LOS ANGELES — A cowboy hitches his horse to a post at a gas station. A coyote stalks a check-cashing spot, illuminated by neon. A woman dances alone through the puddles of an abandoned parking garage. “All of this will never make sense,” a voice repeats in Doug Aitken’s “Lightscape.” Set to a humming and thumping minimalist soundtrack, a cast of LA characters including a cowboy, a mountain lion, an actress, and factory workers act out poetic vignettes within the Southland’s varied environments, from a classic mid-century home, a drive-in movie theater, and sunny beaches, to the rugged desert landscape that extends beyond the urban fabric.
The artist’s cinematic and sonic exploration of Southern California’s myths, histories, and potentialities, told through a series of interwoven but disjointed scenes, debuted as an hour-long film last Saturday, November 16, at the Los Angeles Music Center.
“I was really interested in the metaphor of the horizon. ‘What’s in front of us? Where are we going?’” Aitken told Hyperallergic during a visit to his studio compound in Santa Monica last month.
“How could I create a stage for these questions? It quickly became evident that a traditional narrative is obsolete in terms of how it can express where we’re at and how we’re seeing a hyper-fragmented world,” he said.
At the Music Center’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, the film was presented with live musical accompaniment by Aitken’s collaborators on the project, the Los Angeles Master Chorale and the LA Phil New Music Group led by Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel. From December 17 through March 15 of next year, it will be reimagined as a seven-screen installation at the Marciano Art Foundation, with a dynamic program of musical performances.
The origins of “Lightscape” began in early 2018, when Aitken invited Grant Gershon, artistic director and conductor of the Master Chorale, to his studio to improvise vocalizations in response to a series of words Aitken had written out as prompts.
“I wanted to make something aggressively non-linear, using sound and music to express things that hard language couldn’t,” Aitken said. He was imagining a reductive song cycle that could be performed live in various settings, akin to “a vocal land art piece.”
Then the pandemic hit, and they had to switch gears, reconfiguring the project into a filmic journey of sound and vision. The finished work’s soundtrack features Aitken’s original compositions performed by the Chorale and LA Phil, alongside music by minimalist composers like Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass. Of the 28 Chorale members who performed, 20 were altos or sopranos, showcasing the “high end, more tweeter than woofer,” Gershon told Hyperallergic. “The vocals never touch the ground, creating a very beautiful, unearthly texture.” At the Disney Hall premiere, Chorale members performed their parts live, mirroring their cinematic doppelgängers on screen.
Although the finished movie has a polished, Hollywood veneer to it, Aitken used an experimental approach when he began filming. “It was highly improvisational. I don’t know how to script. I tried, but it didn’t work,” he said with a laugh. “A lot of it was like having an idea for a place and finding instinctually the right people to occupy that.”
A few of those people are well-known performers like actor Natasha Lyonne and musician Beck, who is portrayed playing harmonica outside a donut shop as veteran R&B drummer James Gadson taps out a rhythm on a table. Others are recent acquaintances — “someone you just run into on the street and ask, ‘what are you doing tomorrow?’”— or individuals who have come into Aitken’s orbit over the course of his career. (The “cowboy” is an actual cowboy Aitken first met 20 years ago, who brought along his horse Nemo to the shoot.)
Eschewing a conventional structure, the film is anchored by the diverse landscape, which Aitken says “was an equal part to the characters — it wasn’t a backdrop or a set.”
“The project became this passport to open up doors and travel roads, exploring worlds that are less covered and weaving them into this fiction,” he explained.
Filming sites ranged from the mundane but ubiquitous strip malls of LA and the bold arches of the new Sixth Street Bridge to the city’s winding aqueduct, the Mojave Airplane Graveyard, and the pink salt flats of Trona on the North-West edge of San Bernardino County. They filmed for six months, “night and day,” Aitken explained wearily. “We’d wake up in a Best Western somewhere at two in the morning and say, ‘Okay, we have to start filming at 5, what are we gonna do?’ You make a sketch on a napkin, and that becomes the guidebook for tomorrow.”
The film blends the familiar and the stylized, combining clichés and tropes of the American West with elements of Surrealism. On the grounds of a sleek Neutra-designed house, a long-haired surfer type dives into a glittering pool, recalling David Hockney’s iconic painting “A Bigger Splash” (1967). In another scene, a mountain lion prowls stealthily through the house at night as a grand piano plays a Glass composition in a nod to the player pianos of the Old West. Warehouse workers dance jerkily to a techno-adjacent track, their bodies mimicking the movements of their robot colleagues in an update to the “man-machine” of the Bauhaus and, later, of bands like Kraftwerk.
“There’s this strange liminal space that we’re inhabiting right now,” he said. “We look in front of us and see this kind of screen life or digital realm or automation. We see how we fit in seamlessly, but also how we’re completely sidelined or left behind.”
The disparate elements of the film will become even further fractured in their next permutation at the Marciano Art Foundation, where the work will be split between seven screens, with various performances by Chorale members and other musicians offering myriad distinct experiences. For Aitken, that instability and fluctuation is the point.
“I think LA is infinitely fascinating because it’s infinitely enigmatic. It will never reveal itself, because there is no singular. It’s constantly plural,” he said. “This isn’t a city for someone who is looking for a sense of geographic security, or of ownership, or a sense of knowing completely what something is. It’s a deeply disruptive society, riddled with friction. But if you’re okay going downstream and embracing a sense of constant perpetual change, I think it’s incredible.”
