Doug Aitken remembers his first, earth-moving show with Victoria Miro

If you’re partial to taking risks as an artist, one thing’s for certain: you must find yourself a gallerist to match. Californian artist Doug Aitken, it seems, met an equal in the “grande dame” of dealers, Victoria Miro. Their first show together in 1999, in the gallery’s original space on Cork Street, focused on the manic activity of the 24-hour-a-day film-making production line that is Bollywood, and the pressure to feed an insatiable audience. Into the Sun, an immersive installation involving multiple screens and a floor covered entirely in red-orange earth, ended up with a much larger footprint than planned, much to the amusement of both parties. To celebrate the gallery’s 40th anniversary, Aitken recounts the formative experience of exhibiting with Miro. 

I remember Victoria Miro’s first London space well: it was on Cork Street and the gallery was situated in a small storefront. The street was upscale, in the district of Mayfair, replete with jewellers and all manner of high-end boutiques. And here was Victoria showing a progressive and subversive programme of artworks in the middle of all this tradition and luxury. When I was invited to make a show, I knew I wanted to create a complete environment, a single artwork that occupied the entirety of the exhibition space. I had spent several months living in Mumbai, filming and documenting the extraordinary chaos of Bollywood and the Indian film industry to create a new artwork titled Into the Sun, which I was to premiere at the gallery. The installation was to have the walls covered in sheets of raw canvas draped down from above which would serve as the screens for multiple moving-image projections, and the floor was to consist entirely of red-orange earth. To cover the gallery floor required tonnes and tonnes of earth hauled in by trucks. As an installation, it was fully immersive and evocative; there was a palpable sense of humidity in the warm air of the exhibition space, and the texture of the canvas and the flickering light of the projectors revealed a subconscious quality of the image-making machine that defined Bollywood. At night, we would roll up the blinds on the front window of the gallery to reveal to Cork Street the video installation that we left to run 24/7 so passers-by could see it. The gallery happened to be situated directly across from a pub, where off-work characters could have a few pints while – perhaps bemusedly – watching our Bollywood artwork on continuous loop.

Everything was going well until we started to receive messages from local establishments inquiring about a mysterious red-orange dirt that was being tracked through their premises. Someone sent me photos and I could see this earth had been borne outside my show by foot, creating trails down the sidewalk, clearly leaving the gallery and going up and down Cork Street, in and out of jewellery shops and the many other galleries and exclusive businesses in Mayfair. I have to confess, I smiled when I heard this, and I thought how amazing it was that our artwork and its raw materials were starting to migrate, to leave the gallery and make their way through the neighbourhood. I imagined someone trying on diamond rings, catching a glimpse of the floor below, and wondering why and where the strange red-orange earth came from; this added a layer to the artwork I never could have anticipated. I wasn’t sure how Victoria would react, though. When I sheepishly spoke to her about it, she smiled in her charming Cheshire cat way and paused; I knew then that she was laughing inside as much as I was about this beautiful, accidental art-disruption. This first show with Victoria was a seminal experience for me, but not only because of the exhibition itself, it went so far beyond that. What has mattered most has been getting to know Victoria, Glenn and their team over the years, and sensing their love of risk-taking and slyly subverting the system. Within them, I felt like I’d really found a new family of friends and collaborators, and isn’t that so much of what art is about?