Meet Doug Aitken’s New Muse

Why the artist set his multisensory masterwork in the West

Words by ELIZABETH VARNELL

“There’s a scene with Beck in front of this donut shop, sitting with the drummer James Gadson, and these drifter cars are doing their own donuts. We see the patterns of car tires on the ground,” says Doug Aitken, a multidisciplinary artist based in Venice, Calif., of his just-completed boundary-pushing project, Lightscape. “It’s almost feral, creatively.” His latest work encompasses film, music, live performance, and installation, using a mesmerizing method of storytelling through images and sound. The feature-length piece — he calls it “polymedia” — plays out as a fever dream or hallucination of the modern world propelled by what Aitken says is a “constant sense of continuous movement.” He sees the polyphonic partnership uniting the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and numerous dancers, musicians, friends of the artist, and passersby as a modern mythology.

“It’s like a river of different stories,” Aitken says of the film, and the landscape of Southern California itself — mountains, valleys, freeways, and factories — as well as its ecology, plays a starring role. Joshua Tree, Death Valley, Mojave, Grand Avenue, and an Amazon warehouse and airport parking garage are all here, juxtaposed in the frenetic mix. “Lightscape explores the idea of the future, where we are now, and where we could be going,” Aitken says.

His work is often site-specific and just as often genre-defying. He curated 2013’s Station to Station involving a train, designed as a moving light sculpture, traveling from New York to San Francisco with various happenings along the way. His 2017 Mirage sculpture of a home covered in mirrors began in the California desert and traveled to Detroit and Gstaad, where members of the Chorale sang abstract, hypnotic phrases while walking through its interiors as snowflakes fell.

“Lightscape explores the idea of the future, where we are now, and where we could be going.”

Doug Aitken

“We live in a world of images. There’s a sense of collective acceleration. There’s more and more. We need new tools to navigate this,” Aitken says. “I was more interested in asking questions about the individual. How do you retain your identity? We’re always going to rely on storytelling and myths, but we need models that speak to us now.” This project about the future of humanity is a foray into the technological fray, and Aitken feels compelled to go there. “Art can be a space with no commercial ties. If we don’t mine that, there’s no sector that will.”

Lightscape’s world premiere with a live-to-picture music performance took place on November 16, at Walt Disney Concert Hall, part of the day-long new music festival, Noon to Midnight: Field Recordings, curated by composer Ellen Reid and the L.A. Phil. This month, the piece will be installed on multiple screens at the Marciano Art Foundation, with the possibility of a wider release to theaters in the future. For this, Gustavo Dudamel and the L.A. Phil recorded the minimalist compositions, while the vocal parts come from the Grant Gershon–led Los Angeles Master Chorale. A schedule of live performances with the Phil’s New Music Group and the Chorale’s singers also accompanies the Marciano’s installation.

The film is visually stunning, with appearances by Beck, Natasha Lyonne, LA Dance Project’s Daphne Fernberger, and even a mountain lion who resembles Griffith Park’s P-22. The sound elements are equally compelling. Aitken began by writing song cycles, what he called, “minimalist pieces centered around the idea of the frontier, what is in front of us, the horizon.” He imagined creating 12 chapters and invited the Chorale’s artistic director Gershon and associate director Jenny Wong to compose new abstract, ambient vocals using the human voice.

For Aitken, words and phrases take on meaning through repetition and become abstractions. He cites Lawrence Weiner and Bruce Nauman’s language-based works and Samuel Beckett’s plays as influences. In his studio, Aitken handed Gershon and Wong a stack of words to sing, including phrases such as, “there was a man.” Gershon says they had to ask themselves, “If you’re just speaking it, what’s the rhythm of that? What are the different possibilities? We developed this kernel of a melody.” Aitken asked Gershon and Wong to think of another word, “freeway,” as an infinite path forward. Gershon says they sang it in “very long tones with each vowel extended and the volume rising and falling.”

“Art can be a space with no commercial ties. If we don’t mine that, there’s no sector that will.”

Doug Aitken

Much of the film depicts interactions and human connections, amplified by music. Wong calls the sound layering “otherworldly.” Words and phrases are bolstered by electronic looping, and Gershon expects the live experience to be “overwhelmingly visceral.” Aitken and his engineer Austin Meredith also tapped canonic music for the work’s soundscape. “Instrumentals carry the idea of minimalism,” Aitken says, noting works by Meredith Monk and Terry Riley are woven in.

Ultimately, the work is the culmination of the artist’s meandering journey. “There were these structures but the collaborative nature of this project really grew in a very organic way. It’s an artwork we were making, using film, but we didn’t really have a script. We were writing the scenes on the fly. That made it more risky, with more room for improvisation.” For the expansive project, Aitken tapped into the ecological variety, social diversity, and economic disparities of the West Coast to explore the future. He says the project is “a way to talk about these different realities, like Death Valley vs. a robotics factory, such radical diversity happening all at once, the different ecologies both within our landscape and within our culture.” Marciano Art Foundation, 4357 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., 424-204-7555; marcianoartfoundation.org (Dec. 17, 2024–March 15, 2025).