Remastered

Doug Aitken Mies van der Rohe Lamonte Young A Modest Mies Is Slated for Destruction Dia’s Big Day A Marathon Tribute for Merce Cunningham I.M. Pei Goes Gold Doug Aitken

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

Sitting down with Doug Aitken in his Venice, California, studio, you will likely, at one point or another, be offered a pair of drumsticks. For the table that he uses for meetings (and also dinner parties — his studio is a small, mod house that’s walking distance from the house where he lives) is one of his own design, into which he has had five wenge wood chambers carved to create different drumming pads on the table’s surface. Each "drum" is about the size of a small place setting. A bowl of drumsticks sits nearby, ready for the testing.

I banged out a few notes on this table that doubles as a drum set while asking Aitken for the story behind it. Yes, he lit on the idea about three years ago after a boring dinner party somewhere on the art circuit. "There was that usual awkward moment, and I realized that words have their limits," he says. "I thought, Wouldn’t it be amazing if at another dinner, sound could take over?"

And, strangely enough, considering his reputation as a video artist, sound has been taking over his artwork for years. He has collaborated on his videos with a wide scope of musicians, from André 3000 of OutKast (who played a character in Aitken’s 2002 Interiors) to bands like White Rainbow and Lichens (both of whom contributed to his score for the 2008 Migrations). He has incorporated into his scores what he calls "field recordings" — ranging from jungle noises from Jonestown, Guyana (in his 1995 Monsoon), to the sounds of earthquake tremors generated by the eruption of a volcano on the Caribbean island of Montserrat (in his 1998 Eraser).

Even in his 2007 installation of Sleepwalkers, which he calls his first "silent film," as it was designed to play on the facade of the Museum of Modern Art, with the streets of New York supplying a soundtrack all their own, he cast musicians like Cat Power, Seu Jorge, and Ryan Donowho as actors to help create particularly rhythmic or percussive images of everyday city activity.

This month, his ongoing interest in sound will be even more prominent with the debut of his "sound pavilion" in the sculpture gardens of the Instituto Inhotim of Brazil. For this work Aitken has drilled a hole nearly one mile deep into the ground to tap into and broadcast the earth’s "primal, geologic sounds." As if putting a stethoscope to the planet’s heart, he has used a system of ultrasensitive amplifiers and geomicrophones (like the ones geologists use to record the breaking up of glaciers in Antarctica) to transform these guttural registers into audible sounds that fill a ground-level glass pavilion above. He expects the visitors in the pavilion both to have intensely private experiences and to become part of a larger community — the audience created by sound.

"My main focus has always been visual artmaking," says the artist, a Southern California native who received his BFA in illustration at the Art Center College of Design in 1991 and never formally studied an instrument. "But everybody knows that making art involves a lot of sitting around listening to music. You could definitely say I’ve been obsessed with sound."

As we listened to an eclectic mix that included African jazz and drone rock, Aitken said that early tests at Inhotim have yielded surprising results, from sounds that are "consistent and rhythmic like a bass murmur, to this sharp and violent noise." Visitors to the pavilion will hear the earth’s gurgling in real time, so the audio will be constantly changing. He didn’t have actual sound samples to share when we met, but he did walk into a bedroom, where there was an assistant equipped with a flat-screen TV and a Macintosh for sound and video editing, and pulled up digital images of the glass pavilion.

"That’s one thing that just fascinated me about this project," he says. "The idea that you could make a living artwork, a changing artwork that will never be the same twice."

He credits Minimalist composers Terry Riley and La Monte Young as inspiration on this front, for favoring nonlinear compositions that repeat, loop, and fold in on themselves without clear beginnings or endings. These musicians, he suggests, make "time expand and contract in interesting ways."