These speculations are ever more poignant as we inhabitants of this still-young century become increasingly alarmed about technological wealth set among environmental degradation. In dazzling locations ranging from beneath the sea off the Californian coast to remote wilderness and half-glimpsed urban corners, and with a wide variety of media – photographs, films, installations, performances, sculptures – Aitken’s wry eye plucks telling details, visions splintered like his mirrors, which we must then aggregate. ‘We author from collage fragments,’ says Aitken. And since he is a mature artist, born in 1968, Aitken inhabits a world formed in and through dematerialisation: in the catalogue he speaks of ‘a landscape that’s rudderless and nomadic’. This idea is perhaps best exemplified by the unforgettable migration (empire) (2008), an extended meditation on the great westward American expansion across the continent. In a series of mundane motels, we find wild animals: a bison paws the carpet, a mountain lion casually savages bedpillows, two white peacocks pose, a delicate little deer sips from a bright-blue swimming pool. The huge video projections are mounted on massive steel billboards: this is America, this is modernity.

Doug Aitken, Earthwork: Aperture series, 2019, installation view. Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2021. (Courtesy the artist; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; 303 Gallery, New York; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; Victoria Miro Gallery, London; and Regen Projects, Los Angeles © the artist Photograph: Dan Boud)

In some ways, Aitken takes up the Romantic Sublime that lurks just beneath American appreciation of the natural world, especially the great western regions of the country. The catalogue cover shows a more recent work, Earthwork: Aperture series (2018), an aerial view of snaking blacktop in a dusty orange desert. It’s ominously hot. Yet this Sublime has a Californian twist that is intelligent, informed, labile. Los Angeles has a distinguished history of contemporary art: Atiken mentions the great conceptual artist John Baldessari, and I think especially of Ed Ruscha, that visual poet of settled landscapes, whose solo exhibition was presented at the MCA in 2004; Aitken’s work appeared in Rachel Kent’s 2003 exhibition Liquid Sea. But this solo exhibition shows his mature work to be seen in depth. Kent’s crisp selection includes a brace of remarkable projects, and the interrogative generosity of the practice registers. Just one example: the spectacular but restrained Sonic Fountain II (2013–15) stages an uneasy antagonism between natural forces and technology that Australians understand too well. Water patters rhythmically into a large milky pool surrounded by rubble; it is a beautiful wasteland with a postmodern lyric. Given Aitken’s fondness for splintered images, for the hard surfaces of contemporary life, the overall mood is surprisingly poetic. An uncanny disjunction is staged in this impeccable exhibition: between the perfection that human technology delivers and ungovernable natural forces. I saw the whole as symphonic, not only for the various soundtracks, but in the orchestration of ideas. I wasn’t surprised to hear Aitken say in a Zoom media preview that he sees the entire show as a composition.

This is an exhibition for our times. At the preview, Kent pointed out that Aitken’s expansive projects take on pressing contemporary issues that are prescient of the current Covid moment – a NEW ERA indeed. The work speaks about cohabitation between humans and the natural world, and different ideas of time and space from the geological to the digital. Different time codes recur through the works and in the accompanying publication: the time taken for the extended interviews between Aitken and Kent, for instance; the location co-ordinates and time stamps found on the black-and-white documentary photographs. During the Zoom session, Aitken noted that he made the show specifically for Sydney, and for the MCA’s spaces. However, as he makes many major works outside museum contexts, the MCA is also the conduit to that wider world: the film of the performance work Station to Station (2013) is being screened, for example, and a dedicated room within the show focuses on works in the public domain.

Doug Aitken, Sonic Fountain II, 2013/2015, installation view. Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2021. (Courtesy the artist; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; 303 Gallery, New York; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; Victoria Miro Gallery, London; and Regen Projects, Los Angeles © the artist. Photograph: Jacquie Manning)

Co-produced by the MCA and Thames & Hudson, the book is opulent and idiosyncratic. It comprises six focused interviews that Kent conducted in various Los Angeles locations in February 2021, accompanied by a wealth of illustrations, both those monochrome stills from a 2021 documentary, and beautiful colour plates of the works. Initially I was dubious: what can capture the ephemerality of Aitken’s grand outdoor installations, such as SONG I (2012–15)? The visual density of videos such as Diamond sea (1997)? Now I am convinced. This lovely book addresses these projects as only a book can, with thoughtful juxtapositions of text and image. Moving images are translated into still photographs alongside the transcribed (and edited) conversations, making something quite other than the original works, wonderfully ruminative and multi-directional. Aitken has worked with interviews and books before, and it shows in this collaboration: NEW ERA makes a distinctive and original contribution to the literature on his work. To underscore the point, the most recent work in the exhibition, Catalogue Raisonné, is just that: all the works since 1998 collected into three volumes, grouped by media.

The opening of NEW ERA marks another beginning: the exhibition was Elizabeth Ann Macgregor’s last as the MCA’s director, and this was Kent’s final curatorial project there; Macgregor is returning to her native Scotland as expatriate Australian Suzanne Cotter arrives as director, and Kent is now the director at Bundanon. Yet one aspect of the MCA’s core mission will not change: the Sydney International Art Series (SIAS) of grand exhibitions by leading contemporary artists, mounted since 2011 with NSW government support, continues the MCA’s commitment to the vision of founder–benefactor John Power in his 1939 will: ‘to make available to the people of Australia the latest ideas and theories … of the most recent contemporary art of the world’. The series includes artists as diverse as Grayson Perry (2015–16), Pipilotti Rist (2017–18), David Goldblatt (2018–19), and Cornelia Parker (2019–20). Over the summer of 2020–21, with NEW ERA deferred because of the pandemic, the MCA mounted a highly successful Lindy Lee survey.

The MCA’s post-Covid program is still to be confirmed, but given the highly anticipated opening in late 2022 of the expanded Art Gallery of New South Wales, this is a pivotal moment for the visual arts in Sydney. Finally, the city will have the depth and capacity in its art museums that a great cultural centre needs. I think Sydney might be looking up, as well as ahead.

Doug Aitken: NEW ERA is at the MCA Australia until 6 February 2022. NEW ERA: Doug Aitken, edited by Rachel Kent, MCA Australia/Thames & Hudson Australia, $70 hb, 288 pp.

This article is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.