“You can get lost in the blink of an eye,” intones a voice amidst the cinematic cacaphony of Doug Aitken’s Lightscape, an ambitious installation at the Marciano Art Foundation in Los Angeles. As much a sonic as a visual accomplishment, it is a one hour Gesamkunstwerk of Aitken’s preoccupations using characters and scenes familiar from his earlier excavations of Southern California, especially Los Angeles. It encompasses much that is ravishing, troubling and incomprehensible about the region even to residents such as myself.
Open frame doors, like shoji, lead to the immense darkened theater with pale wood seating in the center, a simplicity at odds with the pace of action on two opposing sets of massive screens. The non-linear scenes include Death Valley desert, pulsing ribbons of light along nighttime freeways, a seedy bar where Ed Ruscha’s face appears on the tv screen, a white modernist house by Richard Neutra where a lone mountain lion paces to the sounds of Philip Glass, and a cowboy riding his horse through a scrubby lot lined with deteriorating aircraft.
