BOOK:Doug Aitken, Prestel Publishing

For more than 20 years, Doug Aitken has shifted the perception and location of images and narratives. His multichannel video installations, sculptures, photographs, publications, happenings, and architectural works demonstrate the nature and structure of our ever-mobile, ever-changing, image-based contemporary condition. The catalogue “Doug Aitken: Electric Earth” is published in conjunction with the 2016 MOCA exhibition “Doug Aitken: Electric Earth” 11/9/16-15/1/17). With contributions from: Joseph Grima, Anna Katz, Norman Klein and Glenn Lowry, this catalogue of 264 pages with 253 color illustrations, presents the artists first North American survey. With a profound knowledge and understanding of the history of 20th-century avant-gardes, experimental music, and cinema, and an intimate kinship with the protest movements of the late 1960s, Aitken has invented a unique immersive aesthetic, from his breakthrough installation “Diamond Sea” (1997) to his most recent event-based work “Black Mirror” (2011), the exhibition unfolds around the major moving-image installations that articulate his thematic interest in environmental and post-industrial decay, urban abandonment, and the exhaustion of linear time. Conceptualized as an entropic landscape suspended between city, broadcasting machine, and labyrinth, the exhibition is punctuated by the signs, sculptures, photographic images, and altered furniture.-Dimitris Lempesis