Doug Aitken’s video performance in Turin
Enrico Pedrini
There is a big
exhibition about Doug Aitken running now in Turin, Via Modane, in the new centre
of the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation. The show opens with the video installation
“New Ocean”, where a most perfect editing rich in special effects leads
us to the borders of new sensitivity. The artist succeeds in obtaining this “radical
alternative” effect by accelerating images, slowing them down or dissolving
them by means of absolute original devices of image focusing. Through the various
media, such as video, photograph and sound, the audience becomes involved in
a trip taking them to a complete dismissal from their reality, plunging them
in an imaginative atmosphere with the sea as its first actor. The visitor involved
in the various multimedia performances, being projected on wide metal screens,
goes through the various scenes of the installation, in a dark atmosphere, where
he is upset by the clashing blue shades of the sea. The artist dips the visitor
inside this element and has him taking part in the energy given off by the waves.
Sea is’nt in Aitken’s mind something to control, but something to share,
since it is presented to him like a senses experience belonging to a true artificial
and freezing alternative, recalling the cold atmospheres of our globalized towns.
In fact one feels he is lonely and isolated from his context when he is in one
of these metropoles. The American artist becomes continually involved in this
relation incurring between the nature’s powers and human civilization, where
any event of a catastrophic type engenders participation and emotivity.
Such events divert
the individual from his cold daily life, substituting the fake reality built
up by the media. Emotion is important to Aitken as it creates a strong belonging
to life through moments of a warm participating lyricism, creating disturbance
and excitement, which are feelings favouring new experiences among individuals
in their social relations, enabling them to open up to new emotions. What the
artist is most interested in is to use creativity to visualize certain natural
events producing infringment and discontinuity, so as to break up the cold artifice
of the media world where any form of lyricism and emotions dissolves. Three more
works by Doug Aitken are visible at the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, once
more pointing out this sort of “visionary catastrophism”. The “New
Ocean Cicle”, produced in Argentina and at the Arctic Pole, focuses the
white universe of ice and snow, the “Thaw” lingers on the enormous
icy stretches melting into huge masses of blue water and finally the work “Interiors”,
where the artist tells us tales about desolate towns. Doug Aitken, who won the
jury prize at the Venice Biennial in 1999, had shows at the Serpentine Gallery
in London, at the Kunsthaus in Bregenz, at the Musée d’Art Moderne
de la Ville de Paris, at the Pecci Museum in Prato and, in 1993, at the Gallery
303 in New York. His exhibition in Turin will be running through May 18, 2003.
