Doug Aitken: Inversion as Aesthetic Gesture in Film and Photography

A critical analysis of Doug Aitken's work, published in artpress in 2002, examines the artist's use of inversion and gesture across his film and photography. The article opens with a discussion of an unlabeled photograph in the Phaidon catalogue, page 144, depicting a family scene where a child is held upside down by his feet, a gesture that Aitken uses to explore perceptual shifts. This inversion is echoed in recent works like "The Movement" and "Metallic Sleep," where flipping an image disrupts the viewer's reading, placing figures and objects in desert landscapes upside down while the human and car remain upright. The analysis extends to films such as "Electric Earth" (2001), where a nocturnal walk's rhythm parallels urban architecture, and "These Restless Minds," where auctioneers' rapid chanting in empty spaces creates a disorienting, Beckettian absurdity. In "I am in You," a child's hand games and travel through electrical wires and screens fragment language and reality. The article draws parallels to Deleuzian concepts of movement-image, time-image, and the refrain, arguing that Aitken's works territorialize and deterritorialize gestures, words, and bodies within media and architecture. Aitken, born 1968 and based in New York and Los Angeles, had recent shows at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, MoMA New York, and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 2001-2002.