Doug Aitken’s portrait of a woman moving through airports and hotel rooms, stuck in an anonymous circuit of check-in, security and delay, is seductive. Firstly, the film plays across multiple screens in a spankingly sleek black-mirrored box. Secondly, channelling the thinking-boy’s appeal of Scarlett Johansson in ‘Lost in Translation’, Aitken’s beautifully bewildered traveller is aficionado of ineffable cool, Chloë Sevigny. Yes, ‘Black Mirror’ talks of an age that prizes precariousness, global exchange and intellectual assets, but whose experience of it? And why make the melancholic effects of this fast-paced, liquid modernity seem so hot?
Just as speed, broken communication, and solitary journeys are familiar subjects for Aitken, it’s not unusual for the artist to work with Hollywood stars, and the LA wunderkind effectively invented the use of exquisitely edited large-scale productions in art. What remains unusually irksome with this work is the finger-pointing.
As with other practitioners, say Ryan Trecartin, who explore a generation ‘lost’ to the saturating effect of mass communications, guided by the call to ‘connect, exchange and move on’ (as stated by Sevigny’s character), one senses that this is always the experience of some other. Perhaps these perpetual-motion zombies are useful figures, for we creative types, desperate to establish an image of those sucked into the unregulated systems that we, of course, so cleverly avoid.
Although overshadowed by the film, Aitken’s new light box works pull together antagonistic melds of image, material and text. Harnessing the languages of pop art and LA artist Edward Ruscha (whose signature palms also feature in the film), Aitken attempts to reclaim commercial signatures.
The isolated glamour portrayed in these works is gorgeous to watch. It can’t be ignored, however, that for some, disorientation in the face of actual political non-places and repressive commercial practices is perhaps more poignant than the experience of a bored frequent flier.