Doug Aitken and Beck on Making Art in an Age of White Noise

For the artists Doug Aitken and Beck, making art nowadays is an attempt to counter the constant white noise of a culture so rapid and fragmented that it’s hard to discern the value of any one thing. “It’s like a caterwaul of unimportance,” said Beck, the eight-time Grammy winner, when the two got together in Los Angeles last month for a wide-ranging conversation about creativity and inspiration. “This shrieking of tiny, small, inconsequential moments and blips of existence all screaming at the same time.” Aitken, whose new project Lightscape debuted at the LA Phil in November and is currently on view through March at the Marciano Art Foundation, agrees. “The culture and the information world is like an endless kaleidoscope,” he explained. “For me, the creative process is an attempt to navigate this and perhaps temporarily make some sense it.” Hence the 57-year-old multimedia artist’s prolific output as of late; on January 11th, his new show Psychic Debris Field opens at Regen Projects. Below, the two artists talk about artistic intuition, being reckless with their work, and the question of authorship in an age of technological innovation.

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DOUG AITKEN: I was speaking to my friend who has this awful ringtone. And I thought, “I want my ringtone to be Werner Herzog’s voice.” So when it rings, it says something like, “Yah, you have a phone call. And you need to get this immediately. It’s urgent or you may die…”

BECK: I want him on my navigation system. “You’re gonna want to turn left on Sepulveda, the 405 is completely fucked. There’s an apocalypse, you might as well go home. Hollywood Boulevard is completely backed up and is an emblem of the decay of our civilization and societal breakdown.”

AITKEN: Even though, ironically, Werner Herzog lives in the Hollywood Hills.

BECK: I got bit by a Brown recluse spider this week. It sort of feels like the world has a hex on me, some sort of benediction to unravel the bad mojo of 2024.

AITKEN: It’s been quite a ride, but I feel optimistic for the next chapter.

BECK: I think that we share an optimism, which is unusual for the time that we came up in, when pessimism was a badge.

AITKEN: And irony was front and center. But this period we’ve in now is really filled with white noise.

BECK: Oh my god, its unending.

AITKEN: And within the white noise is the constant question of what’s real and what’s false? I think everything is moving with such turbulence, it’s really hard to find a mooring. 

BECK: It’s like a caterwaul of unimportance. This shrieking of tiny, small, inconsequential moments and blips of existence all screaming at the same time and there’s no sense of which thing is important or if any of it is important.

AITKEN: It’s a weird and surreal time to be creating, because you’re often working with fragments. The process of creativity now is almost like welding little pieces of information together. The culture and the information world is like an endless kaleidoscope. For me, the creative process is an attempt to navigate this and perhaps temporarily make some sense it. 

BECK: I think that we always tried to get closer to the fractured, fractal nature of our thoughts and our senses. I think the media is becoming like this scattershot of rippling fuselage of impressions, of little moments and things that add up to something. There’s a power of finding stillness in it. But it’s really hard to do. I’m kind of drawn to that musically. Something like Brian Eno just seems like some sort of medicine, you know? Something that allows for more space. 

AITKEN: How are you creating now? What’s your process? Because there’s always been a lot of multiplicity in the way you work.

BECK: I think the multiplicity has multiplied. I find myself now working on multiple projects or albums at the same time and I’m just jumping between them, sort of creative schizophrenia, but it does make sense. I used to be a little more single-minded. I would just dedicate myself to one thing completely and see it through. If it took a year or two years but now it’s just kind of, each idea is sort of spawning another idea. There’ll be a really interesting thread of something. And I go, “Wait, that’s its own project.” That would be a footnote on this album, but if I take it and expand that idea out more, it might be a whole other world. So I was working on three things, and I think now I’m sort of moving into working on five or six. My only challenge is time to be able to execute it all properly. The ultimate commodity is time, and it’s the ultimate luxury. It’s the currency of creation and life, having time. I think I’m trying to figure out how to somehow cartwheel through a lot of things to get to all of it before there is no more time.

AITKEN: Creatively, I find myself working in a broader and broader way. And I work on something in one medium, like a film or music that’s really de-material. And then I want to make something simultaneously that is completely different, maybe a project that is insanely physical, and tactile. I’m attracted to a radical diversity as part of my working process. In art, I want a sense of disruption, because when things become too formal or too defined, there’s no oxygen left. So you have to lean into it and go downstream, and sometimes you’re going through rapids. And don’t hold on to something that you think you know. Just let it go.

BECK: Well, I think jumping between the mediums and the approaches helps give perspective, because for me to see what I’m doing clearly and to get it to where what it needs to be, I need to have as much perspective as possible, which is almost impossible when you’re in the center of creating it. It’s like trying to have some sort of distance or perspective on your own body or your own hand in it. In a way, it’s sort of a trick of the mind to displace yourself so you can come back to whatever the other thing you’re working on with a new perspective. That’s why I’ve liked working with other artists, because I’ll get into the space of what they’re making and how they’re creating it, and then I go back to my own work and see things a little differently.

AITKEN: It’s amazing how the things that we create in culture are actually like bridges. It’s such an incredible tool, to be able to work with that electricity and flow. We were just watching Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders. In the film, you see this crystallization of Berlin before the fall of the wall, a very edgy Berlin. The film is pulling in everything from Nick Cave to a scene in a public library with old German actors and Peter Falk. The things that we create, such as that film, can be amazing stages that crystallize periods of time. Art can create moments that can burn that into the retina and record in the memory.

BECK: I think the art that’s always drawn me in is the art that lives and swims in this vast space of possibility. And there’s certain artists and films, there’s certain creations that just feel like anything can happen. Like a film, like Wings of Desire, you could see that for the first time and go, “Okay, what is that?” Somebody not used to that kind of a narrative and all of the philosophical and emotional places that it’s exploring might say, “But wait, I’m lost.” But if you live in it, and you get lost in it like I did—I saw that film when I was a teenager and watched it over and over—sometimes just waiting to see the Nick Cave scene because we were fans. After a while, you sort of lived in the world of that film,  like you said—a multiplicity of different worlds and people, interconnecting. To me, it really goes back to [Federico] Fellini, who was a master of orchestrating this circus of intersecting lives and personalities and culture. There’d be some old world nun and then a 60’s Go-go dancer and then an old, matronly wealthy woman with a big hat, and a little beggar man. To me, it goes back to one of my favorite pieces of art, which is Hieronymus Bosch.

AITKEN: “The Garden of Earthly Delights”?

BECK: Yeah, a collision of fantastical worlds and representations and of humanity and the world of his time, mixed with the fears and the fantasy at this time. That’s something that I aspire to. I think it might be almost too ambitious for this time. I think the culture now really loves something that’s ephemeral and unfussy and kind of badly made. You know, for instance, I’ve made music videos where we spent $100,000 and weeks and weeks of work. And then I’d done things where I just played a song on my guitar in my backyard which somebody filmed on a phone and got five times more views. 

AITKEN: Do you think that’s because the viewer is suspicious of things that are over-produced? We have this desire for authenticity so we see it in the lo-fi, unrehearsed moment. We see a rawness to it, and we seek it out. We want to find something with more oxygen and we want to break the screen. The artist John Baldessari said to me over lunch, “Doug, the greatest tool that an artist has is the ability to say no.” He says “You can just say no to anything.” I thought to really own that was just such a provocative idea.

BECK: I struggle with that. I struggle being discerning and saying no, because often when I really try to push and I’m making a song and I’m trying to will it to what I want it to be, it fights against me, and it comes out as kind of something disingenuous and and doesn’t really connect. But then sometimes, if I just surrender and say yes, even though I don’t really like it, it does work. The problem is, I do end up with songs that I don’t actually really like that much, but they do work for what they are. And I made them for some reason, I don’t know why. Then they sort of belong to the world, and, you know, people either forget them or they love them. I’ve only a few times been able to conceive of something and have it align with my taste and my aspirations and projections. But often it’s just sort of a mystery to me how it ends up the way it does.

AITKEN: Fast and loose. I think there’s a lot to be said for intuition and letting things go and allowing one thing to lead to another very, very rapidly. When you’re making a move, one to another, creatively, and you find a rhythm, and things take over on their own. Sometimes, when you’re creating there’s a sequencing that happens that is really exciting, and it’s like an energy source. I think it’s actually at the core of creativity. When things become really fascinating is when you don’t really know where they’re going to go, and there’s no real safety net, and there’s a sense of taking things further, maybe even to the point of collapse, but you keep going. You need that kind of energy to get somewhere new. And if it’s all familiar, then why do it? You make it, you break it, and keep moving. 

BECK: It’s interesting. My grandfather, Al Hansen, was a Fluxus artist. He worked in a lot of different mediums, but he eventually fell on the image of the Venus of Willendorf, which is one of the first images in art. It’s sort of the genesis of image or meme or whatever you want to call it. So he made that figure of the Venus over and over for the rest of his life, most of his art is just this one image he made and reconfigured. A lot of this is collage work, the cigarette butts and candy bar wrappers, and sometimes it was painting. He has a whole philosophy about that. He studied with John Cage early in the 50s, and that whole group of artists and dancers and musicians had all seen [D.T.] Suzuki speak on Zen, I think at Columbia University, and some of the beat writers were there. So there was this whole wave of this experimental work being infused with Zen, so this idea of repeating the same image over and over in all its variations is sort of a beautiful minimalist act. But I don’t think I would have the discipline to do that, because I’m a little too—

AITKEN: Restless?

BECK: 21st century ADD. Restless. I guess it feels like whatever frontier of ideas is endless. I kind of look at artmaking and creativity like like those TV shows when I was a kid, where they put somebody in the supermarket with a shopping cart and they say you have five minutes to grab as many things as you can.  So it’s just a grab of music and art and ideas and you only fill up one shopping cart. It’s a whole supermarket of possibilities. So there’s sort of an innate frustration that you won’t ever quite get to the end of it. That’s why I don’t think I can ever relate to this idea of writer’s block or running out of ideas, it’s almost impossible to me. I mean, look, there’s a lot of artists who you know in their 20s make 10 albums and then they just cruise for another 40 years. I mean, god bless, if you can just do that the first 10 years and cover all possible ground. But I just don’t think that I have.

AITKEN: To me, it’s not a lack of ideas—it’s a lack of time. I just feel so restless, because I have so little time to create the artworks and the projects I want to do. And I think, how hard can you push yourself to get closer to something that is this intangible thing that you’re really after, but you don’t really know what it is? You can’t really define the goal of artmaking, but you know it’s there. And you also know it’s always a little bit out of reach.

BECK: That’s what pushes you to the next project. I think that out-of-reach quality of anything you’re working on creatively is the impetus towards the next thing. And the people who have a real crisis of faith or ability in creating are the ones who somehow crack the code and make the greatest song of the day, or the greatest film or the greatest piece of art. Then there’s a sort of existential moment of, “Now what?” But at least for me, I feel like I’m still about 10 feet out of reach and if I reach hard enough, I might grab it. Do you feel that your best work is ahead or behind?

AITKEN: I feel like I have no memory whatsoever of any art that I’ve ever created. Every morning I don’t even remember that I’d ever even made any art. But I do have this kind of absolute fascination with what’s next, the future, this horizon in front of me. I could wake up and create with this energy and keep going, and it’s going to be an incredible journey, and I don’t know where it’s going to take me. But I don’t really feel any baggage of having ever made anything before, I’ve almost forgotten about it, like my mind just erases it.

BECK: Well, I have to go out and perform my songs over and over and over, so I kind of have to live with the stuff I made, and they’re remnants of completely different lost times of my life, right? Which is great in a way, but most of the time I play the songs and I know for a fact that there’s still something better there that I haven’t gone to. I played last month at this festival in Mexico City. I opened for Paul McCartney, and he’s just out there playing Beatles songs and all these classics from the 70s. The songwriting is so undeniable, and you watch them hit the 100,000 people who are watching and singing along. It’s pretty clear that there’s rarefied air to get to in the craft of making this stuff and I’m perfectly content wandering on the foothills. I don’t need to necessarily get up to the top of Mount Everest, but there’s always higher ground to get to. I wonder sometimes if I’ll ever feel compelled to really try to reach for some of those things.  

AITKEN: Well I don’t think that you are going to find them if you try to.

BECK: But when you’re wandering, you can choose to go up there, where it’s a little scary and forbidding, or you go to a sort of more comfortable lower ground, where there’s a shady tree. It’s a bad analogy, but it’s interesting. It feels like there’s possibilities of personal renaissance. You’re a surfer, so you kind of know that feeling of like, “If I just hang out a little bit longer, I’m going to catch the wave, and it’s going to be the best ride of my life.” It’s a similar feeling with what I do. You wake up and this could be the day you catch a good one.

AITKEN: Yeah, it’s also about playing off different energies. You could be spending all year on a folk record, but maybe tonight you go into your garage and you go totally punk. 

BECK: And it might be way better than the year you spent on the other thing.

AITKEN: Exactly. It’s restless and reckless, and rough around the edges, there’s energy and it’s burning hot. One of the greatest freedoms is to make things that aren’t about refinement, but instead breaking things apart and opening them up and reconfiguring the world through a different lens. 

BECK: Yeah, cultivating a sense of creative recklessness is an opening into the truth. I don’t know if it’s encouraged. Something like auto tune, which is a particular stylistic element of our time—but by nature, it captures your melody and it reduces it down to simplicity. So the idea of that recklessness is discouraged by the technology that we use. I don’t know, maybe there’s a movement towards finding that place again. There were certain bands that I gravitated to when I was growing up that were the kind of bands that were never the most popular, but they inspired 1,000 other people to start their own band. That’s a specific category of artmaking that’s really kind of the most exciting.

AITKEN: How would you sum that up?

BECK: It might not necessarily translate to the mass culture, but the people who are making stuff see it and it gives them great ideas and directions. I’m sure Wings of Desire didn’t make as much money as Top Gun, but it probably inspired more films which, in a way, is its own wealth. 

AITKEN: I think we want individuality and vision in culture. We want unique voices and ideas that cut through the white noise and show us other possibilities of what it is to be alive. I think in a lot of ways, the greatest strength of anything that’s created is the power to disrupt time and to suddenly put you right here, right now.

BECK: There’s one thing that you touched on speaking to how things are created in the kind of nexus of medium and technology and this sort of shifting landscape. I really think that we’re in this analogous time to the previous turn of the century, where we had early movie equipment and photography and sound equipment but we didn’t really know what to do with it yet. So they were just filming footage of a horse running down a road or a train pulling up and they hadn’t conceived anything like Antonioni or The Wizard of Oz. I think we’re also sitting with this technology and these tools that we haven’t quite figured out what we’re going to do with them yet. So it’s a really interesting in-between time where many of the old mediums are still alive and they’re still being explored, but there’s this whole new future of possibility with any sort of technology that we haven’t even grappled with.

AITKEN: But it’s often unclear, are we using technology or is technology using us? And I think that’s been the paradigm shift. I think in a sense, technology has always been there with culture and creativity.

BECK: The innovation of the orchestra and the building of different instruments.

AITKEN: The theater, the opera, to film, to screens and the digital realm. So in a sense, there’s always been this restless pushing forward that we have as humans, where we’re trying to find something new—a format, an experience—that is a more authentic representation of the crazy chaos of living. We want to reflect the ideas inside us, and we want to mirror the journey we’re on. So we try to create tools that we think are closer and closer to that. 

BECK: Closer and closer to consciousness, maybe. 

AITKEN: Or just the idea of experience itself. Because life, the organic life we live and the digital life we live, can appear at times as all one. It’s a really, strange time in that sense, because technology is almost surpassing us in terms of our personal authorship. But what’s the end game, and who’s really the author, anyways?

BECK: I think you’re right. I think we’re telling the same stories and we’re reiterating the same thoughts and impulses that go back to the ancients. Everything is colored and configured from the time that its made. Writing words on a page—words are one of the earliest technologies, and I still think they’re one of the most profound. Words have a power to them in the right combination and configuration. They’re one of the ultimate technologies that really cut to the core of us. 

AITKEN: Sometimes, less is more, more or less. In Lightscape, my new film/artwork, I was using less and less language and really reducing language. There’s very little dialog in it, only a word or two. And that word might even be repeated and repeated. I thought, “Why am I eliminating dialogue out of an hourlong film?” But maybe there’s something different that I can tap into, such as sound and music and the movement of the body through space that can tell a story and connect in a different way. At the core of Lightscape was an attempt to create a different kind of structure. You were talking about mythologies, and saying everything comes back to certain stories that are told forever but with slight variations. We really do live in a world where we’re asked to be passive and to consume. We need to flip the script, push that away, and create culture where there is atmosphere and ambiguity. We don’t need only black and white tones, or right or wrong. We also need gray areas that allow us to have more oxygen to come into our potential as humans and push against the white noise and the absolutism that we’re surrounded by.