The Happenings Man

Doug Aitken is largely known for his film installations in the form of labyrinthine monitor displays and epic outdoor projections on building walls. The content is diverse--his Sleepwalkers chronicled a day in the life of five distinct characters played by Cat Power, Seu Jorge, Donald Sutherland, Tilda Swinton, and Ryan Donowho, and Migration depicted wild animals being their wild selves in cheerless, far-flung hotel rooms--but the one constant in the films is an exquisite attention to sound.

Aitken’s obsession with sound can be seen in his Venice Beach studio, where we sat for our interview at a table with a bowl of drumming mallets in place of fruit. The table doubles as a drum kit, with each place setting containing a different built-in percussive sound when struck, an artwork of Aitken’s called, Sonic Table. Aitken offered me a pair of mallets and we drummed for a while before launching into the interview.

Sound is always highly considered and meticulously produced in your films.
[It’s] the idea of sound and music having a conceptual role and not being an afterthought, not simply being a ‘soundtrack’. Sound can have an integral relationship with the concept. There are pieces like eraser, shot on the Caribbean Island of Montserrat during the volcanic eruption, where we wanted pure field sounds at the same time as the images were being shot. It was important to record every real sound we heard, whether it was an earthquake tremor, or the wind coming off the volcano, but I didn’t want it to end there as a field recording. I wanted to take that real sound and use it as the DNA for a composition. The experiment was to take those real sounds and stretch and loop them into soundscapes, use the sounds as notes. I thought of it being alchemical, where all these ingredients having a conceptual relationship could come together and something unexpected could come out of it, something other than the immediate or literal.

As crucial as sound production is for you, at one of your ‘happenings’ the films are projected onto buildings alongside an entirely new live score, performed by a variety of artists, melding with the naturally-occurring environmental noises around the installation. Someone who sees the work from across the road, or someone driving by listening to their own music, is going to receive a very different set of sounds. Why mess with the original?
The happenings were an attempt to allow an idea to exist in different manifestations.... It seemed provocative to me to try to break my own pieces with the happenings. I like the idea of making it, then breaking it. Projecting onto these buildings changes and re-interprets the building as a structure too. It’s also fascinating seeing how these different musicians I work with were radically reinterpreting the film installation. It feels like an act of freedom, like the piece hasn’t been completed, but instead comes to life in different ways.

It challenges the traditional idea of an artwork being completed and done.
Yeah, I think that’s such an archaic view, that you make a painting and it then it goes on the wall and it can never change. Mediums that have an end-point don’t interest me very much. I like the idea that something can come to life and move past you and beyond, and have a sense of generosity and freedom, where it can exist as a concept and an idea.

While at the recent Migration happening at Regen Projects, I was distracted by cars honking at a Hollywood tour bus that slowed down so the tourists could check out the scene. I ended up watching these people wigging out and it became part of my experience of the work. Do you consider the environment and the outer level of unwitting viewers an element of crowd participation at a happening?
Very much. I like the idea of breaking the gaze and the one-point perspective, breaking this basis of traditional viewing, where there’s you, the work and then this distance between it. It can be interesting to short circuit that and create something where the viewer is empowered to create their own work and experience by the way they navigate the situation. The impression of someone on that bus driving by for three seconds and seeing these people milling about and picking up five images moving on a screen and hearing a loud frequency from Lucky Dragons will be so different than Lucky Dragons making the music and looking at the screen and passing off a sound to Steve [Roden] who’s on an adjacent stage. So in that way you have this wide open system where things can ebb and flow. Maybe there’s potential there.

Your films also have little to no dialogue - does that allow room for them to be further opened up?
They’re like silent films because they don’t have a necessity for language or dialogue. Sometimes language handicaps a work, creating a regionalism. This is something that music can break down. When sleepwalkers was installed on the walls of MoMA, I found myself out late one night checking on some equipment, and I’m walking down this snowy street and it’s freezing. There’s a doorman standing outside an apartment building waiting to open someone’s car door for them. This taxi pulls up and the driver rolls down the window. They’re friends and the doorman says in this deep Queens accent, “Yeah tonight is fucked, I’m freezing.” Then the cab driver stops the conversation and says “Wait a second, this is my favorite scene” and they both watch the façade of the museum for this one sequence on one of the screens. I watch them as they both watch in silence as the snow’s falling. Whatever you want to call that thing on the building, an artwork or experimental film, it doesn’t matter to these guys. They’re just seeing something that has something they responded to.

Both visually and in sound, you seem fascinated by rhythm and patterns.
When you mention patterns or repetition, the question I ask is, does repetition even exist at all? I might hear the same song 15 times, but is it really the same song? As I listen to it, I’m changing, my thoughts are drifting, and perhaps I’m walking in and out of the house, hearing it from different perspectives and places, and everything becomes relative. That idea can be very liberating, creatively.  I think of driving down Lincoln Boulevard today and passing 2,000 signs on the highway and 50 of them are the same image for the same chain restaurant and they’re flashing at me and creating this subconscious rhythm and tempo. Somewhere inside our anatomy there’s this pulse, a heartbeat that relates to what we experience and how often or not it seems to be repeated. I’m interested in the idea of a tempo that is spread into the landscape around us.

With the attention to soft, subtle landscape noises, your films suggest the impossibility of silence, as even during ostensible silences there are rich, subtle sounds, like desert winds in blow debris and lamppost drones in electric earth.
I love how when you talk to a sound designer who works on films and they say, for this ‘silence’ in a scene, would you like regular room tone, large room tone, or the sound of emptiness? And then they have a huge file on their hard drive of varying forms of silences. In a way it’s like a complete 360 back to John Cage. You almost imagine Cage’s ghost going into pro-tools, going through the sound archive of ‘silences’.

It’s a terrifying idea, this ultimate lack of silence, that silence is really as chaotic as abrasive noise.
The piece I’m designing right now is an experimental architectural work called the Silent Pavilion. It’s a large mirrored rectangular structure cantilevered out of a mountain in the Swiss Alps. Centered inside is a thick glass window framing a view at the cinematic ratio of 16:9. It’s a complete anechoic chamber, where no sound enters and there’s no reflective sound inside, generating a space for the individual that is as sound free as possible.

I’d like the viewer to experience the moment, be confronted by things happening in real time. Sound triggers thoughts of the future, or past memories, and without this, in a nearly silent space, one is confronted with the present: in the single second you exist in. In the Silent Pavilion you’re forced to recognize the sounds of your body, your blood moving, the pulse in your ears. It’s horrifying at first, because you’re really struck by being alive, something we take great pleasure in ignoring. We’ve created these insular worlds of white noise and distraction in daily life. I wanted this to be a place that forces you into the present in a violent way at first, but you spend time in there and you surrender to it and it gives back to you on another level.

I think I need to get into one of those.
(Laughs). I’ll sign you up.