Aitken, a California-based artist who has had a dazzling career since winning the International Prize at the 1999 Venice Biennale, has long said he wanted the work to be an exercise in “liquid architecture.” He succeeded. And when the word “disappear” appeared and floated for a moment on the endless, circular screen, the work emphasized its aesthetic ambition: to set up a visual spectacle that both attracts looking obsessively, yet makes the museum itself dissolve.
It is by far the most ambitious piece of public art yet attempted in the District. Using 11 projectors and multiple outdoor speakers, the video covers the entire surface of the building, with images that are remarkably sharp. Even the shadows cast by real trees feel like a happy accident in the game of illusion, almost photographic double-exposures on the surface of the video.
As an urban intervention, it is brilliant, animating one of the city’s monumentally grim dead zones: the Independence Avenue corridor just south of the mall. It makes the march of government office buildings on the south side of the street seem even more forlorn, almost alive in their sadness, like the inhabitants of a badly run zoo looking out at freedom.
And the whole thing is perfectly timed, too, arriving just as Cherry Blossom madness has reached it steroidal peak — artistic balm for people exhausted by all those repetitive pink flowers.
But so many aesthetic, technological and cultural threads come together in “Song 1” that it’s worth sorting out the cheap thrills from the more supple and satisfying ones.
The sheer size of the images offers a visceral frisson. Huge faces loom up on the screen, singing, lost in thought, driving a car. Although the Hirshhorn is no higher than the buildings around it, these people seem to tower over the city.
But there are good and long-standing reasons to be suspicious of large images, which are a staple of advertising, Las Vegas and totalitarian personality cults. They are fun and dangerous, overwhelming our skepticism, like being in the midst of an emotional crowd. There are times, watching “Song 1,” when you wonder if anything projected with this much clarity on a building of this size wouldn’t be almost equally hypnotic. And there are times when you wonder if there’s a dystopian urban future hinted at in this project — a perfect melding of messaging, ideology and architecture.
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