Always Ahead
by Ruby Thelot

Perennial tricksters, the Dadaists dismantled the rational, the linear, and other ingrained myths. More than a century later, Chinese artist Shuang Li, for her show I’m Not at AAM, presented a work in a similar avant-garde tradition. Déjà Vu is a silent, multilayered video installation embedded within a sculptural model of a half-built architectural structure. Created during the COVID-19 pandemic, while the artist was unable to return to her home country of China, the work interweaves performance documentation with footage captured by a GoPro affixed to a duck in a Geneva animal rescue center. The visual narrative is accompanied by fragmented subtitles that tell a story of a town where language disintegrates: first, words are confused, then grammar collapses, and, finally, speech itself vanishes. The duck-mounted GoPro, the architectural fragments of abandoned dreams, the garbled subtitles describing a town forgetting how to speak—much like the Dadaists responded to the trauma of global conflict with fractured language and absurdist forms, Li replies to the affective estrangement of digital life, migration, and fandom with a poetics of distance.

You can’t plan the avant-garde, you can’t manufacture or engineer it; it has to emerge from the fertile grounds of willing institutions, from organic collisions and cross-pollination. Aspen, like Zurich, is contiguous to mountains, and continues to be a spawning ground for novel avant-garde experimentations. Though such things can’t be planned, one can hardly overstate the importance of the individuals who, through their unrelenting curiosity and perseverance, tilled the Aspen soil to ensure it remained fertile.

In the aftermath of World War II, Walter Paepcke, an industrialist, and his wife, Elizabeth Paepcke, sought to turn Aspen into a cultural destination. They brought to the city Walter Gropius, the leading figure of the forward-thinking design and architecture group Bauhaus—and who, much like the experimentalists of the early century, was in exile—to rethink its urban design. The Paepckes invited leading intellectuals to discuss Johann Goethe for the Goethe Bicentennial Convocation and Music Festival in 1949. Whatever the Aspen equivalent of the Odeon, there is a table where, potentially, the physicist Albert Schweitzer, the writer Thornton Wilder, and the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset all sat, drinking, under the watchful eye of the Rockies.

In spite of the uproar certain shows have provoked in previous decades, Aspen Art Museum has remained undeterred and steadfast in its commitment to supporting the avant-garde. This institutional fidelity to experimentation is exemplified in Jasper Marsalis’s Einschub, currently on view through mid-June 2025, an exhibition that both expands and complicates the legacy of artists like Vito Acconci, whose work, though now canonical, was once met with controversy when first presented in Aspen in the late 1980s. Acconci’s early performances, which often foregrounded the body as a site of surveillance, overt sexuality, desire, and provocation, were regarded by many as antagonistic, too raw or too intimate for the polite distance often preferred in museum settings. His work challenged aesthetic conventions and institutional norms, implicating the viewer in an uncomfortable proximity to the artist’s presence.

Marsalis, working today, picks up the thread with a calm ferocity. In Einschub, he transforms the Museum’s lower-level galleries into a live circuit of feedback and perception, where the viewer is no longer a passive spectator but, in our networked age, becomes a generative element within the interactive installation. Contact microphones, LED screens, and mirrored surfaces capture and broadcast the audience back to itself, a mirror where all become implicated, echoing Acconci’s use of surveillance equipment to trouble the loose and porous membrane between observer and observed. There is a shared lineage here: a belief that the museum can serve as a space of rupture rather than repose, a site where the architectures of seeing and being seen are exposed.

What emerges is a deft, multilayered inquiry into how we stage ourselves for others, and how institutions like the museum mediate those performances. That Aspen Art Museum gave early space to Acconci and now to Marsalis is a testament to the Museum’s enduring willingness to risk discomfort in pursuit of deeper perceptual and cultural questions. It shows that when you’re an hour ahead, the minutes pile up, they accumulate, they get lodged in the sand, the soil, and the soul of Aspen, like an indelible fertilizer. Though the buildings, people, and eras may change, Aspen remains always ahead.

This essay originally appeared in Aspen Art Museum’s Summer 2025 Newspaper. Free copies are available at the museum for the duration of the summer exhibition season.