Doug Aitken

Portrait by Alayna Vandervort

interview by ALEX ISRAEL
portrait by ALAYNA VANDERVORT

DOUG AITKEN is one of the rare multimedia artists able to incorporate commercial style and cinematographic technique into visual art. His art encompasses photography, installation, multi-screen video, and architecture. Using conventions of the big screen — wide angles and grand vistas — to explore American ideology, Aitken reinterprets THE AMERICAN DREAM AS A FORM OF PRIMITIVE MYTHOLOGY, often being both the author of an event and the photo­grapher who documents it.

ALEX ISRAEL— I know that you were born in Redondo Beach in the late ’60s, but did you grow up there as well?
DOUG AITKEN — Yeah, on the coast around Los Angeles.

ALEX ISRAEL — What do you remember most vividly about your childhood in Southern California?
DOUG AITKEN — Empty parking lots and bleak flat cloudless skies. Santa Ana winds pushing…