On Saturday, September 21st, a limousine carried me from the airport in Flagstaff to the town of Winslow, Arizona. I was boarding a train tricked out as a “kinetic light sculpture,” vintage cars lined with strips of metal peppered with L.E.D. lights that reacted to motion and audio, pulsing and changing color in response. Over three weeks, the train stopped in nine cities across America, big and small. Winslow was the sixth stop on this “nomadic happening,” called “Station to Station,” directed by the artist Doug Aitken.
For me, a terminally native New Yorker, any landscape distinct from a tall building or a food cart is familiar only from touring in a band, moving as a tourist, or working as a journalist. This means that during trips I usually have a task to focus on, and notice little of what is around me. Fixed on a destination, surroundings can be no more than visual weather, relevant only because they might slow you down on your way to the abandoned cathedral or the best tapas bar in Moscow or the slushy spot with the last operating Vittleveyor. When are you actually required—morally—to notice the space you are passing through?
According to Aitken, one of “Station to Station” ’s several aims was to “de-familiarize all surroundings and get artists out of their comfort zone.” Aitken is forty-five, tan, close to six feet tall, stooped but with the build of a swimmer, lithe and prone to wearing nothing more fancy than a loose-fitting button-down shirt. His work uniform is a grey V-neck T-shirt from American Apparel, which he buys in bulk to wear in his Venice studio. I’ve known him for about five years, and have both worked with him on projects like “Altered Earth” and “Song 1” and simply stood back and watched him do things. It is never clear what he wants you to do, once invited along. Even as I boarded the train, I was unsure of what role I was going to play. This is, at some level, the default relationship for those around Aitken. The program is always in flux, but Aitken’s impulse is always: “Yes. Come with us.” Train as autobiography.
Before we’d reached Winslow for the smallest happening of the trip (three hundred attendants at most), I was pressing against my visual ignorance as a New Yorker. I needed to match the train’s mandate and see things clearly, things that might cause me to act differently. In the nineties, my band played Boulder, way north of Flagstaff, but that only involved pinning the steering wheel to one side when driving into the wind, or sleeping in the back of the van, and nothing else. I’d been through the Southwest without knowing I was there. Now, it was time to see and be present.
From both sides of the car, rock formations were visible in the bright sunshine, land cloven by centuries of water and wind. The ravines looked like tiramisu that had been wiggled apart with a wire hanger and left to dry, the result blending into stretches of grey-green scrub and succulent purple mountains. This was all tented by flat blue sky that mocked the portholes of atmosphere New Yorkers see (which we might have forgotten had Instagram not been invented). I felt like I was ten years old, dumb and stunned. The limousine hadn’t even reached the train.
The week-long experience I had was split. Riding on the train was not an option for average citizens, aside from a few contest winners. The nine happenings were open to the public, with tickets hovering around twenty-five dollars and the profits going “to support non-traditional programming at nine partner museums around the country,” according to the Web site.
The events were more like concerts than anything else, with stages for the musicians to work with. Activities and performers around the stages tried to productively disorient and surprise the audience. When it worked, people noticed each other and the work in front of them.
In Barstow, the site was an abandoned drive-in theatre, a gorgeous setting. The sun fell, and a video that Stephen Shore had made days earlier on the streets of Winslow, the previous stop, played on the drive-in screen as Dean Spunt and Randy Randall of No Age created long, sweeping passages of gentle feedback. One example of true surprise on this leg was Peter Coffin’s U.F.O., a lighting rig equipped with a fancy L.E.D. program that was lifted above the crowd by helicopter, as close as the law would allow. Some kept their eyes on Beck, who was playing on a traditional stage, but most saw the flying thing. A few people even called it into the police, any artist’s true validation. Those smaller and stranger moments felt closest to the “exquisite corpse” feeling Aitken mentioned often. You might expect one band following another on a stage. You’re less likely to expect a choreographed whipping performance to blend into Beck playing with a choir, only to be interrupted by a U.F.O. floating above the food trucks. The less easily you could predict sequence, the better it felt.
In Santa Fe, one stop before Winslow, Aitken tried to find male flamenco dancers, but could only locate two young women at a local dance school. They enjoyed the first performance so much that they drove themselves to Winslow and joined the train. (Famous or not, none of the performers were paid.) Aitken’s only instructions to the dancers were to “not dance” and to create “tension.” In practical terms, that meant using only their feet and limiting arm movements. A few days later, in L.A., their arms were back in action. Happenings need to happen.
In Winslow, on a stage almost five feet high, the two women stomped and moved toward each other without touching. It was all over in less than two minutes. Anyone gearing up a phone to catch the images probably missed it. In a site like Winslow, where the outdoor performance was bracketed on one side by the adobe-colored La Posada hotel and on the other by the train itself, there wasn’t much chance anyone could mistake this for a big ticket show, whether or not Jackson Browne was playing. (He did.) You could wander into a yurt where Liz Glynn paced and explained (very capably) relativity in less than two minutes while drawing on the felt walls. If you kept moving, you might have ended up in a tent filled with dry ice and a bed. If you wandered down past some packing crates, you might have seen Cold Cave performing on top of a maze of hay bales, which was funny if you know that Cold Cave and hay bales have nothing in common. Or maybe it was better to not know. There were no set times posted outside and, frustratingly, many of the vintage experimental films by people like Oskar Fischinger were a lot less recognizable than, say, Cat Power (though the films are all listed on the Web site somewhere).
Both the shows and the maintenance of the vintage train were bankrolled by Levi’s, who donated what Melena Ryzik of the Times reported was a seven-figure sum. In exchange, the Levi’s logo appeared on signage and shirts, and there were Levi’s yurts present at every happening. (There was also a car on the train full of Levi’s swag and above-average cocktails, a continuous, vague salon.) Somehow, this sponsorship tripped triggers when the journey began in Brooklyn, on September 6th. Twitter lit up with word that “Station to Station” was a “big Levi’s ad” before the train had moved an inch.
Upon examination, I found nothing that revealed the project to be more or less sponsored or controlled than hundreds of other art events I’ve seen. The Levi’s staff had no artistic input in the happenings. At some events, Levi’s was almost invisible; in other places, their yurt, staffed with workers at sewing machines making bespoke clothing, was full of people. Every part of the travelling organism was easy to ignore, if necessary. I like bluejeans more than luxury cars, and have had more unpleasant branded art experiences. Which is to say, Yes, follow the money, but don’t be fooled by the number of visible logos. If you can find an entirely self-supported enterprise, be it a live show or a magazine, and the work is good, support that small cohort of people right now. But if a jeans company’s involvement ruins your idea of nomadic happenings, you’ll need to steer clear of museum exhibits and big-ass live concerts in the future.
This is a topic for further examination, not for filing away. If you think about what was on the train and on-site for each event, it is clear that, without those seven figures, there would have been no project. There is a strong counterargument to be made, that art doesn’t need such resource-rich waters. This conflicts, though, with the emotional and spiritual experience of spending a week around committed and generous people who want nothing more than to help make remarkable and surprising things happen. Here is where politics and art pull each other; but do we always keep track of who has the upper hand? There’s nothing facetious in this question. As delightful as my week was, I can’t entirely square it with my idea that art is best when it’s cheap and democratic at every turn. Sometimes, the train felt like it was. When are you implicated in the funding around you? Always? How do you like Citibike? You see how far this can go.
The nine-car train, assembled from various vintage sources (including Frank Sinatra’s favorite train), transported performers, recording crew, guests, art collectors, and journalists. It was a place to work, and a comfortable one. It was easily the more intense of the many locations we visited, without being a location. It was taxing, no matter how enriching, to know that I was doing something few others could do. Anyone trapped in the moneyed beach houses of Saint-Tropez or the Hamptons has found that exclusivity, the aim of rich people and their real estate, is not as fun as going to the Rockaways with a bag of beer and clams. This train, though, was different—a kid’s dream of what money can do. With an absence of stress, a team of people managed to hang out lazily and then break into activity, filming each other, or recording an impromptu song with Cold Cave in the recording car, or leaping out between the cars to film a stretch of desert or California coastline. (Anyone who started the trip jaded was hit with the Kryptonite of the American landscape, and soon had their phones out, sending pictures home.) It was like being led back to a brief burst of childhood, but with corporate funding. The idea that either felt wrong would be untrue, a cognitive dissonance that will take me a while to resolve. Everyone needs the chance to ride on a train full of people like those on “Station to Station.”
All of the passengers were vetted by Aitken himself, and there was little tension or selfish behavior. The enterprise rolled on with a few whispered conflicts among the staff. At one point, someone had to determine whether nudity was allowed at one location. It wasn’t, but the show went on. I miss it.
