Doug Aitken

A TRILL Zine interview originally published in 2018

Renowned Artist Doug Aitken has been pushing visual and auditory boundaries since his earliest exhibited works in the 1990’s. He has shown at some of the world’s most prestigious institutions including the Whitney, Museum of Modern Art and Pompidu. His 2016 solo retrospective Electric Earth (MOCA, Los Angeles) was a staggering survey of his visionary output to date.

YOUR USE (AND EMBRACE) OF SOUND IS SOMETHING THAT HAS ALWAYS STRUCK ME OVER THE YEARS. IT FEELS AS IF IT’S JUST AS IMPORTANT AND VALID TO YOU AS ANY OF YOUR VISUAL OR SITE SPECIFIC PURSUITS. CAN YOU TALK A BIT ABOUT YOUR INTEREST IN WORKING WITH SOUND SPECIFICALLY?

Sound and music was never something I saw separate from visual art. To me it’s all one. I often see ideas in sound, I hear the pattern of the idea; the rhythm and structure. You can have an idea that is sonic and that can create a structure and then you start seeing visuals within the sound, they can grow into narratives and this can take you places that are very unique. In culture right now we see this division between all the forms and mediums: music, art, architecture, performance and everything else. It’s as if they have all become their own cultural ghetto. They are seen as separate from each other and much of this is due to capitalism and insecurity. When you sit with a friend and have dinner you have a conversation that touches on many different mediums at once because we recognize that is all part of one cloud. We need to create new systems to open up the flow between mediums. I think if we look into the future we won’t see the segregation between mediums. There such incredible history of poly media creators - from Xenakis, a formal architect who started turning his ideas of architecture into music to Walter De Maria, initially a musician who went on to innovate Land Art and make pieces like The Lightning Field. For my creativity, sound is just part of breathing. It’s always around me or in me. I asked Terry Riley why his music never has a bass or low-end and he said: “the low-end attaches you to the earth, it’s primal, I want something different, I want my music to soar, to be in the sky...so I never use the lower tones.“

I FOUND MYSELF MESMERIZED BY SONIC FOUNTAIN II (MOCA, 2016). WHAT DOES THAT PIECE REPRESENT TO YOU?

For that work we excavated the floor of the museum and created a large rough pond of white liquid – the water circulates and pours through the museum ceiling like a very precise waterfall. There are underwater microphones. We wrote a composition for the dropping water. The piece is minimalist. It finds sonic patterns that draw you in and the sequenced drips are tranquil, while other times it gushers fast and pours with a kind of magical violence. It’s a strange artwork, when I was installing it in Lyon, France someone came up to me as i was watching it and working things out and said “...oh you’ve been sitting here for hours.” I thought I had just walked in, I guess I lost time.

I UNDERSTAND YOU EMEDDED CONTACT MICROPHONES IN YOUR HOME’S FOUNDATION WHEN YOU WERE BUILDING IT - IN ADDITION TO SOME OTHER INTEGRATED SOUND FEATURES. CAN YOU OFFER A LITTLE BACKGROUND ON THIS?

A while back I did a piece in Brazil called the Sonic Pavillion, it was a permanent installation that is on a jungle hillside. The work is a circular glass pavilion. At the center of it is a hole that goes 700 feet into the earth. At the bottom of the deep hole is a series of geo-mics and accelerometers. This work picks up the live sounds of the earth - plates shifting and the movement inside the earth as it moves and turns. This was the first artwork I had done that was living - it’s a continuously changing soundscape in real time. It was a mysterious piece, you could sit in there for hours, constantly hearing different sounds that at times would be tranquil, other times violent and disruptive. The Sonic Pavilion would hypnotize while engaging you in the present.

When I built my house in Venice Beach, CA we had to pour a concrete pad for the foundation. I slipped about eight mics into the concrete. I thought it would be interesting if I could turn on the earth below my house. This grew into other ideas. Two of the tables in the house are instruments: one out of chambered wood and the other from 80 slices of Afghani Onyx. The staircase is chambered wood so you can play them. House is a private space, so I wanted to just experiment with how I could live sound on a daily basis. It’s great when friends come over, many musicians, who just want to have a drink, catch up and play parts of the house.

WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN LISTENING TO LATELY?

The amazing thing about music is you can always discover a new frontier...there is always something else out there. You can go backwards, deeper into to the music you know and find something new again or push out and dig something new. Lately, I was listening to Michael Rother’s Flammende Herzen - he’s the guitarist from NEU! and this was his first solo album in the mid-70’s. It’s an amazing bridge from Psych Krautrock to the more regulated German sound of Kraftwerk to the ambient washes of Cluster and Harmonium and with the sensuality of Popul Vuh. Jaki Liebezeit from Can plays drums on it. I worked with Jaki shortly before he died on a little happening in Frankfurt...his rhythms are out of this world. A little diamond of an album, but a really interesting transitional bridge. My ears are restless, my mind can’t sleep I can’t get enough, there’s always more.

Further linkage:
Doug Aitken Workshop