DOUG AITKEN
migration (empire) , 2008 Video installation, color, sound, 24:28 min. Courtesy the Rosenkranz Collection Promised gift, Whitney Museum of American Art
Since the early nineteenth century, the conflicting American settler myths of westward expansion and an “empty” wilderness have cast the American West as both a pristine landscape and a source of economic enrichment. migration (empire) (2008) articulates the consequences of this paradox in a surreal cinematic narrative in which wild animals native to North America engage with the interiors of empty motels—geographical markers of the post–World War II increase in natural resource industries and of the tourist industry generated by the Wilderness Act of 1964, which legislated the protection of large areas of land from development and redefined Indigenous land as uninhabited spaces to be visited for recreation. migration (empire) stages the tension inherent in these layered histories in an unfolding tableau of displacement. Projected onto a billboard or a large hanging screen, the video implicates the space of the gallery as part of the fraught landscape. It is as though we are watching from one of the long stretches of road that appears in the video; the billboard becomes a road movie that narrates the reason for its presence. In this conceptual interlocution, exterior shots of roads, freight trains stretching into the distance, and motel signs are punctuated by the drama occurring in the motel rooms’ interiors. A bison tosses a bedcover on its horns and casually breaks the furniture; a mountain lion tears apart a pillow; a beaver moves through a bath full of water, dunking its head under the tap. The artificiality of America’s constructed “wilderness” is mirrored in the animals’ incongruous presence in the motels. Displaced and unable to be managed by, and in relation with, the Indigenous community, they negotiate the environment of their displacers, their incongruity articulated through an uncanny doubling of nature with its reproduction. A flight of migrating birds turns into TV static; a light bulb shines from an upended lampshade, in close-up morphing into the midday sun; a horse glances at wild horses galloping across the screen on a wall-mounted TV; a fox examines a jigsaw puzzle of what looks like an image of itself, scattered across the bed. An owl stares at a red light blinking on the motel room phone, the futility of its connective alert underlining the chasm between the two incompatible worlds. In the final sequence, white feathers fall like snow onto the owl until it flies away, its wings causing the feathers to float upwards into the darkness like a flock of birds. In this final visual metaphor, the feathers enact the “migration” of the work’s title, implying the hope of return. 6
Installation views: Doug Aitken, migration (empire) , 2008, in Mountain / Time, Aspen Art Museum, 2022. Photo: Carter Seddon
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