Over the weekend, a rolling sculpture/wandering art gallery rolled into Oakland after a month-long trip from the Atlantic coast (Brooklyn, natch) to the Pacific. Los Angeles artist Doug Aitken created Station to Station, a retro train decked in lights and packed with artists of all stripes (Olafur Eliasson, Beck, Thurston Moore, Cat Power, Catherine Opie, etc.), traveling around the country together and stopping only briefly to create temporary art performances and exhibitions in locations ranging from Chicago to Winslow, Arizona. The train had nine cars, including a recording studio and an editing bay. Last week, Station to Station stopped into Barstow--Aitken told the New York Times he chose the tiny San Bernardino town "precisely because it wasn't a destination"--and LA's Union Station. (The crowd at the former "seemed airlifted from Coachella," as you can see from these photos.) Intrepid Curbed photog Elizabeth Daniels caught both events and returns with these photos of headliner Beck, Opie eating a hot dog on board the train, artist Peter Coffin's fake UFO, and much more.
Lamely, you can't seem to host an art event these days without a corporate sponsor--these guys sold out mostly to Levi's, along with Moog and others (no one will say what the budget was, although it was somewhere in the "robust independent film" zone). Artists weren't paid aside from expenses and proceeds from ticket sales and donations will go to a nonprofit cultural fund. See more photos of the train here.
· Station to Station [Official Site]
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