Doug Aitken’s migration (empire)

Doug Aitken’s video work migration (empire) is a poetic allegory of modernity and its effects, conveyed by the actions and behavior of a series of undomesticated animals improbably placed in contemporary human environments. A horse, two peacocks, a sprightly fox, a skittish deer, and a lumbering bison are among the dozen wild animals temporarily confined in that most banal of modern American environments: the nondescript motel room, a setting that connotes mobility and escape but also isolation and alienation. Aitken’s work offers a metaphoric exploration of space and place, employing nonhuman animals to underscore modernity’s bifurcation of people and the natural world and the increasing dislocation of humans and animals due to climate change, overdevelopment, and economic and political unrest.

Twenty-four minutes in length, the evocative video is framed by scenes of industrial extraction and the circulation of natural resources for human ends: a flaring smokestack, a coal-bearing barge, a vast rail yard with slowly rolling boxcars, the rhythmic gyrations of oil derricks. An accompanying soundtrack, alternately meditatively percussive and wistfully melodic, accentuates these images of environmental estrangement. When seen together with footage of similarly displaced animals, the video provides a quietly jarring critique of capitalism’s expropriation of nature and the alienating infrastructure and  transiency such processes produce. In one segment, a stallion stands awkwardly in a motel room, staring at a television with grainy footage of stampeding wild horses—and then, as if to implicate the viewer in his unnatural situation, turns his gaze on us.

Aitken is one of the most prominent multidisciplinary artists working today. His cinematic works, at once surreal and contemplative, reflect poignantly on contemporary life. Most of Aitken’s videos explore the social, physical, and psychological aspects of space, both natural and urban, using nonlinear, nonsynchronous narratives—stories whose gaps and repetitions complement the ideas they convey. In migration (empire) these strategies afford the artist a powerful means to reflect on themes of forced migration, displacement, and the increasingly disjunctive effects of late capitalism for life of all kinds.

Acquired by the Museum soon after its creation in 2008, migration (empire) was first screened at Princeton during the fall of 2010 in a prominent location adjacent to the entrance of the former Museum building. Its reinstallation at the Lewis Arts Complex in the University’s Arts and Transit neighborhood offers a renewed opportunity to reflect on these issues in the context of the growing movement of humans and animals worldwide. As people make their own personal migrations to and around Princeton, Aitken’s video provides a compelling critical gloss on the charged implications of migration today—social, political, environmental—and asks us to consider the costs of the way we are living, divorced from the natural world that sustains us.

Karl Kusserow
John Wilmerding Curator of American Art

This installation is made possible in part by Peter M. Ochs, Class of 1965, and Gail Ochs and Rachelle Belfer Malkin, Class of 1986, and Anthony E. Malkin, with cosponsorship provided by the Lewis Center for the Arts and the High Meadows Environmental Institute.

Doug Aitken, Stills from migration (empire), 2008. Princeton University Art Museum. Museum purchase, Fowler McCormick, Class of 1921, Fund. © Doug Aitken. Courtesy of the artist; 303 Gallery, New York; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; Victoria Miro, London; Regen Projects, Los Angeles