DOUG AITKEN

In the tradition of Land Art as a reflection of the dreams and aspirations projected onto the American West, Mirage presents a continually changing encounter in which subject and object, inside and outside, remain in flux. The ranch-style structure suggests a latter-day, architectural vision of manifest destiny. Mirage is a primary structure, rendered by the artist without function, service, or texture. With every available surface clad in mirror, it absorbs and reflects the surrounding landscape so that the exterior seemingly disappears just as the interior draws the viewer into a kaleidoscope of light and its reflection. As Mirage pulls in the landscape and reflects it back out, the classic, one-story suburban house becomes a frame as well as a perceptual echo chamber, endlessly bouncing around the dream of nature as a pure, uninhabited state and the pursuit of its conquest.

neville wakefield: Let’s start with two interlinked ideas: the American West and how it has been constituted in recent art, and how Land Art has influenced your own relationship to that landscape.

doug aitken: When we look at the movement to the West, when we look at the development of the West, we often see patterns and repetitions. Within that you see the dwelling, the house, as something that becomes serial, repetitious, grids of homes. I’m very interested in this idea that you begin to not see the landscape around you because you’ve seen it so many times; it has numbed your senses and made your perception blunt in a way. I felt it was important to use the vernacular of a suburban house and distill its sculptural form.

How important is the encounter with the object? A lot of Land Art—at least, a lot of Land Art from the 1960s and ’70s—was about shaping and framing the encounter.

When you look at the period when Land Art was in its development, you often find remote locations, and oftentimes the artist would use the aesthetic language of abstract geometry. In a lot of ways, that goes back to earlier forms of Land Art such as the pyramids of the Mayans, or the pyramids of Egypt, or the Nazca Lines, which all have an abstract symmetry.

I became interested in something quite different. I have a fascination with working outside the urban space, outside architecture such as the gallery or museum, but it’s also important for me not to ignore the idea of civilization. I wanted a location that looked down onto the sprawling Cartesian grid of electricity, the city, and I wanted to site the project so it was almost a one-point perspective of this grid.

In a way I saw Mirage as an inversion of Sleepwalkers, which you’ve projected onto buildings. Rather than projecting onto architecture you were cinematizing the structure itself, turning it into a screen.

A lot of that goes into the idea of the artwork existing as a system, not only as a finished piece. The work itself becomes different continuously. In a sense, maybe the Sonic Pavilion in Inhotim, Brazil, was a precursor to a piece like Mirage. With that work from 2009, you would go to Brazil and walk up this hillside, but inside the pavilion there’s not an artwork; there’s a hole. It goes seven hundred feet into the earth, and at the bottom of that hole there’s a series of live sounds, pushing up almost like a sonic geyser, of the earth’s shifting tectonic plates.

The project was my first step in the direction of creating a living artwork.

There’s a paradox to it: You made the architecture disappear in order to make one aware of its presence.

Exactly. That loops back to the idea of what we don’t see, what’s along the drive that we forget. We have a capacity to experience and remember, but that capacity in some ways is very limited. It’s almost like the [Jorge Luis] Borges short story when he talks about a man who has a condition where he is suddenly aware of absolutely everything around him, and it’s debilitating, paralyzing.

In that way, Mirage is a system constantly in flux. Whether viewers drive there to experience it or see it randomly, they can step up, be shocked into awareness, and have a realization of what’s around them.

Is the experiential, or living, artwork at odds with the way it was recorded, which was largely through images on social media? How did you feel about that?

The way we see and the way we document evolve. One of the interesting things about Mirage was that viewers often would own the experience; they’d author the experience, kind of write their own narrative. I love that each and every person has a unique take on it. They bring something to it, but they take away an experience, an encounter, a moment in time, and a sense of a destination that’s ephemeral. That’s how I had hoped the work would function: It would go beyond the artist’s authorship, and instead be the viewers’ ownership.

I thought very few people would make it out to the work. I thought it might be people who follow contemporary art or had a desire to see land art in some form. It did take me by surprise how the work became this destination. There was a diverse range of people, from someone who’s a curator or a critic to someone who’s driving down the highway in a pickup truck at dusk and sees this reflective object and moves toward it. I really liked and I value this democratic viewership. I think it’s great.

In some ways it was one of the first truly populist works of land art.

Yeah. I had been working on the idea of Mirage for some time, and it had different iterations. The development of the project came out of a series of sculptures where I was looking at the idea of the moving image. I had certain ideas that the moving image couldn’t quite achieve. What I mean by that is: something that’s filmed is already authored.

Whether it’s a landscape or a character-driven work, or a narrative work, it has to convince you, or seduce you, for you to fall into the world it has created. I started thinking about the idea of the viewer becoming the subject. The viewer is actually seen inside the work.

In 2004 I did a show in Paris. We created a labyrinth of moving mirrors, and they had silent motors. Almost like the wind, they would follow the viewers and distort them into this living abstraction.

That was the first large-scale work where I employed reflectivity, and I had been searching for a way to bring the viewer into the work and bring them into a deep space, a compression-contraction. [For Mirage] I wanted to completely break out of interior architecture. I felt this could be a system that’s outside, in the wild, so to speak. It would act differently. It would no longer be purely about the viewer backed by a white wall of the museum, or a closed environment.

That led me to merging the idea of the viewer becoming the narrative and subject and what form it would take.

It was interesting that Mirage was sited in a place with architectural presences, but that were uninhabited, curiously empty—a modeling of possibility.

That goes back to our conversation about the last section of the film Zabriskie Point, where you find suburban developments on the fringes, on the horizon. The dust has settled, and there’s a settlement and a road. I’ve always been interested in the outskirts, the twilight space between the natural environment and civilization.

When you live on the West Coast, you become so aware of that because you find it often and everywhere.

We had a sense of how Mirage needed to be activated, but you don’t sculpt the location; you have to discover it. That process of discovery helped develop the work. It became stronger, more fully formed, because of the struggle that we had in searching for a location that could speak the language it needed to.

In a way, Mirage inhabited a twilight area between architecture and film.

The work was made from the tension of elements: a boulder-strewn hillside with huge rocks frozen in time, and roads with no homes. There’s emptiness, but at the same time you look down and you see a suburban sprawl.

The idea that you can be so close yet so far was incredibly important. That was an important difference from the land art in the 1960s and ’70s, when it often looked for the most remote places, and this journey that you would take to spend time in silence and reflection. Mirage speaks more to the twenty-first century. It’s kaleidoscopic, it’s mapped with movement, and it’s incredibly familiar. It takes a form that’s so commonplace you feel no reservation about stepping inside. There’s no door, and there are no windows. It welcomes you in an absolutely neutral way that is almost subconscious.