Doug Aitken Goes On Tour

by Corinna Kirsch on May 23, 2013 Newswire

Doug Aitken knows celebrities. Musicians. Filmmakers. People with money. Sometimes their ideas fall down on him like fruit from a tree—he once found inspiration by overhearing discussions at a dinner party. Now, with “Station to Station,” a three-week-long project set to debut this September, Aitken will host a road trip-party on a train, and it might involve art.

The private, 10-car Amtrak train will be loaded up with artists and musicians trekking across the United States. At each stop, the passengers will disembark and take part in events such as “pop-up tents at each stop housing local craft food and design purveyors”. The train itself will be decorated with LED lights, like some sort of glowing Christmas tree. It’s sponsored by Levi’s.

According to Rosalia Jovanovic at ARTINFO, more details about the passengers, locations, and the artists and musicians involved, will be announced within the next two weeks. She wondered, even, if this idea was too preposterous to take place. Currently, a trailer for “Station to Station” exists on the Doug Aitken Workshop Vimeo page, but it’s password protected.

We don’t doubt Aitken’s proclivity for teamwork-driven spectacle. And it looks like the title of the piece may have been brewing with Doug Aitken for some time. In a 2004 interview between Doug Aitken and Pierre Huyghe for BOMB Magazine, he mentioned his interest in the “station to station” concept:

DA: When I look at your work, I see that sense of continuous transformation. There is a place-to-place, station-to-station quality to it, where the viewer is taken into landscapes of temporal experiences.

So, he liked the “station-to-station” bit in Pierre Huyghe’s work. Now he’s doing that, too.

Comments on this entry are closed.

Previous post:

Next post: