GENERAL DESCRIPTION
As the title suggests, these restless minds mimics the frenzied activity of a typical American mind. Viewers are confronted with a complete environment installation incorporating manipulated light sources, subtly painted walls, and material alterations of the gallery's normal flooring. The benches and raised platform invite the viewer to sit and watch one monitor, but sounds and voices from the other monitors encourage the viewer to pace around the room, attempting to catch all the scenes. In essence, the viewer, moving from one monitor to the next, manifests a "restless mind" and becomes part of the work.
Three monitors alternately show footage of rural auctioneers, and of landscapes caught between the natural and the industrial. The auctioneers are seen out of their customary settings, isolated, and in stark and empty locations. In their distinctive cadences, the auctioneers deliver high speed numerical countdowns, interspersed with observations about their surroundings. Mirroring the auctioneers' words, the series of numbers and telegraphic descriptions become increasingly faster and less and less discernible, exceeding intelligibility, and eventually fusing with the environment.
The sounds are crucial to the poetic power of the work. Occasionally artist Doug Aitken loops a portion of an auctioneer's address so that the viewer hears the same clip over and over in a half-second interval. The auctioneer's address overlaps itself and echoes throughout the gallery. The result for the viewer is that voice detaches from its source and the words lose their meaning (like a word repeated until it becomes senseless). The viewer is left surrounded by sounds once connected to a face, now disembodied and authorless. The auctioneer's litany becomes a hum like a Tibetan monk's chant: the very song of thought.
Adapted from
DMA Label copy, 2000.
NOTES
- updated provenance, geo x refs, and text entries in TMS
- label copy, no author no date:
- The idea of these restless minds started when Doug Aitken met an auctioneer in a parking lot in Ohio. The monitors placed above ground level onto a platform or podium; the auctioneers needed to 'step off the floor,' almost like that you would find them on at an auction. Aitken explored the threshold where voice an dlanguage and ideas become just a frequency, questioning, "How fast can perception move? How fast can you input and output informatioin?" The fast speech the auctioneers made, what they call 'chant,' is the only moving part of in the pbulic auction. As the stage is set out in a ring, you circle round and round as if on a carousel, watching these monitors and tracking the linear progress of the piece, while catching up with it.
- In a series of work, Aitken seemed to explore many possibilities about speed. Speed of light in 'Diamond Sea' (1997), speed of the wind in 'Monsoon' (1995), speed of the human body in 'Electric Earth' (1999), and of the mind in 'These Restless Minds' 1998), and speed of fame in 'Into the Sun' (1999).
- 303 gallery press release:
- these restless minds presents viewers with a complete environment incorporating manipulated light sources, subtlely painted walls, and material alterations of the gallery's normal flooring. Three monitors alternately show footage fo rurla auctioneers and of landscapes caught between the natural and the industrial. The auctioneers are seen out of their customary settings, isolated, and in stark and empty locations. In their distinctive cadences, the auctioneers deliver high speed numerical countdowns, interspersed with observations about their surroundings. As the auctioneers' words, their series of numbers and telegraphic descriptions become increasingly faster and less and less discernible, they exceed intelligibility and approach a fusion with the environment.
- Since his first solo museum exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art in 1999, Aitken has become a highly acclaimed, emerging artist on the international as well as national scene. For his multipart video installation Electric Earth (1999), he was awarded a prestigious Golden Lion Award at the 1999 Venice Biennale. In 1999/2000 Aitken had exhibitions in Florence, London, Tokyo, Aurich, Berkeley, Karlsruhe (Germany), Monte Video (Amsterdam0, Sydney, and Minneapolis. Aside from his video installation work, Aiken has been a director of music videos for groups such as Fatboy Slim, Aphex Twin, and Nine Inch Nails, and an illustrator-photographer for raygun magazine.
- acquisition justification:
- California-based Doug Aitken is one of the most innovative artists working with video today. As a director of music videos and an illustrator and photographer for raygun magazine, Aitken works in both the commercial and art worlds, allowing each to inform and enrich the other. Winner of a prestigious Golden Lion Award for his multi-part video installation Electric Earth (1999) at the 1999 Venice Biennale, Aitken had his first solo museum exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art (May 21-August 8, 1999), where he exhibited his riveting video/sound installation Diamond Sea (1997), an exploration of a 40,000-square-mile area simply labeled diamond l and 2 ("a blank spot on a map of Namibia"). Similar to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Diamond Sea takes the viewer on a breathtakingly beautiful journey into a "forbidden zone," an area sealed off from the world since 1908, which contains the oldest desert in the world, the Namib, and the one of the richest diamond mines in the world.
- Born in 1968, in southern California (four years after the publication of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media), Doug Aitken is not cynical about media like an earlier generation of video appropriation artists. He grew up on television programs like School House Rock and The ABC Afterschool Special; in fact, two of his earliest videos to be exhibited in New York were Dawn (1993), a collage of excerpts from four different teenage angst films (one stars Linda Blair), and I'd Die for You (1993), a video of excerpts of 14 John Wayne films in which Wayne is shot, drowned, and beaten. For Aitken, television and movies are "landscapes" to traverse. Media is a center of information, the reality of culture, and affirmation of the present.
- With These Restless Minds, a three-part video sound installation, Aitken traverses a landscape with the most sophisticated electronic equipment, intersecting the topological with the technological to find a story to tell. These Restless Minds is actually a round viewing arena that includes three monitors facing outward from a wheel in the room's center, and curved wooden benches for viewing. Each monitor alternately shows footage of chanting auctioneers and of American landscapes caught between the natural and the industrial. With their distinctive cadences and fast-talking routines, the auctioneers, removed from their customary settings of cattle, antique, or big equipment events, interject mutely poetic descriptions of the surrounding environment ("bright lights," "sun going down," etc.). There are haunting, Hopper-like scenes of Midwestern Americana: truck stops and endless highways at night; a bleak shopping mall and huge parking lot; and a swimming pool at a typical motel along any highway. As the auctioneers' words, numbers and telegraphic descriptions become faster and less discernible, they exceed intelligibility and seem to approach an organic fusion with the environment.
- Similar to use of the charged territories of Jonestown, Guyana (Monsoon, 1995), the small Caribbean island of Monserrat (Eraser, 1998), and the "forbidden" zone in southwestern Africa (Diamond Sea, 1997), These Restless Minds is an open-ended exploration of an unknown or forgotten landscape. But, like the Venice piece, Electric Earth, which depicts a young man ("Giggi' Johnson) lying on a hotel bed, the TV remote control in his hand (he mutters, "A lot of times I dance so fast that I become what surrounds me"), then seen doing a hip-hop walk on the dark, desolate streets of Los Angeles, and then dissolving in a nocturnal, never-never land of pixels, These Restless Minds explores the subtle interplay of man and his surroundings.
- In These Restless Minds, Aitken poetically blends aesthetics with conventions of commercial film and television to create a work of art in which the metaphorical and literal, and the familiar and unfamiliar, continuously and subtly shift. It is a world that is hyperreal, uncanny, even perverse. Although it is nonlinear, These Restless Minds is an investigation of the structures of narrative, of storytelling itself, in a mediated age.
- Born in 1968, in southern California (four years after the publication of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media), Doug Aitken is not cynical about media like an earlier generation of video appropriation artists. He grew up on television programs like School House Rock and The ABC Afterschool Special; in fact, two of his earliest videos to be exhibited in New York were Dawn (1993), a collage of excerpts from four different teenage angst films (one stars Linda Blair), and I'd Die for You (1993), a video of excerpts of 14 John Wayne films in which Wayne is shot, drowned, and beaten. For Aitken, television and movies are "landscapes" to traverse. Media is a center of information, the reality of culture, and affirmation of the present.
- Recent solo exhibitions of Doug Aitken's work include Victoria Miro Gallery, London; Pitti Discovery series, Pitti Immagine, Florence, Italy (curated by Francesco Bonami); and the Dallas Museum of Art. Group exhibitions include dAPERTutto, Venice Biennale; Video Cult/ures, Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany; Clues, MonteVideo/TBA, Amsterdam; and, Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Forthcoming projects include installations at the Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. A major solo exhibition is currently being planned for the Serpentine Gallery, London in 2001.
- Doug Aitken's work is represented in numerous collections, including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles; Sammlung Goetz, Munich; Fondazione Rebaudengo, Turin; and in important private collections in Dallas, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, and Mexico City.
- With These Restless Minds, the Dallas Museum of Art would be one of the first public museums to acquire the work of an artist at the beginning of an undoubtedly major career. The DMA would significantly add to its growing collection of media-based art begun in 1997, which includes video work by Rosemarie Trockel, Matthew McCaslin, Christian Marclay, and most spectacularly, Bill Viola. This acquisition would deepen this museum's holdings in installation work of the type the DMA is uniquely suited to display.
-Suzanne Weaver, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art
Catalogue essays
Artist/designers
Cultures
Geography
Process/materials
Historical periods
Individuals
Subject terms
RELATED OBJECTS
PROVENANCE
Until 1999: 3030 Gallery, New York, NY
From 1999: Dallas Museum of Art
AUDIO ASSETS
VIDEO ASSETS
IMAGE ASSETS
WEB RESOURCES
- Vimeo~Watch a clip from these restless minds.
ARCHIVAL RESOURCES
FUN FACTS
TEACHING IDEAS
RULES
Apply to objects where number equals 1999.196.A-P
Category
rules_operator
AND
General Description
As the title suggests, these restless minds mimics the frenzied activity of a typical American mind. Viewers are confronted with a complete environment installation incorporating manipulated light sources, subtly painted walls, and material alterations of the gallery's normal flooring. The benches and raised platform invite the viewer to sit and watch one monitor, but sounds and voices from the other monitors encourage the viewer to pace around the room, attempting to catch all the scenes. In essence, the viewer, moving from one monitor to the next, manifests a "restless mind" and becomes part of the work.
Three monitors alternately show footage of rural auctioneers, and of landscapes caught between the natural and the industrial. The auctioneers are seen out of their customary settings, isolated, and in stark and empty locations. In their distinctive cadences, the auctioneers deliver high speed numerical countdowns, interspersed with observations about their surroundings. Mirroring the auctioneers' words, the series of numbers and telegraphic descriptions become increasingly faster and less and less discernible, exceeding intelligibility, and eventually fusing with the environment.
The sounds are crucial to the poetic power of the work. Occasionally artist Doug Aitken loops a portion of an auctioneer's address so that the viewer hears the same clip over and over in a half-second interval. The auctioneer's address overlaps itself and echoes throughout the gallery. The result for the viewer is that voice detaches from its source and the words lose their meaning (like a word repeated until it becomes senseless). The viewer is left surrounded by sounds once connected to a face, now disembodied and authorless. The auctioneer's litany becomes a hum like a Tibetan monk's chant: the very song of thought.
Adapted from
DMA Label copy, 2000.
Fun Facts
Archival Resources
Web Resources
Notes
- updated provenance, geo x refs, and text entries in TMS
- label copy, no author no date:
- The idea of these restless minds started when Doug Aitken met an auctioneer in a parking lot in Ohio. The monitors placed above ground level onto a platform or podium; the auctioneers needed to 'step off the floor,' almost like that you would find them on at an auction. Aitken explored the threshold where voice an dlanguage and ideas become just a frequency, questioning, "How fast can perception move? How fast can you input and output informatioin?" The fast speech the auctioneers made, what they call 'chant,' is the only moving part of in the pbulic auction. As the stage is set out in a ring, you circle round and round as if on a carousel, watching these monitors and tracking the linear progress of the piece, while catching up with it.
- In a series of work, Aitken seemed to explore many possibilities about speed. Speed of light in 'Diamond Sea' (1997), speed of the wind in 'Monsoon' (1995), speed of the human body in 'Electric Earth' (1999), and of the mind in 'These Restless Minds' 1998), and speed of fame in 'Into the Sun' (1999).
- 303 gallery press release:
- these restless minds presents viewers with a complete environment incorporating manipulated light sources, subtlely painted walls, and material alterations of the gallery's normal flooring. Three monitors alternately show footage fo rurla auctioneers and of landscapes caught between the natural and the industrial. The auctioneers are seen out of their customary settings, isolated, and in stark and empty locations. In their distinctive cadences, the auctioneers deliver high speed numerical countdowns, interspersed with observations about their surroundings. As the auctioneers' words, their series of numbers and telegraphic descriptions become increasingly faster and less and less discernible, they exceed intelligibility and approach a fusion with the environment.
- Since his first solo museum exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art in 1999, Aitken has become a highly acclaimed, emerging artist on the international as well as national scene. For his multipart video installation Electric Earth (1999), he was awarded a prestigious Golden Lion Award at the 1999 Venice Biennale. In 1999/2000 Aitken had exhibitions in Florence, London, Tokyo, Aurich, Berkeley, Karlsruhe (Germany), Monte Video (Amsterdam0, Sydney, and Minneapolis. Aside from his video installation work, Aiken has been a director of music videos for groups such as Fatboy Slim, Aphex Twin, and Nine Inch Nails, and an illustrator-photographer for raygun magazine.
- acquisition justification:
- California-based Doug Aitken is one of the most innovative artists working with video today. As a director of music videos and an illustrator and photographer for raygun magazine, Aitken works in both the commercial and art worlds, allowing each to inform and enrich the other. Winner of a prestigious Golden Lion Award for his multi-part video installation Electric Earth (1999) at the 1999 Venice Biennale, Aitken had his first solo museum exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art (May 21-August 8, 1999), where he exhibited his riveting video/sound installation Diamond Sea (1997), an exploration of a 40,000-square-mile area simply labeled diamond l and 2 ("a blank spot on a map of Namibia"). Similar to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Diamond Sea takes the viewer on a breathtakingly beautiful journey into a "forbidden zone," an area sealed off from the world since 1908, which contains the oldest desert in the world, the Namib, and the one of the richest diamond mines in the world.
- Born in 1968, in southern California (four years after the publication of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media), Doug Aitken is not cynical about media like an earlier generation of video appropriation artists. He grew up on television programs like School House Rock and The ABC Afterschool Special; in fact, two of his earliest videos to be exhibited in New York were Dawn (1993), a collage of excerpts from four different teenage angst films (one stars Linda Blair), and I'd Die for You (1993), a video of excerpts of 14 John Wayne films in which Wayne is shot, drowned, and beaten. For Aitken, television and movies are "landscapes" to traverse. Media is a center of information, the reality of culture, and affirmation of the present.
- With These Restless Minds, a three-part video sound installation, Aitken traverses a landscape with the most sophisticated electronic equipment, intersecting the topological with the technological to find a story to tell. These Restless Minds is actually a round viewing arena that includes three monitors facing outward from a wheel in the room's center, and curved wooden benches for viewing. Each monitor alternately shows footage of chanting auctioneers and of American landscapes caught between the natural and the industrial. With their distinctive cadences and fast-talking routines, the auctioneers, removed from their customary settings of cattle, antique, or big equipment events, interject mutely poetic descriptions of the surrounding environment ("bright lights," "sun going down," etc.). There are haunting, Hopper-like scenes of Midwestern Americana: truck stops and endless highways at night; a bleak shopping mall and huge parking lot; and a swimming pool at a typical motel along any highway. As the auctioneers' words, numbers and telegraphic descriptions become faster and less discernible, they exceed intelligibility and seem to approach an organic fusion with the environment.
- Similar to use of the charged territories of Jonestown, Guyana (Monsoon, 1995), the small Caribbean island of Monserrat (Eraser, 1998), and the "forbidden" zone in southwestern Africa (Diamond Sea, 1997), These Restless Minds is an open-ended exploration of an unknown or forgotten landscape. But, like the Venice piece, Electric Earth, which depicts a young man ("Giggi' Johnson) lying on a hotel bed, the TV remote control in his hand (he mutters, "A lot of times I dance so fast that I become what surrounds me"), then seen doing a hip-hop walk on the dark, desolate streets of Los Angeles, and then dissolving in a nocturnal, never-never land of pixels, These Restless Minds explores the subtle interplay of man and his surroundings.
- In These Restless Minds, Aitken poetically blends aesthetics with conventions of commercial film and television to create a work of art in which the metaphorical and literal, and the familiar and unfamiliar, continuously and subtly shift. It is a world that is hyperreal, uncanny, even perverse. Although it is nonlinear, These Restless Minds is an investigation of the structures of narrative, of storytelling itself, in a mediated age.
- Born in 1968, in southern California (four years after the publication of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media), Doug Aitken is not cynical about media like an earlier generation of video appropriation artists. He grew up on television programs like School House Rock and The ABC Afterschool Special; in fact, two of his earliest videos to be exhibited in New York were Dawn (1993), a collage of excerpts from four different teenage angst films (one stars Linda Blair), and I'd Die for You (1993), a video of excerpts of 14 John Wayne films in which Wayne is shot, drowned, and beaten. For Aitken, television and movies are "landscapes" to traverse. Media is a center of information, the reality of culture, and affirmation of the present.
- Recent solo exhibitions of Doug Aitken's work include Victoria Miro Gallery, London; Pitti Discovery series, Pitti Immagine, Florence, Italy (curated by Francesco Bonami); and the Dallas Museum of Art. Group exhibitions include dAPERTutto, Venice Biennale; Video Cult/ures, Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany; Clues, MonteVideo/TBA, Amsterdam; and, Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Forthcoming projects include installations at the Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. A major solo exhibition is currently being planned for the Serpentine Gallery, London in 2001.
- Doug Aitken's work is represented in numerous collections, including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles; Sammlung Goetz, Munich; Fondazione Rebaudengo, Turin; and in important private collections in Dallas, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, and Mexico City.
- With These Restless Minds, the Dallas Museum of Art would be one of the first public museums to acquire the work of an artist at the beginning of an undoubtedly major career. The DMA would significantly add to its growing collection of media-based art begun in 1997, which includes video work by Rosemarie Trockel, Matthew McCaslin, Christian Marclay, and most spectacularly, Bill Viola. This acquisition would deepen this museum's holdings in installation work of the type the DMA is uniquely suited to display.
-Suzanne Weaver, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art
Catalogue essays
Artist/designers
Cultures
Geography
Process/materials
Historical periods
Individuals
Subject terms
RELATED OBJECTS
PROVENANCE
Until 1999: 3030 Gallery, New York, NY
From 1999: Dallas Museum of Art
AUDIO ASSETS
VIDEO ASSETS
rules
Apply To
Objects
number
Equals
1999.196.A-P
source file
object_notes_1_b-0231.xml.nores