A uniformed employee in blue walks through the mechanized depths of an Amazon fulfillment center. Now we see a second figure—not a human but a robot arm that prepares packages of unknown Amazon goods. Then, intriguingly, these coworkers synchronize: the man begins to pop and lock in harmony with the movement of the machine. It becomes a twin dance, repeated in a variety of ways across several large screens.

If this whole narrative were somehow all captured in a single still photograph that would be impressive; if this were a music video then the music would be better, or maybe worse—but either way more memorable; if this were a feature film it would have a story so we’d expect something before, after or in front of this dance, to give it another layer of interest. Is this a moment of liberation from banal labor? Capitulation to it? Emerging empathy for the robot? A slapstick aside?

But this is Lightscape, a multi-screen art-film nearly an hour long, and the vignette only occurs for a few minutes before transitioning into footage of other things. As in so much film and video work in this well-established mode, finding meaning here requires bringing some from home.

They say all comparisons are odious and I’m inclined to suspect Doug Aitken would agree, for he belongs to that class of big-budget symbol-slinging post-conceptualists whose work only seems remarkable if you’ve forgotten that everything else in the world exists. The Los Angeles Times called Aitken’s most recent offering, “Fall’s biggest spectacle”—apparently forgetting Cai Guo-Qiang’s epic fireworks display at the Coliseum, Freddie Freeman’s World Series grand slam, and the 2024 US presidential election. Artists like Aitken thrive in an in-between space of inter-contextual amnesia: on paper, the work is more exotic than works by poorer artists (most of them), but not nearly as exotic as the spectacles provided by reality on a daily basis.

While Lightscape is undeniably big and expensive, it’s not IMAX, the Las Vegas Sphere, 4DX, or virtual reality—but it is bigger and louder than any painting. The LA Philharmonic’s involvement in the initial version of the piece might seem very progressive compared to what an orchestra usually does, until you realize that it sounds kind of like Enya.

Doug Aitken, Lightscape, 2024. © Doug Aitken Workshop.

What exactly will you see in Lightscape? A series of stylishly mysterious images and portentous scenes that look like a very long trailer for a late-period David Lynch movie, with the grotesquerie and humor replaced with short moments of modern dance and snatches of bad poetry. Someone says “One day we’ll slip away” over and over again while staring at an oil pump.

There are ideas here—about Los Angeles, about the myth of the American West, about the plenitude of human experience, and about the hack-artist-subjects-du-jour, landscape and memory—but like a bad SNL sketch, Aitken forces each idea to take up far more time and space than it is worth. Indeed, Lightscape cannot be contained to only a Disney Concert Hall live-music-accompanied premiere and a three-month stint in a room at the Marciano Art Foundation; apparently, storyboards of its least interesting scenes needed to be turned into multimedia art and shown at Regen Projects. Even great directors’ storyboard paintings are, at best, interesting-if-you-like-the-film and these are worse—a mixture of digital printing and sewn material, they display unstylish rearrangements of sky, modernist home and swimming pool. Their most obvious function is as an overgrown souvenir of having seen the movie.

The same corporate ethic and mantelpiece aesthetic animates the other work in Aitken’s Regen Projects show. It consists mostly of sculptures of animals that are about as surreal as every other contemporary art sculpture of an animal made since 1980, and so style-free that they might amount to nothing more than digitally enlarged versions of toy railroad scenery. One dearly hopes that nobody that likes sculpture or animals (whether Aitken or one of his assistants) actually modeled the creatures or poses—if this is the best that they could do it would be truly heartbreaking.

The only surprises on display here are three buffalo, colored and textured like cottage cheese that somehow manage to be not funny. The animals are about the size of furniture but are not so large that they take on new visual properties associated with architectural scale, because then Aitken wouldn’t be able to sell them, but they are large enough that they don’t immediately remind you of the tourist knickknacks they resemble. However, Aitken lacks Jeff Koons’ post-Pop desire to rub how little work he did, and how little taste the audience has, into the viewer’s face. Here, one senses that the listlessness is neither tragic commentary nor deadpan joke but rather that Aitken sees his work to be an experiential distraction from the seamless delivery of his ideas: Form does not create meaning but merely injects it. These are snow globes for people with very large living rooms.

What Aitken’s multimedia presentation communicates is not versatility but a profound sense of inattention, as if all these constructions in film, foam and flickering light are props and ephemera left by the practice of some other kind of person—a pop star, an ad executive—who directs brigades of indifferent craftspeople to bring his mood board to life. Aitken has an eye for loaded and arresting images; he also has an eye for blandly slick ones—he lacks a third eye with the wisdom to know the difference. Or perhaps he has it but keeps it willfully closed, since the moneyed classes that buy and fund these diffuse extravagances are apparently content to repeatedly inflict environments as characterless as what he makes onto the landscape he makes it about.