“What should the future look like?” is a central question that occupies the minds of scientists, economists, artists and politicians who debate daily in important forums. However, another set of questions looms, just as important, and which often determines the first: “Who is being asked? The other, who withdraws into it: “Who decides?”
Such questions about the future are rarely posed to citizens of small rural communities, even though they may, in some cases, be the most affected by climate change and economic and industrial change. That seems to be on California concept artist Doug Aitken’s mind when he took his camera inland to an unnamed American oil town and began filming his conversations with the locals.
In their arid dust bowl of a city, huge pump jacks dot the skyline, moving in and out of a barren desert landscape to extract oil, which appears to be the city’s main source of income and also its purpose. The new video, titled TO YELL, first shown in her solo exhibition at Eva Presenhuber, Zurich last month (it’s on view until July 22), and she juxtaposes these rhythmic, ruthless fracturing machines with the voices of people coexisting between them. The short film and the adjacent exhibition that shares its title offer a disturbing vision of a climate emergency that punctuates our present, and offers a strong dose of angst about the future.
Doug Aitken, TO YELL (movie still) (2023). © Doug Aitken.
“We wanted to give a voice to the people who were there and allow their expression to become the narrative of the work,” Aitken told Artnet News. “It wasn’t a piece I had a plan for. I didn’t have a script or a thesis. The work was done over time.
In TO YELL, the juxtaposition of the two groups of main protagonists, the humans on the one hand, and these massive rhythmic machines on the other, was formed into a 15-minute narrative over three channels in a dark gallery room. The work, although taken from real images filmed for a year, is far from being a documentary. Instead, the mood is surreal, with fragmentary glimpses of a polyphony of realities and viewpoints that make up this anonymous place, which Aitken sees as an allegory for many places around the world suffering from post- industrialism and climate change.
A woman living in her car in a parking lot talks about utopia and her ideals for the future, for example. In an abuse shelter, another woman speaks in subtle ways about physical, emotional and climatic abuse. A group of beauty pageant contestants wear black suits, and it’s all intercut with shots of shuttered malls and empty parking lots. There’s a moment of a marching band marching through the city, which seems to reach for the ghost of a former glory that these places once had.
“At first I was drawn to this hallucinatory landscape of fracking, drilling and grinding and I looked at this activity as the arteries and veins of the body, and this activity as extracting blood from the landscape,” said said Aitken. “As the creative journey progressed, it became equal parts that and a conversation with the people inhabiting the space.”
Elsewhere in the gallery are individual wall sculptures with unique words taken from the themes of the film: “howl”, “contact”, “drama” and “unreal”. These pictographic-like pieces, layered over landscape wallpapers and mirror works that cut through your reflection as you pass by, create an immersive space as eerie as film, except one is constructed reality and the other is tragically real .
See a clip from the film below.
Doug Aitken, TO YELL (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich / Vienna © Doug Aitken.
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