Next Tuesday will mark the opening of Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This massive installation, and Aitken’s first public art piece, takes full advantage of MoMA’s new building by projecting eight large-scale moving images throughout the museum and on its facade. Tilda Swinton, Donald Sutherland, Chan Marshall, Seu Jorge, and Ryan Donowho star in the “broken narrative, without beginning or end.”
We’ve been looking forward to this installation for quite some time now. Some of Doug Aitken’s work is in the Walker’s Permanent Collection, and we’ve been following Tilda Swinton’s career since her earliest work with Derek Jarman. It will be fascinating to see how the public reacts to this massive piece and how the building and city will absorb it.
One Reaction, of a sort, has already been documented. As i was preparing to write this post, Assistant Curator Dean Otto forwarded a post he read on Curbed about a guerrilla art piece put up by one of MoMA’s neighbors. While MoMA was setting up and calibrating the projectors for Sleepwalkers, they set their own projector up across the street and projected an image that simply states “YOUR VIDEO ART HERE.” You can see more images from the set-up at the artist’s flickr site. They have stated that they will not run their intervention while the Aitken piece is running.
[…] After a long search, we’re pleased to announce the hiring of Peter Eleey as Visual Arts Curator. Currently a curator/producer at Creative Time, he’s organized public art projects including Cao Guo-Qiang’s Light Cycle (a pyrotechnic celebration of Central Park’s 150th anniversary in 2003), Jenny Holzer’s 2004 For New York City, and Doug Aitken’s film sleepwalkers (above), to be projected on the exterior of MoMA starting next Tuesday. He’s also worked with a range of fascinating artists, from interventionist Michael Rakowiz to Chinese artist Song Dong, who was featured in our exhibition How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age. He joins us officially on March 26. The New York Times writes that Nato Thompson, curator at MASSMoCA, will fill his shoes at Creative Time. […]
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[…] · The Museum of Modern Art has a YouTube Channel. Currently on view are two trailers for Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers. Thanks, Paul. […]
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