Aspen’s Ambitious AIR Festival Turns the Rocky Mountains into a Stage

Aspen, Colorado, stands at an elevation of just under 8,000 feet, enough to wonder what the atmosphere there might do differently to the eye, the ear, and all the rest of the bodily apparatus that we marshal throughout the day. Certainly the question was high in mind when the Aspen Art Museum reconvened AIR, an ambitious festival of art, performance, and talks whose second edition took over the mountain town last week.

Last year’s inaugural edition of AIR added considerable intelligence and allure to the more traditional fundraising and market-minded aspects of Aspen Art Week, and the reprise returned the favor with a program that connected certain dots while sketching new shapes with others. Opening night revolved around Matthew Barney’s ZONE DEFENSE: Old Snowmass Parallax, a new sculptural installation in sublime ranch environs that last summer played home to a related performance (involving sled dogs and a sharpshooter, among other things) that engaged the dark fantasias of football and the American West. The new work is quieter and stock-still, in the form of what appears to be PVC piping arranged into a precarious structure held down by gym weights and covered with the jerseys of two NFL legends whose shared violent tragedy Barney has been fruitfully mining for the past few years. (For more on this, see an interview with Barney to follow soon—but know that what seems like plastic and other materials is a mix of bronze, steel, and aluminum painted trompe l’oeil-style to look different than what they are. And links to Barney’s interconnected oeuvre abound.)

The performance program of AIR, which this year adopted the theme “Figures in a Landscape,” got off to a soaring start on Tuesday, when a gondola started ferrying festivalgoers to the top of Aspen Mountain at 9 a.m. to see the musical duo Los Thuthanaka. At more than 11,000 feet, the two siblings, dressed in ornately fringed green suits and black and white cowboy hats, summoned hypnotizing sounds inspired by their Andean heritage in what played like a light-strewn DJ set and a darkened shoegaze concert, all in the early morning glow. At one point they turned their backs to the audience and addressed the millennia-old mysteries of the Rockies instead.

Music figured prominently again that night during a “film-performance” presentation of Lucy Raven’s Murderers Bar with a live score by Deantoni Parks. Projected on an enormous 30-foot screen built with timber in the middle of an otherwise empty alpine meadow, the film focused on the demolition of a dam in the Pacific Northwest and followed the path of rushing water through a riverbed into the ocean. Parks’s expanded score mixed elements from previous showings with new parts played by ensemble musicians from the Aspen Music Festival and School, who added drama to already immensely dramatic footage shot in part by helicopter and drones. To accentuate the connection to cinema, little tubs of popcorn were handed out upon arrival—adding to the theatrical effect of the mountains in the background blurring with the mountains on the screen as darkness descended.

Earlier that day, a talk focused on Adrián Villar Rojas and his exhibition “First Gods, Lost Animals” at the Aspen Art Museum. The most significant works in that are a life-size triceratops skull in bronze hung vertically on an illuminated wall, like a vision from the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and, taking up most of the lower floor, a vast simulacrum of a cave whose chasms and crags include representations of grids and pixels from their computer renderings. Very old and very new, the work suggests, can commune, if mercurially so.

The setting for Wednesday morning was curious: the Pitkin County Solid Waste Center, with a screen and seating between massive mounds of scrap metal and other kinds of detritus. That’s where Ivan Cheng commenced one of his “live situations for camera” that merged monologue, dance, and aerobics in a performance heavy on hyperventilation. As Cheng made his way around the grounds, sometimes far from the view of the audience for which he was performing, a crew of camera operators and high-flying drones followed him and transmitted footage to the screen, in real time. Some of it was moving, such as when Cheng equated the attention he commanded from the camera to the affirmation he craved from his father, or when he talked about learning to love Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time and how to eat pad see ew. But some of the antic energy expended by running around and the theatrics of the live-filmed simulcast did raise the question if the material might have been better served by something more simple: a stage.

The stage is where Morgan Bassichis thrives—as discussed in a presentation during which the artist pulled the curtain back on their cunning mix of stand-up comedy and pitched-up monologue in works like Can I Be Frank? That sensational show—about Bassichis’s parasocial relationship with the late queer comedian Frank Maya, who died of AIDS-related complications in 1995—was very much the talk of the town during its recent run in New York, and reading from an essay written for the occasion, Bassichis turned introspective about their communion with ghosts. “What are we looking for when we look for dead artists?” they asked, in relation to the Maya show, as well as another of theirs about the late Larry Mitchell (author of the 1977 book The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions)—and a forthcoming one devoted to the tormented aura of Amy Winehouse. 

A talk starring Miranda July was less directed and less revelatory. It was not without its moments: “I kind of enjoy my hang-ups,” she said. “There’s a lot of erotic potential there for me.” but, at least for some, it was also bogged down by body talk and lacked for flow between July and moderator Okwui Okpokwasili. Lyle Ashton Harris’s performance on the roof of the Aspen Art Museum later that night, however, abounded with flow, to emotionally eviscerating effect. The sprawling spoken-word piece included personal photographs projected on screens and dabs of dance, with Harris (accompanied in different ways by Darnell L. Moore and Raymond Pinto) working through memories of his absent father and the recent death of his former partner in Ghana. The piece was searing and raw, with Harris working through his grief and, at times, heaving with tears that felt like a cry of damnation and deliverance at once.

Bright and early on Thursday morning, Kali Malone resurrected a newly restored pipe organ in the modernist Aspen Chapel for a performance that included Concentric Circles of the Choirs of Angels, a composition she wrote for the Vatican’s Holy See Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. The piece, inspired by the 12th-century polymathic mystic Saint Hildegard of Bingen, was skin-tinglingly breathy and slow, with long tones (played by Malone and her accompanist Stephen O’Malley) that rose up and swirled around the room. Others from albums like 2024’s All Life Long sustained a spell that lingered.

The mesmerized mood shifted later in the afternoon during a fascinating talk about a subject that rarely gets its art-world due: laughter. Psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir and neuroscientist Patrick House talked about distinctions between involuntary and socialized modes of laughing, lessons about similarities between emotional extremes (Alsadir’s clown-school teacher used to say “the wah-wah is attached to the ha-ha”), and—at the urging of moderator Evan Calder Williams—the eeriness of Friends episodes with their laugh tracks removed.

All the comic talk suited AIR’s finale: Camille Henrot’s Commedia dell’arte. Set on the proscenium stage of the Wheeler Opera House, a vestige of Aspen’s Old West past that dates back to 1889, the farcical musical play told the story of a hapless delivery man trying to drop off a package to an artist in a New York City apartment building filled with characters including a talking black cat and hedge fund guy who dabbles in making ambient music and dreams about Ibiza. The writing, by Estelle Hoy and Justine Gelfman, was sassy and sharp, and the narrative exuded a whimsical lewdness that cut against the production’s overall slapstick sensibility. Parts of it were looser and goofier than would have been ideal, but in the spirit of AIR, it reached for something beyond what was expected and proved the better for it.