Doug Aitken: sleepwalkers

Tonight, I stopped by MoMA to see the new outdoor video installation by Doug Aitken, Sleepwalkers. It was so cold that I couldn't stay as long as I would have liked. I know from reading about it that there's much more to see and I plan on returning for more.

Earlier in the day I stopped by the Brooklyn Museum to kill time while Spangler wined and lunched (doesn't rhyme as well but...) his wife. I hadn't yet seen the Ron Mueck show and thought I might peek into the Annie Leibovitz show. There's nothing to say about the Mueck show except, if you like him in pictures, don't go. You'll ruin it. Leibovitz just made me mad. I'd summarize the show "Celebrities (and other powerful people) celebrating themselves and some other boring stuff like landscapes and children."

The issue of Celebrity brings me back to Doug Aitken. I knew the faces of Donald Sutherland and Tilda Swinton. For whatever reason, these did not phase me. When I came home and looked up the online exhibition (see link above) the identities of the other three main characters came into view. First, Seu Jorge, who I knew looked familiar. Chan Marshall and Ryan Donowho were faces I did not recognize. Oops, Chan Marshall is A.K.A Cat Power. As soon as I realized this I needed to find out how Donowho fit in. Surely the cast was not made up of two well know respected actors, two of the hippest musicians, and some dude from the corner. But I "Donowho" he is. A quick Yahoo search revealed that Ryan Donowho is a young actor who appeared in none other than The (now defunct) O.C. and in the film Broken Flowers. The dude's even got himself a genuine fan site.

Lets be clear. I'm not complaining. If I had celebrity friends, the first thing I'd do is ask them to appear in my drawings. I just find the level of hipness and nowness in the selection of celebrities involved to be suspect. I like celebrities. I like art. I'm just not sure that they always go together.

Maybe I'm wrong about that...

Update (1.22.07): Maybe I was. Well, maybe not, but my position has softened a slight bit as I realized that I really know little to nothing about Aitken's history. Today he was featured on Soundcheck, where he spoke about, among other things, his relation to sound. The use of musicians as actors becomes more relevant.