“Migration (Empire)” shows live animals reacting to being placed in run-down hotel rooms. “Each one responds to his/her captivity in a different way, and their reactions are both poignant and funny,” Kelly Baum, the museum’s curator for modern and contemporary art, explained in an e-mail.
According to the description on the art museum’s website, the motel room setting adds to the lonely feeling, symbolizing “transience, passage, escape, and freedom, but also alienation and isolation.” This theme is carried through in the projection screen, which is shaped like a billboard to evoke a highway.
The show, which begins at dusk and repeats every 24 minutes until 11 p.m., will run through Nov. 14. It is the latest multimedia production by Doug Aitken, whose work has won awards at several international film festivals.
“We think Doug Aitken is one of the most important contemporary artists in the country, whose work in video is not only rich in ideas but exceptionally visually rewarding,” art museum director James Steward said in an e-mail.
There is no linear narrative to Aitken’s hypnotic film, which is shot in soft, clear tones.
“I think of it as a story about displacement, dispossession and relocation, both forced and chosen,” Baum said.
The movie is part of the museum’s effort to expand the size and reach of its contemporary collection. The location in front of the museum was vacant last year, after a collection of 20 headless statues was taken down in June 2009 after filling the space for five years.
“We particularly have sought to animate the space in front of the museum as a way of further suggesting that art does and should exist outside the walls of museums and be put in the path of everyday life,” Steward explained.
Baum said that the museum is expanding its contemporary offerings because the genre “is the art of your generation ... All of the events and changes that shape the students attending Princeton are in some way reflected in the art being made now.”
Reactions to the piece have been mixed.
For Steward, the highlight of the film is a “white barn owl, who finds himself surrounded by feathers falling through the air like snow — a moment of surreal visual magic as good as anything in contemporary art.”
“I like the idea of having a screen out here, but I think it’s kind of an eyesore,” Alana Tornello ’12 said. “I very much appreciate film and photography and that sort of thing; I just think it’d be better inside a building.”
Steward said he thought some students might be “surprised, even mystified, by what the piece is doing outdoors, or what it ‘means.’ ”
“Though pondering its meanings is perhaps part of the point,” he said.
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