The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 17. Doug Aitken's Blow Debris (2000)

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Blow Debris. 20:39 min., color, 2000. By Doug Aitken. Ubuweb's description:

Blow Debris similarly suggests narrative but prefers to offer it in the form of a drifting, almost aimless experience; the piece enacts a passage or journey as we follow a group of nude wanderers in a desert landscape. As with Electric Earth, what could be postmodern anomie becomes celebratory drifting. Aitken spurns a romantic nostalgia for a pristine past and its untrammeled landscapes in favor of the stories suggested by the discarded remnants and detritus that litter the expanse of the Mojave Desert. He also fetishizes the feeling of the desert. Even in the cool, dark space of the gallery rooms housing the huge projections, you sense the lassitude of the characters and time seems to slow down. And then things explode, time reverses, and you are compelled to walk around some more, from dislocation to relocation and back again.

This follows in the vein of Autumn and Electric Earth in that it offers a series of compelling images I haven't quite seen before. It differs from those in its wider purview. Where Aitken's first two pieces on Ubuweb stuck to teen aimlessness and urban wandering, Blow Debris gets all the way from the desert to the creek to the palm tree fields to the suburbs, no sweat.

Also like its predecessors, the piece starts out measured and exploratory but turns urgent and nutso. We see a roving pack of nudes emerge from their encampment of bright red tents, amble down dirt roads, climb rocks, push old couches end over end, examine electronic junk and drive cars. As the setting moves from the sometimes strikingly Lawrence of Arabia-y sand-and-brush landscapes to a carved-out basin to a creek under a bridge and finally to a sprawl of tract houses, things get strange. Stranger than a welter of naked people walking through a series of disconnected environments, I mean.

Powerful gusts of wind blow papers around. Couches explode. Bookshelves disintegrate. Detritus scatters across all visible space. Humans turn to ash and blow away. Utter destruction! This is what I've come to consider the standard Aitken end-stage turn, though greatly amped up from the other examples I've seen. (Clearly, the other videos didn't have the luxury of a demolition budget.) But then there comes a surprise reversal, à la Weird Science: via the miracle of reverse motion photography, all this decimated stuff assembles back into wholes and flies back into place.

Oh, and did I mention there's also a nude dude playing tennis? 'Cause there's a nude dude playing tennis.

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