Artist Doug Aitken Is on a Mission to Bring Us Back to Reality

JOSEPH AKEL: In the last year or so, you’ve worked on large-scale installations—Mirage in the deserts of Palm Springs, your “Underwater Pavilions” off the coast of Catalina Island, and The Garden in Arhaus, Denmark—that speak to experience, embodiment, time, and perception. Is there a conceptual thread that links all of these together?

DOUG AITKEN: One of the things that you brought up just now was this idea of connectivity and experience. As you were talking, I was thinking about the “Underwater Pavilions” and the first time I had a chance to swim underwater towards the sculptures. There was this moment where I found myself sinking under the Pacific Ocean with a weight belt on over my wetsuit, and in that moment, I had this out-of-body experience. Here I am, I’m weightless, I’m in this completely vulnerable and foreign situation, and everything feels disorienting, and I’m sinking. 

[Photograph by Julien Roubinet]

That begs the question: If the value of art is to somehow make us more present, does that imply that we are living in a more disengaged time?

I read that more images were generated last year than in the history of humankind. We have this incredible velocity that we’re moving through, in terms of connectivity, but also just information. I think we are in a very Darwinist era, which poses some very interesting questions: How do we adapt to this? How do we survive? How do we live and move through this new system? I’ve noticed that there’s this pendulum: On one hand, we exist in this state of incredible speed and, on the other, there is a new desire for the real, a new desire for the tactile.

[Image: Inside Me, 2018, clear mirror, resin and concrete. Courtesy of Doug Aitken and 303 Gallery, photograph by Dakota Higgins]