Author Profile
Doug Aitken
1968 • American • Artist
34
Total Quotes
Collected Meditations
Showing 34 quotesI'm really a believer in being in situations that feel new and awkward and different. And I love that feeling of being in motion - that sense you find when you're traveling.— Doug Aitken
In our daily lives, we see ourselves often in very reductive ways. I want to explore motion, change and flux, whether we are looking in the mirror or seeing ourselves in our surroundings. The singular view of self contradicts the act of living.— Doug Aitken
'Planet Caravan' by Black Sabbath is such a delicate song from such a surprising place.— Doug Aitken
I'm not a journalist; I'm probably a horrible interviewer. The one small thing I have is I'm curious, and I'm interested in who I'm with.— Doug Aitken
I see life as a burning meteorite that you can climb all over, and feed off, as it is falling to earth.— Doug Aitken
I love art that haunts me, that stays with me, that is left embedded in my mind. I don't really think there is any use for owning or collecting art; it is more about remembering and preserving it in the minds eye and allowing it into your cultural DNA.— Doug Aitken
We live in a world where art exists in galleries and museums, and musicians have to play the same venues over and over.— Doug Aitken
Our culture is not this thing to be seen from a distance. We need to be embracing the friction of it all - that is where the energy is.— Doug Aitken
I have a weak spot for late '60s-early '70s yippie paperbacks and protest manifestos. I find them at flea markets or online. One of my favorites is 'Right On,' a compendium of student protests made into this 95-cent paperback with the most amazing graphics.— Doug Aitken
The perfect pop song is a 20th-century creation; it's not a sonnet, it's not an opera, it's something short - three and a half minutes by nature - and has this ability to travel and to defy class and economic structures.— Doug Aitken
My office has two buildings that function like the right and left sides of the brain. There's a room where everything is being edited for an upcoming project, but you can pull out of that into a tranquil space to work in a different, more solitary medium. It's an architectural unfolding of the process instead of just one chaotic structure.— Doug Aitken
The 'Station to Station' film has been fascinating to create. It feels as though it made itself in a way, and after awhile, the film told us what it needed and began to sculpt itself.— Doug Aitken
One of the core reasons for creating 'Station to Station' was to provide a space for exploration and cultural friction between different mediums. It should be natural for mediums like music, film and art to cross over, and we wanted to empower that process.— Doug Aitken
The 'Station to Station' film is made entirely out of one-minute films, and each of the 62 minutes is a completely different person, place or encounter.— Doug Aitken
The 'Station to Station' film is a fast-moving journey through the modern creative landscape. It's a kaleidoscope of voices and impressions rather than a standard linear film.— Doug Aitken
It's very easy to lose track of the environment around you, to lose touch with the present.— Doug Aitken
We are engaging with so many art forms at once in the 21st century, but we're presented with them in a way that is so isolated.— Doug Aitken
We're living in a tremendously new landscape, and the possibility of what can be created is immense. These tools of the moving image have a relatively short history in art, and what we can do with them is still largely unknown. We are still innovating and finding ways to tell stories.— Doug Aitken
I always thought about 'Station to Station' as an approach. It was about creating an alternative platform for culture where different mediums could co-exist.— Doug Aitken
I have always just made things. I don't see what I make as being defined by a medium or aesthetic. It probably comes more from a fundamental restlessness, an attempt to create tools for questioning or understanding, and I have always been interested in using a wide spectrum of mediums to do this.— Doug Aitken