Doug Aitken Quotes
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I have a weak spot for late '60s-early '70s yippie paperbacks and protest manifestos. I find them at flea markets or online. One of my favorites is 'Right On,' a compendium of student protests made into this 95-cent paperback with the most amazing graphics.
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Our culture is not this thing to be seen from a distance. We need to be embracing the friction of it all - that is where the energy is.
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I'm not a journalist; I'm probably a horrible interviewer. The one small thing I have is I'm curious, and I'm interested in who I'm with.
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We are all affected by the time we are born into, and of course that feeds into your work. Society is based on storytelling - religious myths, opera, film - and 1968 was always seen as a time of rupture and fragmentation. I have always been interested in those words.
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Communication is paramount, and what medium or what format you utilize should be a non-issue. In some respects, that has created a barrier for new media, especially web new media, because often times maybe the media itself comes before the concept, before the ideas, and ends up navigating or dictating the outcome.
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There's really no differentiation between the work I make and the world I live in.
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One of the core reasons for creating 'Station to Station' was to provide a space for exploration and cultural friction between different mediums. It should be natural for mediums like music, film and art to cross over, and we wanted to empower that process.
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I love art that haunts me, that stays with me, that is left embedded in my mind. I don't really think there is any use for owning or collecting art; it is more about remembering and preserving it in the minds eye and allowing it into your cultural DNA.
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Art is always a search for understanding, and the different levels and frequencies of that search feel completely comfortable and natural to me.
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We're moving into an era when things are dematerialised and much more holographic. Floating above the physical world and the geographic map, there's another landscape that's constantly changing - something like a cloud - of communication, information, exchange and commerce.
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My office has two buildings that function like the right and left sides of the brain. There's a room where everything is being edited for an upcoming project, but you can pull out of that into a tranquil space to work in a different, more solitary medium. It's an architectural unfolding of the process instead of just one chaotic structure.
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I think that 'Station to Station' is a nomadic project not only in a literal sense, as it's traveling by train from place to place. Some of these places are New York City or Los Angeles, but some of these places are rather off-the-grid places.
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It's very easy to lose track of the environment around you, to lose touch with the present.
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'Planet Caravan' by Black Sabbath is such a delicate song from such a surprising place.
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I always thought about 'Station to Station' as an approach. It was about creating an alternative platform for culture where different mediums could co-exist.
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'Station to Station' came out of a sense of urgency - a sense that culture, be it art, film or architecture, has become so compartmentalised. For this project, we wanted to break that and create a language that is more nomadic and less materialistic and really empowering for the creators and the audience.
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The 'Station to Station' film is a fast-moving journey through the modern creative landscape. It's a kaleidoscope of voices and impressions rather than a standard linear film.
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In our daily lives, we see ourselves often in very reductive ways. I want to explore motion, change and flux, whether we are looking in the mirror or seeing ourselves in our surroundings. The singular view of self contradicts the act of living.
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The idea of a 'happening' is that there is little distance between the viewer and it, whatever 'it' is. It's an experience that's on-going and evolving.
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I see life as a burning meteorite that you can climb all over, and feed off, as it is falling to earth.
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'Station to Station' is a series of happenings that go across the landscape. What is a happening? A happening is a moment in time. A moment in time that is not choreographed, where you don't know precisely what's going on. Where there are aspects of different layers of culture.
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We live in a world where art exists in galleries and museums, and musicians have to play the same venues over and over.
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I'm really a believer in being in situations that feel new and awkward and different. And I love that feeling of being in motion - that sense you find when you're traveling.
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The 20th century is a period defined by cultural and artistic movements. However, the 21st century creative-scape that we occupy now doesn't really have movements in the same way. Instead it's made up of diverse individuals working across various platforms simultaneously; art, architecture, film, music and literature.