adventure constantly, then there's a kind of a vibrancy and oxygen to it.

7:21Doug Aitken:Is there something in particular that draws you to minimalist compositions or composers?

7:27Sharon Louden:I've always been fascinated by minimals in music, that really reductive kind of approach. And also the use of repetition. You know, I think those are kind of pillars in art, in visual art to me also. You know, in some ways, I feel like there was kind of more experimentation and more progress made within music when it came to patterns and repetition. I think actually art was informed a little bit later. Some of the composers got there first, which is interesting. There's also that idea that we kind of live in a world where we consume culture, yet we see it as segregated silos. Like contemporary art is over here.

8:05Sharon Louden:It's completely separate. Punk rock is completely separate from classical versus electronica, you know. And to me, in an ideal world, there really kind of is no boundaries. Like it's more of a river of information to pull from or to be inspired by than it is discrete islands. I agree.

8:23Doug Aitken:And I think this leads into your collaborations with musicians. The LA Philharmonic is really just the latest musicians that you're working with, going back to projects like Song One, Station to Station. You've worked with everyone from Beck and Cat Power to Terry Riley and AFX Twin. When you're working with musicians, what's that dynamic like? What role do you see yourself playing?

8:45Sharon Louden:Yeah, I love collaborations. It's amazing when an artwork can become a platform, a stage, and a space where you can create a new dance, you can create new forms of choreography, different interactions. Many of my collaborations have been with musicians because I find that that is just so easy and seamless, that interrelationship that we might have between the visual and the sonic. A work like Lightscape, it's sitting on a foundation, a sonic foundation, a foundation of patterns and tempos and rhythms and language. And the images really kind of come on top of that. They become the soil that kind of fills it in.

9:23Sharon Louden:And with that work, we have the kind of bedrock of the work, which comes from the song cycle, the kind of minimalist compositions. But then within that, on top of that, I think there's a lot of moments in the work where new music is created for it or musicians weave in and out of the scenes on film. And I was interested in that. I was interested in not ignoring that and not trying to put music onto a secondary level, but instead like bring it into the narrative. With Lightscape, as it runs throughout the summer, we want to do live activations. And we want these live activations to be moments where we're giving over the artwork to different musicians to create their own reinterpretation, their sonic impressions.

10:05Sharon Louden:And I love the idea that it's improvisational, that it's one time only, and that's all that will exist. It's ephemeral. Yeah.

10:14Doug Aitken:What perspectives do you think musicians bring to a project that visual artists often don't?

10:20Sharon Louden:Well, I think that visual artists are often bound by a certain weight, and that weight is time. And it's the time that goes into fabricating something, painting the painting or making the sculpture or installing the installation. And that can be kind of a cumbersome proposition, right? It's something that you really have to commit a lot of time and resources to. With music, on the counterpoint, you have something that can be very ephemeral. It can tap into something in a very immediate way. So that dichotomy, I think, is incredibly powerful, you know, when combined.

10:51Doug Aitken:For sure, for sure. I'm also really struck by the way you describe music. It's almost like a sculpture. And it brings to mind song one, which was a massive projection on the Hirschhorn Museum, featuring images and scenes centered on one song, I Only Have Eyes for You. And I've heard you describe the song as structure and landscape. It's almost like architecture. Going back to this project, why use this one piece of music as a framework for the entire artwork?

11:17Sharon Louden:Yeah, it was interesting. With song one, we only used this one song, I Only Have Eyes For You, which is actually one of the most covered songs in history of music. And I found that when I was listening to it, I was working on some projects over the holidays. So no one was at my studio. So I was free to play music as loud and as much as possible. So I found myself playing one song just on repeat, and I just left it. And it played all day. and I came back the next day and it was still playing. And it was that one song. And as it was repeating, you know, probably hundreds of times, I would have moments where sometimes I wouldn't even hear it at all.

11:51Sharon Louden:It would just disappear. And other times I might only hear an instrument or a certain vocal would stand out. And I realized that there really is no such thing as repetition. Things are constantly changing and our perceptions altering and changing and shifting. So the world around us, although there may be moments that are seemingly the same, they're not. And I thought maybe this idea, this very, very simple concept, I could take and exploit into a larger artwork. So with that work, we took that one three-and-a-half-minute song, I Only Have Eyes for You, and we re-recorded it about 50 or 60 times, from slide guitar to gospel singers to, you know, kind of every variation you could imagine.

12:30Sharon Louden:And that became the starting point for this work. The Hirschhorn Museum is a very strong, brutal statement. There's hardly any windows. This is kind of concrete, circular structure. Many people find it quite oppressive. And when I was asked to do a show there, I pulled up in D.C. in my taxi and I looked at the building before I went inside. And I thought, maybe we don't need to do a project inside the exhibition space. Maybe the building becomes exhibition. And that circular space, which is almost like a record, I thought, what if it just becomes a 360 degree film? And we just passed life to life, character to character, continuously.

13:10Doug Aitken:Is that how you usually listen to music obsessively, just in one track?

13:16Sharon Louden:I confess, I love doing that. Yeah. Amazing. I feel like you're finding the secret of the universe sometimes in a song. Like you kind of mine it and you go a little bit deeper and it opens up more and more and you hear these things that just kind of, you know, they just make time erase, you know, and the door opens.

13:36Doug Aitken:When I move, when I move, when I move, when I move, when I move, I see. Could you name some songs that are constantly on your playlist or any you listen to obsessively?

14:10Sharon Louden:Oh God, I forgot my phone. I heard this cover of the song Baby by this Turkish electronic musician. And the way he uses chorus in it, the voices, is just incredible. I'll send to you later if you're your thing. But yeah, that's something I've been listening to a lot lately.

14:27Doug Aitken:Do you gravitate to any particular kind of music? Are you constantly looking for new music to listen to?

14:34Sharon Louden:Yeah, I'm constantly looking for new music, you know, constantly. And, you know, I kind of dedicate a little time each weekend just to search and scrub and see if I can find some diamonds in the rough for the following week at the studio. It's interesting. It's such a polyphonic conversation we're having, right? Like, you know, if you look at it and you say Xanaxis, the classical composer, was an architect before he was writing music. So he would notate his music as drawings, almost engineering-like drawings. instead of writing classical sheet music. There's so much kind of back and forth. And in some ways, I think that the cultural landscape we're living in now is probably the most conservative of the last hundred years.

15:12Sharon Louden:I think it's incredibly afraid. I think it's very siloed. I think much of what we're seeing right now is it's formal and classical and trying to stay within its confines. And if we were to look back on the early 20th century, we might see a moment where Picasso or Leger are collaborating with Stravinsky, are collaborating with Cocteau, and putting together a performance for Friday night. And that flow and that kind of idea that we see from the Dadaists to the Fluxists to Situationists, there's an energy there that I think we can really tap into.

15:44Doug Aitken:Yeah, that's something I want to talk about, the live music component as well. Like throughout your practice, you stage happenings and performances with artists, with musicians. they're essentially communal experiences and station to station was one such project and now lightscape what draws you to these really collective and immersive experiences

16:05Sharon Louden:well i mean i think that um there's something magical about the unexpected you know and i think it's chemistry right and sometimes when you realize that the medium you're working with is not a physical medium it's just time and time is this elastic thing and when you can kind of erased the separation between the audience and what's being performed or what's happening, then there's a kind of magnetism there, which is unexpected. And there's a possibility for something to burn so hot for such a temporary amount of time. And I think to divert from that for a second, I think we have to think about what our memories are, how memory works.

16:42Sharon Louden:And I think that's essential to how we see art. The memory doesn't record everything. The memory records moments that are unexpected, that break the time code, that are radical or violent or beautiful or harmonious, but they're not the even keel, right? And in a sense, I think if we think about the artworks that we remember that become part of our DNA, it's also very much about that. They're moments of discord, moments where something's pushing out or pulling you in, but they're not placid moments usually. And I think that's something that I sometimes see with happenings or live events. There's something there that's very fast and fleeting.