Finally, L.A. Gets the Enormous, Amorphous, Labyrinthian Doug Aitken Exhibit it Deserves. By Catherine Womak.
Over the last 20 years, Los Angeles–based artist Doug Aitken’s multichannel video installations, sculptures and “happenings” have defied categorization as they charmed audiences and critics worldwide. While his eclectic pieces regularly draw on his California roots, sometimes featuring celebrity actors and often incorporating barren landscape imagery of the great American West, they are, more often than not, exhibited elsewhere.
Often too big, too site-specific or too ephemeral to exist inside traditional museum spaces, Aitken’s art has been displayed onthe exterior of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and on a barge off the coast of Greece. One of his more recent works — a sort of large-scale performance/light installation — escaped confinement by museum, city or even state as it raced across the continental United States on the side of a train...
