"I only have eyes for you..."
That's the gist of the song playing throughout the experience of watching the Hirshhorn Museum come alive in Doug Aitken's Song 1 exhibition, a series of films and sounds projected on and around the Hirshhorn's façade. Of course, with Sylvia Lavin's Kissing Architecture on my reading list, I immediately thought back to what she'd written about one of his previous exhibitions, Sleepwalkers, at MoMa in New York:
Aitken uses surfaces in such a way that they do not merely support projection but begin themselves to project outward. His images face out, produce an outside, do not gravitate toward each other, and, in fact, tend to be detached one from the other as though being pulled apart by centripetal force... the film multiplies its audience, creating at least two audiences: those who are at a relatively close distance, who read faces and pay direct attention, and the general urban audience, who barely perceives the building but can sense its active presence at a much greater than usual distance. In the most interesting moments of spectatorship, these two viewers are the same person [quoted from Sylvia Lavin's Kissing Architecture, p 47-49]A few more photos of my own:
I have to say that it was a little eerie when cars would go by with their own soundtracks, inadvertently adding to the soundtrack of the film we were watching. Or when the bus would go by, flashing its bright interior between us and the building, so that our viewing plane was interrupted by it, the bus, and that was our movie for a brief moment. I'll have to go back with a better camera, and I hope to catch the James Murphy segment of the mix.
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