Next month, Aspen Art Museum will kick off its new flagship initiative AIR, which is set to explore the role of art in an increasingly complex world. It won’t lack for guests. To lead its program, the institution is convening a crowd of artists, filmmakers, musicians, designers, technologists, and creative thinkers—among them one Werner Herzog.
Opening July 29, AIR, which encompasses a public festival and a private retreat, is inaugurating things with a rich theme: how the numerous intersections of art and technology are reshaping the world around us. In this, the program takes its cues from the ever-restless Paul Chan, who has spent years programming an A.I. to create a synthetic self-portrait, and physicist Sara Imari Walker, whose boundary-pushing book Life As No One Knows It, on nothing less than the origin of life, gives AIR 2025 its theme.
And AIR is bringing heavyweights. Tapped to lead its series of keynote speeches is Herzog, the German filmmaker long celebrated for his 70-plus features and documentaries that tangle with the extremes of reality, images, and truth. His sizable oeuvre spans the provocative Fitzcarraldo (1982) and Grizzly Man (2005), the meditative Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), and the incisive Into the Abyss (2011). He published his memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, in 2022, and will be collecting a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2025 Venice Film Festival.
Film still from Werner Herzog’s (1982). Photo courtesy of Aspen Art Museum.
Fittingly, Herzog’s keynote at AIR will explore “ecstatic truth,” a kind of insight that surpasses mere facts. The concept has occupied the director for at least two decades—”the factual,” he reflected around 2010, “can never give us the kind of illumination, the ecstatic flash, from which Truth emerges”—now complicated by an era of artificial intelligence and digital illusion. Besides fueling his forthcoming speech, these ideas will be woven into his upcoming book, The Future of Truth.
“Werner Herzog is one of the most singular voices in cinema and culture—utterly fearless, wildly imaginative, and deeply human,” said Nicola Lees, artistic director and CEO of Aspen Art Museum. “His work doesn’t just challenge how we see the world; it dares us to feel more, to think more expansively, and to embrace the unknown. It’s an absolute honor to celebrate his vision as part of our inaugural festival this summer.”
Maya Lin. Photo: Jesse Frohman.
Herzog joins other keynote speakers at the AIR, namely architect Francis Kéré, who will explore the communal power of public spaces, and artist Maya Lin, who will shed light on how her environmental artworks conjoin landscape and memory.
Elsewhere, AIR’s site-specific art programming will be headlined by Matthew Barney, the avant-gardist whose ideas have taken shape in film, sculpture, and performance. In Aspen, he will unveil a new performance piece titled TACTICAL parallax. It resurfaces and connects motifs from two major bodies of work: Redoubt, his 2018–21 project that unpacks the landscape of myth, and SECONDARY, his 2023 video installation exploring the collision of American sport and violence.
Matthew Barney, (2018). Production still. © Matthew Barney, courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Hugo Glendinning.
Sculptor Mimi Park, artist Jota Mombaça, and the collaborative duo of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Rafiq Bhatia will also stage works that variously explore the interconnectedness of dreams, sound, body, and nature. Paul Chan, meanwhile, will have his first conversation with his A.I. avatar, during which they’ll discuss false selves and death.
The program will host exchanges between humans, too. Its Dialogues section will see pair-ups such as artist Glenn Ligon and museum director Thelma Golden discussing the role of collaboration in artistic practice; artist Sophia Al Maria and Sara Imari Walker chewing over life beyond our planet; architect Frida Escobedo and curator José Esparza Chong Cuy tackling museum architecture; and artist/writer Aria Dean and art historian Courtney J. Martin confronting the art-historical canon.
Glenn Ligon, (2022). Courtesy of the artist.
When it debuts, AIR will be the newest event on the annual Aspen Art Week calendar, which counts the Aspen Art Fair, inaugurated last year, and the Aspen Art Museum’s ArtCrush benefit, which this year honors Glenn Ligon, among its highlights. It also coincides with the museum’s exhibitions on Brazilian artist Solange Pessoa, American photographer Sherrie Levine, and Italian visionary Carol Rama, and the unveiling of a new work by British artist Anthea Hamilton.
AIR Festival runs from July 29–August 1, preceded by the AIR Retreat from July 26–28. Registration is now open at airaspen.org.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
