OLAF BREUNING, smoke installation / Station to Rauch-Installation, New York, 2013. (PHOTO: YE RIN MOK) Station DOUG AITKEN &f TIM GRIFFIN TIM GRIFFIN: Let me start by asking, in nuts-and-bolts ect I’d like to do.” It was born out of a necessity-—-out terms: What is the Station to Station project, and how of the need for a different template for culture to did it come about? exist in. If you zoom out and look at different sectors DOUG AITKEN: Station to Station was a cultural Hap­ of culture—music, contemporary art, cinema, litera­ pening that moved by train from the Atlantic Ocean ture—they all often appear to be contained by the in­ to the Pacific coast over three weeks this past Sep­ frastructure around them; art, for example, is often tember—a nomadic platform for artistic experimen­ contained in commercial galleries and museums. tation that took people on a road trip through con­ Cultural forms often exist in isolation from each temporary creativity. A constantly changing group of other, but there’s such potential for them to rub up artists, musicians, and individuals took part in spon­ against each other, to create new kinds of friction. taneous encounters and live performances on the I also wanted to challenge the weight of place that train and at each stop along the journey. The train we find in culture, where exhibitions exist in certain stopped in major cities and off-the-grid locations for cities at specific locations and times. If the idea of a ten unique multi-hour Happenings. We wanted to static place was challenged and the project became make a living project—a new alternative model for nomadic, the relationship to viewers changes. So art­ the arts based on constant motion and flux. ists were empowered to make something that was not The idea came to me three or four years ago. It about being contained and anchored. wasn’t something where I thought, “Here’s this proj- TG: Is it accurate to say that, in place of a very specific institutional framework or “site” for art, within which OLAF BREUNING, smoke installation / Rauch-Installation, New York, 2013. DOUG AITKEN, artist and initiator of Station to Station. works from some of these other spheres enter and (PHOTO: BRIAN DOYLE) TIM GRIFFIN, executive director and chief curator of the exit, you were more interested in activating a distri­ Kitchen, in New York. bution network here? PARKETT 93 2013 6 7 DÀ: Yes, exactly. There were always two strata that journey. I think what was really extraordinary was the were happening simultaneously in Station to Station: amount of work that was physically generated during one that was physical and experiential and about the journey—not work made in advance and brought being there in person and another about allowing there, but things that were literally made while we anyone in the world to have access to these moments were out there in motion. through the project’s website. There were also nomadic sculptures that traveled Station to Station was like a nomadic studio. On with the Station to Station train, which were erected the train, Yoshimi—from the Japanese noise group at each stop. They were based on yurts, tents that the Boredoms—could step into this one car that was people can enter. Ernesto Neto created an incred­ a recording studio and make a sonic work for an ibly soft, perceptual sculpture. Kenneth Anger’s was hour while the train was speeding along the tracks. a glowing red environment with a pentagram seating Liz Glynn rode on the train for the entire three arrangem ent in fro n t of the three screens of LUCIFER weeks, creating an ongoing performance in which RISING. Liz’s changed at every stop—the architecture she mapped the universe. I created a light sculp­ of her structure changed as well as her performance ture out of the train’s exterior: At night, light was inside it. Urs Fischer created a sensual paradise with a choreographed across the nine cars of the train in white bed, mirrors, disco ball, and smoke. He wanted DOUG AITKEN, NOMADIC LIGHT SCULPTURE / DOUG AITKEN, NOMADIC LIGHT SCULPTURE / live synchronicity with the speed of the train or as­ this space to be used by anyone in any way . and it NOMADISCHE LICHTSKULPTUR, 2013. NOMADISCHE LICHTSKULPTUR, Oakland, 2013. pects of the landscape. Olafur Eliasson made a draw­ was, often sexually. Carsten Holler’s sculpture was a (PHOTO: ALAYNA VAN DERVORT) (PHOTO YE RIN MOK) ing machine that created kinetic drawings through game that people could climb through and around. the movement of the train in motion; the resulting TG: What were the events like, as a whole? drawings essentially mapped the three-thousand-mile DA: It was so diverse. There was almost a different frequency for each location; each Happening was very much a different chapter. The Chicago Happen­ you’re taking in that narrative. Then, when you stop ing, for instance, was really soulful, in this kind of somewhere, there’s this very physical, tactile encoun­ Inner Earth way. There was an enormous marching ter: It’s blazing hot in the desert, and your eyes are band from south Chicago that played Sun Ra’s com­ squinting, and you start talking to someone on the position Space Is the Place. Mavis Staples, who is in her corner who’s from the Navajo nation and has heard mid-seventies, sang. Theaster Gates’s Black Monks about this Happening thing and has come off the res­ of Mississippi performed. And then you had the no­ ervation to check it out. madic sculptures that people were crawling through We’re all so used to the fact that you go to an exhi­ and spending time inside, in a trance-like state. There bition and there is a series of works that are somehow was something warm and earthy, but also unpredict­ curated, and they’re often fixed. But during Station able about it. to Station, there was this sense of constant change With each changing location—and these were and movement, and that empowered new kinds of often locations that none of us had been to before— artworks and experiences to be created in the pres­ the creative language would change. So I think the ent. People tapped into this and really worked with it fundamental principle of a moving project, one that through the process of the journey. continuously changes environment and culture, TG: What were some especially successful examples? completely altered the creative temperature of the DA: Well, a really unusual one, which came from a project, in a way that I couldn’t have foreseen. direction I would have never guessed, was a project TG: So the location actually kept reasserting itself? by Stephen Shore. Stephen said, “I want to do a pho­ DA: Yes. The location was a continuously evolving tographic Happening. I want to see the map of where language. You’re looking out of the window of the you’re going to go.” And he looked at it, and he said, train, seeing the landscape framed like a cinema “Oh, you’re going to be in Winslow, Arizona. I want screen, and you’re seeing deserts or valleys or in­ to go there exactly twenty-four hours before the train dustrial areas almost projected onto the glass, and arrives, and I want to photograph for twenty-four 9 hours—-just shoot everything I see there and kind of thinking most specifically of your books, where you above it that were created by Lawrence Weiner. In ert, and I’m so glad we did because he’s since passed map it, like a photographic mapping.” use quotes from dozens of sources in order to put the distance, on the screen, people saw early abstract away. We filmed a young artist, Kate Casanova, who Stephen shot hundreds of photographs, which he forward a broad, even fragmented sense of a particu­ computer-animation films by the Whitney brothers lives in Minneapolis but has barely shown there. didn’t edit. And at the stop after Winslow, we staged lar subject. How would you say this mode arose in from the 1960s while the musician Beck played with 1 see the train metaphorically as a broadcast tower. a Happening at an abandoned drive-in movie theater your work? a gospel choir underneath. The project is about democratizing the experience in the desert. That night, we projected Stephen’s DA: It’s just curiosity; it’s very simple. I find myself in­ This was not a painting show. I think I can safely and sharing the content that came out of it and the new images on this drive-in movie screen. His photo­ terested and drawn toward new encounters, new con­ say that. At its best, Station to Station was able to em­ voices of the people that created things. The process graphs basically compressed time and space to create cepts, in search of something that might bring me power the viewer and the creator and create a syn­ of using the moving image as an integral part of Sta­ a sense of topography through a sequence of images a deeper understanding of what’s around us. Going ergetic and unpredictable dialogue—a dialogue that tion to Station allowed us to explode the experiences that are unique to the project and will possibly only back to a project like Broken Screen, for example, a came out of motion and nomadism and the vitality of into a series of fragments and to share them.