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Doug Aitken’s ‘Lightscape’ Turns the American Dream Into a Requiem

This immersive seven-screen work offers multiple sensorial experiences that together evoke the fractured emotional terrain of contemporary life.

If there is one must-see show in New York right now, both for ambition and for its final memory imprint, Doug AItken’s seven-screen Lightscape at The Shed is it. It is a contemporary opera—a complex multimedia orchestration that, in its relentless flow of different stimuli, not only requires time to be absorbed but naturally anchors the viewer, inviting them to stay and embrace its temporal and spatial expansion with all senses. At the same time, it offers an hour of air-conditioned solace during a walk through Hudson Yards or Chelsea, which is never bad in this torrid summer.

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The work feels at once like a soundscape, a videoscape and, as the title suggests, a lightscape. In what we can confidently describe as Aitken’s magnum opus, the artist creates a field of evocation that doesn’t rely on narrative storytelling, but instead operates in an allegorical, imaginative register. The landscape is clearly the protagonist: it is a terrain of diversities, of fragmented stories and perspectives, different temporalities and spatial experiences that then converge, revealing the entanglement that unites all human destinies.

Everything started not from a conventional script but from a song cycle Aitken composed about five years ago. “I started the project with the vocal music that I wrote. I wanted to approach it in a very minimal, very reductive way,” Aitken told Observer after the unveiling. “Instead of having something that was dramatic and long, or language-based, I wanted to use single words, sentences and fragments, and allow those to repeat and almost become landscapes—sonic landscapes.”

Only after that did he start developing the visual side of the landscape. “It was very interesting for me because I had never approached a work like that, where I created the music first. But I felt it had to be that way, because the narrative I wanted to express was much more fragmented, nonlinear and contemporary,” he explained. “I wanted to leave an open space for the viewer to really occupy the work, instead of being told what to think or being presented with a dramatic structure. I wanted a new landscape that you could fall into.”

In its ever-shifting, immersive mix of light, scenes and sound, Lightscape feels like a living project and is further activated by live musical performances that blend the script with live improvisations.

The gesamtkunstwerk Aitken has created here is characterized by a sense of fragmentation and interruption, with clear links to contemporary opera as much as to recent experimentation in music and performance, which similarly sought to reflect the new perception and existential condition of modern life. We can think of Luciano Berio’s revolutionary approach to traditional opera and theater, with his experimental “musical actions” unfolding through labyrinthine soundscapes, or of Philip Glass’s repetitive structures, punctuated by ordinary sounds and noise. In these, as in Aitken’s work, music is not the sole........

© Observer