Aspen’s AIR Festival Takes on Crisis, Creativity, and Matthew Barney

The sound of dogs panting—a pack of winded huskies menacingly, mesmerizingly trying to catch their breath—was the highlight of the inaugural AIR festival in Aspen. But so too was a talk about psychoanalysis and death in a psychedelic chapel, a self-inquisition between an artist and his AI doppelganger, and a whispery musical performance on a museum rooftop under a bright crescent moon.

As a new element of Aspen Art Week (which also includes the Aspen Art Fair and the starry ArtCrush fundraising gala for the Aspen Art Museum), AIR added a decidedly heady register to the mountain town’s storied art scene. The public-facing festival last week was preceded by a three-day closed-door retreat for around 30 artists, writers, scientists, theorists, activists, and so on—imagine a cast for a sort of art-inclined Aspen Ideas Festival—and the collegial vibe carried over into a program of talks and performances that spanned divergent subject matter and different disciplines. (Overheard intel from the retreat itself: someone cried, Andrea Fraser bared her breasts, and a groaning artist grossly overate because the Rocky Mountain altitude stoked his appetite.)

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The festival proper kicked off Tuesday at the Aspen Chapel with an early-morning musical incantation by composer Rafiq Bhatia accompanying a film by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The spectral music (played by the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble) tracked an impressionistic film that floated through in-between states, with a painting of a landscape rolling up and down intercut with imagery of a woman in bed, either sleeping or dead. Afterward, a talk by artist P. Staff and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster surveyed “the productivity of dreaming” in relation to “the catastrophe of life on land” and the desire to return to a fluid state (of the womb and, as a species, the sea from which we evolved). Up above, sunlight streamed in through modernist yellow windows in a ’60s-era chapel that aspires to be a nondenominational “spiritual home for everyone.”

Striking vistas were not in short supply at AIR. After three more talks on the first day—including a rollicking back-and-forth between Argentine artist Adrián Villar Rojas and Mexican writer Álvaro Enrigue, whose 2016 novel Sudden Death features an imagined tennis match starring Caravaggio—the program moved to a 25-acre nature preserve. There, at three different locations separated by processional walks, Jota Mombaça’s “site-responsive opera” featured agonized singing and a seated figure (Mombaça themself) being slowly covered in clay. Most striking was a set piece on the surface of a lake, with a woman on a platform appearing to walk on water as she peered longingly out over the pines.

Paul Chan opened Wednesday with a spirited talk about and in collaboration with Paul’, an AI avatar of himself that he developed by way of a small language model and lots of trial, error, and different kinds of provocation. “I just wanted help answering emails,” Chan said of his initial motivation, wearing a T-shirt in tribute to the creepy animatronic star of the movie M3GAN. But after time, Chan began to see Paul’ (the apostrophe standing for “prime,” as in mathematical notation) as “a secondary portrait of me.” The small language model based on his own inputs is some 99.8-percent less extensive than a large language model, Chan said—describing the difference as like that between the brainpower of a jellyfish and a Ph.D. student. But the interactions that commenced onstage grew increasingly elaborate and entertaining, especially during an extended erotic interlude during which the proceedings turned more than a little risqué. Rather than relying on “it,” Chan said he coined new pronouns for Paul’ (se/sem/ser/sers/semself). And while the AI exhibited an impressive grasp on the kinds of cerebral concepts he favors, Chan was quick to note that Paul’ “doesn’t know what the weather is like in Akron or how to make pasta primavera.”

After a much denser conversation about artificial general intelligence between a neuroscientist and a tech researcher, Werner Herzog followed with one of three “keynote” talks (the others being by architect Francis Kéré and artist Maya Lin). In a roundabout way, the great German filmmaker talked about his forthcoming book The Future of Truth, due out in September. Expounding on the kind of ancient painting that figured in his 2010 documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Herzog talked about countering conceptual and/or spiritual readings of things like handprints on rocks with the equally plausible notion that such marks could stand for the number of times their creator “got laid in the cave.” For insight into human nature, Herzog advised members of the audience to spend as much time as they can with Francisco Goya’s “Black Paintings.” And he spoke of a period when he was consumed, for the sake of knowing the world in which he lives, with following the history of WrestleMania. “The poet must not close his eyes,” Herzog said.

The most anticipated offering of AIR was a Matthew Barney performance staged Wednesday evening at a ranch about 20 miles outside of town. The setting was rich: a historic field house that had been used as a training site for a World War II-era American military unit focused on potential mountain warfare in places like the Italian Alps. The structure had been built nearby but—not unlike the steamship in Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo—was later transplanted across the mountains, where in its present state it played home to a cast including a marching band, a camouflage-wearing markswoman, a hoop dancer, animals, and a group of football players and referees.

Barney himself opened the performance in a cowboy hat and a pair of Wrangler jeans, slowly and silently (except for the occasional heavy-booted kick) making a large chalk drawing on the dirt with a field-marking machine. With the stage set between orange end-zone pylons from a football field, a group of string musicians took extended formation and plucked their instruments, sending pointillist sounds arranged by composer Jonathan Bepler in vectors across the room. After a brief horn fanfare came a startling sight: a dog sled, pulled in a manic, running rush by huskies overdressed in wolf-like grey fur. The sled sped in through one doorway of the field house and, after a spell of stillness in which the dogs’ heaving breath was amplified in the rafters, raced through another, not to be seen again.

The intensely transfixing spectacle, titled TACTICAL parallax, braided together elements of Barney’s 2019 film Redoubt (about the myth-laden mysteries and landscapes of the American West) and his 2023 installation Secondary (about the myth-laden violence and beauty of American football). From each came elements of expressive dance and disquieting movement, including three horses trotting in circles around their handlers and two football players mimicking interactions between predator and prey. A new presence in the work was a musically minded master of ceremonies character played by Okwui Okpokwasili, a noted performance artist who sang beautifully in a silver flapper-era dress, as if in a century-old musical revue. At one point, in reference to the Rockies lurking just outside, she sang, “These mountains do not care who you are. They ask the question: can you endure?”

Thursday lightened up, with a keynote presentation in which Maya Lin talked about projects including a pair of 19,500-pound fountains she’ll be installing at the Obama Presidential Center next year and a conversation about “off-modernism” between Courtney J. Martin, executive director of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and artist Aria Dean. At night was a concert on the Aspen Art Museum’s rooftop by Caroline Polachek, who had the unenviable task of subbing in for André 3000, who had been billed to play in an opera house that dates back to Aspen’s formative 19th-century silver-mining boom. Polachek smartly skewed toward intimate moments, including a cover of a song by Nick Drake in which her breathy voice kissed the sky.

The last AIR event, on Friday, was a talk between two old friends: Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and artist Glenn Ligon, who will have a show of multiples and works on paper at the Aspen Art Museum in November. Ligon talked a lot about creative acts and gestures that go on living through time in ways that their initiators could never have imagined, including bricks with handprints left by enslaved people and pottery by David Drake, also known as Dave the Potter, who signed his vessels and inscribed them with messages and poems. Asked at the end what might give him hope in a world in which positivity is hard to come by, Ligon landed on the prospect that, maybe, sooner or later, “what I make may be useful to people in the future in ways I don’t know.”