Frankfurt’s Schirn shows works by the multimedia artist Doug Aitken – Wiesbadener Tagblatt

By Christian Huther

FRANKFURT – Strange Guest populate this hotel room, all kinds of animals from eagles to the raccoon. People do not exist. Here, the room, the change in each animal, in pristine condition, But the animals anyway everything is strange. A hare hops nervously around on the bed, a Puma shredded pillows and blankets, two white peacocks shape with their necks a heart, a horse sees on TV a horse show – so be ranked at Episode Episode, from kitschy to bizarre. Consequently, the video “migration (empire)” from 2008 no common thread. But that’s what the Californian multimedia artist Doug Aitken also not at all.

Suggestive videos

• Project

  During the exhibition in the Schirn launched Doug Aitken’s film” Station to Station “on a train, he ago Two years into a moving sculpture and had sent in 4000-mile journey from New York to San Fransisco. The traveling artist attended to the stations for happenings.

The 46-year-old is known for its suggestive videos full of dynamism and drama, emotion and elegance, accompanied by loud music and gentle melancholy. His recipe for success is a mix of pop culture, advertising, media art, Hollywood and documentary, which he combines with fast cuts. Aitken orbiting the contradiction between nature, civilization and technology. Always have his protagonists in motion. There is not a halt at Aitken not look back also. When a project is completed, fiddled closest

However, Frankfurt’s Schirn director Max Hollein has Doug Aitken made a retrospective tasty -. Which is numerically anyway lightweight four videos, an installation and a dozen sculptures, all laid out in the last 20 years and generously over 1500 square meters. Of course, it does not leave Aitken in a giant monitor, he staggered one behind the other or transforms the space with black mirrors in a surreal kaleidoscope. The viewer is overwhelmed by many sensations, but emerged soon as a meditator in the world of images and sounds in.

metropolis in Interior view

For “Song I” Aitken has specifically a cylindrical designed canvas running on his longest with 35 minutes video that was seen three years ago in Washington, at a museum facade. Now he has moved the nocturnal bustle of a major American city inside, with many motorists who all sing the evergreen “I only have eyes for you” from 1934. Many lay people are under, stars like Tilda Swinton. Each intones the song differently than nölige tearjerker or slight ballad. Each of these people is lonely and sings that he had eyes only for his treasure, but none Bandelt the other on. Occasions there would be enough in many superimposed parking and fast food restaurants.

Doug Aitken shows the banal everyday, keeping us the proverbial mirror before. In fact, can be found at his less known sculptures and a real mirror, albeit in the form of the year 1968, Aitken’s birth year, and laboriously pieced together from many fragments. When looking into this distorting mirror double or shorten parts of the body, the viewer sees from the front and back, up and down – it shatters into many images. Human vicinity there are not that produce more animals.

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