Doug Aitken: New Era
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
Exhibition: 20 October 2021 – 06 February 2022
Occupying prime real estate at Circular Quay vis-à-vis from the Opera House, Sydney’s home of contemporary art has after a profound overhaul in 2011 redefined itself not only via an aesthetically and architecturally pleasing exterior, which marries the original sandstone building with contemporary features, but as a haven championing new age and forward-thinking art with its circulation system based gallery, a formidable rooftop café, sculpture terrace, high-tech education centre, and a 120-seat lecture theatrette.
Given the implications of the recent pandemic induced lockdowns on terra australis, it was fantastic to see after many delays the American artist Doug Aitken incarnate with his first major solo exhibition in the Southern hemisphere, comprised of key works of his oeuvre spanning close to three decades.
Heralded for his idiosyncratic approach to channelling installations, sculptures, photographs and constantly shifting multi-screen environments into an immersive, mesmerising and prismatic other world that culminates in a conceptually fluid display of moving imagery and sound, the exhibition invites one to become actively involved and get lost in Aitken’s multi-sensory ambience.
My personal highlight of the exhibition is the large-scale poetic sound installation Sonic Fountain II: Built into a bouldered wasteland-esque lunar scenery, drops of water are unleashed from a suspended multi-valve apparatus into a milky pond, with the sound being amplified by an algorithm which ebbs and flows the recordings captured by microphones within and outside the pond, resulting in sounds pieces reminiscent of John Cage.
Inspired by mobile phone technology and its impact on our social behaviours, the exhibit NEW ERA not only informed the title of the exhibition but conveys the marriage of seemingly antagonistic concepts of union and dislocation through a mirrored fragmented structure that serves as a gate to a screen filled tunnel that viewers are invited to wander through and being wrapped up by.
The way the exhibition has been designed and orchestrated is devoid of an imposed narrative – au contraire, the viewer is enabled to author and determine an individual perspective through the carving of their own lens with Aitken providing food-for-though via real and imagined landscapes of ideas, using mirrors to reel the viewer into his cosmos and place him at the centre.
The result is a carefully calibrated and boundary-pushing composition of ideas for which the MCA becomes the conduit to a ruminative and multi-directional wider world – one that is transitional, dynamic and hidden in plain sight.
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image courtesy of MCA
