Doug Aitken

Pipilotti Rist Robert Irwin Philippe Parreno James Turrell Matthew Barney Chris Burden Doug Aitken Lamonte Young

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Visitors to Doug Aitken’s studio in Venice, California, are likely, at one point or another, to be offered a pair of drumsticks. Aitken uses the studio, a small modern house walking distance from his home, for entertaining as well as art making. The centerpiece is a wenge-wood dining-room table that he designed to double as a drum set. He had five drumming chambers carved into the wood, with each drum pad measuring about the size of a small place setting. A bowl of drumsticks sits nearby, ready for use.

I chose a drumstick and banged out a few notes on the table while asking Aitken the story behind it. He told me that 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," Aitken said, in his soft-spoken, laid-back Southern California manner (the artist was born in Redondo Beach). "I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if at another dinner, sound could take over?’"

Strangely enough, considering Aitken’s international reputation as a video artist, sound has played a powerful role in his artworks over the years. He uses the auditory to define space or to dissolve it in his highly architectural video installations, which take unusual forms, from monitors set in cruciform arrangements to riffs on cinematic conditions, such as projections across building façades. He has collaborated on his videos with a wide variety of musicians, from André 3000 of Outkast, who was in Aitken’s 2002 multiscreen Interiors, to indie bands like Lichens, which contributed to his score for Migration, 2008, and performed live during the piece’s run in New York at 303 Gallery, where Aitken has shown since 1994. Interested in the uneasy intersection of nature and culture or narrative variability, the artist has incorporated into his scores what he calls "field recordings," such as jungle noises from Jonestown, Guyana (in his 1995 Monsoon), and the reverberations of tremors generated by the eruption of the Soufrière Hills volcano on the Caribbean island of Montserrat (in Eraser, 1998).

"You could definitely say I’ve been obsessed with sound," he admits. Even in his 2007 installation Sleepwalkers — which he calls his first "silent" film, since it was designed to be projected on the façade of the Museum of Modern Art, with the streets of New York supplying the soundtrack — he used the musicians Chan Marshall (a.k.a. Cat Power), Seu Jorge and Ryan Donowho, among others, as actors. His thinking? They could help create particularly rhythmic visual images of everyday city activity.

"My main focus has always been visual art making," says Aitken, who earned a BFA from Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, in 1991, never formally studied a musical instrument. "But everybody knows that making art involves a lot of sitting around listening to music."

This month Aitken’s ongoing interest in sound will be even more prominent with the debut of his Sonic Pavilion at Brazil’s Instituto Inhotim, a sculpture park and museum (some call it an "art zoo") founded by the collector Bernardo Paz, which features site-specific work by such artists as Matthew Barney, Chris Burden and Pipilotti Rist. Aitken conceived the project almost five years ago after the New York-based art consultant Allan Schwartzman, who works closely with Paz, invited the artist to visit the park and consider adding a piece.

Aitken had heard about geologists using highly sensitive microphones to monitor the cracking of glaciers in Antarctica and had the idea of using them here. His decided to drill a hole roughly one mile deep and plant these "geo-microphones" and high-tech amplifiers to listen to the "primal, geologic sounds," rather like putting a stethoscope on the earth’s heart. These devices transform the earth’s low-level noises and vibrations into audible sounds that fill a ground-level glass pavilion, situated above the hole and open to visitors. During the multistage production process, he consulted various experts, including Brazilian geologists and the Los Angeles artist and sound designer Damian Wagner.