Doug Aitken finds new directions for Land Art: His “Sonic Fountain II” installation enables visitors to experience artificial nature.
In the form of Land Art, Briton Richard Long and his peers took art to the outdoors and declared their work in and with the countryside to be art. It was reversible as in the case of Long or irreversible as with James Turrell: They entered landscapes, linked them temporarily or permanently with art and hauled documentations or excerpts of them back into the exhibition space. American media artist Doug Aitken follows in the footsteps of these Land Art protagonists and takes things a step further: Having moved from the exhibition space and into nature, the artist now returns to the museums and galleries, taking nature with him in order to re-interpret the movement – as currently on show at the SCHIRN.
Nature has always been recorded by artists, from prehistoric cave paintings to twentieth-century landscape photography. I too wanted to make nature the subject of my work, but in new ways. I started working outside using natural materials like grass and water, and this evolved into the idea of making a sculpture by walking …
Experiencing nature – the trip to the museum
Today Land Art is no longer limited to art in the countryside, "art made by walking in landscapes", "photographs of sculptures made along the way", "walks made into textworks" as it was with Richard Long, nor to Walter De Maria's steps between two white lines in the middle of a panorama of the Mojave Desert or Michael Heizer's "negative" sculptures achieved through detonations of and incisions into desert stones. Rather, it is the positioning of the artist in a landscape, and his or her work with it. And it no longer involves nature representing itself; instead, in works such as Doug Aitken's "Sonic Fountain II" nature is manifested through its very materials. However, rather than primarily working outside as the first Land Artists did, Doug Aitken returns to the White Cube with a vengeance -- taking with him water and other natural elements, which he uses to create extensive installations, and as a consequence new natural spaces.
In the process, the artist initially delights in confusing visitors: In the SCHIRN visitors will find themselves inside installations such as Aitken's "Sonic Fountain II" -- and simultaneously in the midst of experiencing nature. As drops of water regulated by electronically controlled taps drip slowly into a basin located a couple of meters below in the SCHIRN's rotunda, a sensory experience visitors are familiar with only from the outside is brought almost inside. And consequently the sound of the water becomes music, while nature itself becomes a work of art. In this manner nature's acoustic manifestation of its existence is equated with technology, as Jörg Heiser notes in his essay in the catalog accompanying the exhibition. Whereas with a video installation visitors experience art indirectly, in this instance their experience is a direct one.
It is here that, as in the real world, it enters into dialog with people: Though the splashing and the crater filled with water might seem natural, both are actually fashioned by man and technology and are orchestrated to the extent that even the sound visitors experience is not chance, but rather a water symphony regulated by show-control software. As such, impression and reality are far apart, yet their interaction delivers a status report of sorts: In context, the image of the crater, the idea of a dripping cave are revealed as an illusion; in the same way that the untainted nature Land Artists such as Richard Long sought has become ever rarer. However, aggressive interventions in the form of detonations as perpetrated by other Land Artists are not in tune with today's more sensitive handling of the world and nature. On the contrary, today people are able to imitate its characteristics or control it using machines. And though Michael Heizer resisted the interpretation of Land Art as ecological landscape art with the words "It's about art, not landscape", Aitken never takes up with nature. Instead, what appears to be natural transpires to be a process controlled by intelligent equipment; motifs from ancient myths (the cave, water dripping on a dull water surface) are juxtaposed with something scientific and rational, as Jörg Heiser comments.
"A living project"
Land Art might remain the transformation of geographic space into a work of art, but within this framework it is no longer nature itself. Now Land Art uses human expertise to mimic nature -- both for its creation and how it is experienced. This is where the real journey begins, for which Doug Aitken takes his visitors by the hand: through physical landscapes and social observations, through the purity of nature, manipulated constructions, architecture fashioned by the hand of man, into a careful observation of humanity, which leaves its traces everywhere. "I'd really like to make this a living project -- a living artwork that doesn't really have an end" [2]. This idea is repeatedly visualized in different ways in Doug Aitken's work, though in the context of Land Art it becomes especially clear what "art" means for Aitken: a living work of art without an end (just like ever-changing nature), but as a journey through civilization during which traces and impressions are gathered.