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DOUGLAS GORDON Perception, Appropriation And Self-Representation: The Influence Of Cinema And The Use Of The Body by Jose Carlos Teixeira The main purpose of this text is reflecting on Douglas Gordon’s ability to explore important aspects of the human condition, perception and memory, through his appropriation of cinema and his strategy of self-representation. Thus, this essay does not pretend to describe or analyze extensively all his works, but refer to the most emblematic ones, putting them finally in the context of the art scene since the 1980s and the British one in particular. Douglas Gordon was born in 1966 in Glasgow (Scotland) where, in addition to Cologne, he continues to live and work. Since his first solo show, when he was only 20 years old, Gordon has exhibited extensively all over the world. Having received Britain’s Turner Prize (1996), the Venice Biennial’s Premio (1997) and the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize (1998), he is, in fact, one of the most prominent and influential artists of his generation. From 1984 to 1988, Gordon studied at the Glasgow School of Art where he was greatly influenced by the Environmental Department. “Looking back, I feel as though we were given as much freedom as we wanted, but all this freedom was under the philosophical umbrella which was that the artist had to be able to understand the context in which the work has to be seen”, he said. This idea of context being 50% of the work played an important role on his conceptual approach to several projects. Later on, he undertook a graduate program at the Slade School of Art in London, from 1988 to 1990. In interviews, Gordon clearly assumed that he did not enjoy all the time at that school. He spent more time in cinemas and bars, as a priority activity, than in the college. In this we already appreciate the difference between the 1980s generation and the earlier conceptual generation of the 1970s. We are not talking anymore about fighting against preconceived artistic models in order to build a new philosophy; instead, we talk about art as enjoyment and spontaneity, based on personal interests or being a natural extension of those interests. According to this, it is significant that for Gordon art is merely an excuse for a conversation, an excuse for communicating. Furthermore, for him “if there is no difference between ‘artists’ and ‘people’, then there are no barriers to art.” Douglas Gordon also assumed that one of the problems he had when studying at the Slade School of Art was the progressive loss of his enjoyment for cinema, something that had always been a very important part of his life. Due to the structuralist tendency of analyzing every element, at the cinema he would think more about technical aspects of filmmaking - not on the screen - rather than absorbing the actual movie. “The idea of enjoyment just left me. (…) Entertainment gives you an ending – but enjoyment goes on long after. Enjoyment is in your head but entertainment stops when the curtain closes.” Ultimately, his words are establishing the distinction between art and entertainment, thus defining the role of the artist as communicator. Dealing with the central issues of perception and memory - perception in a psychological way and memory in a collective dimension - Gordon develops a permanent re-contextualization of ideas and emotions in his works. By ‘kidnapping’ films, music, objects and texts, the artist - more as an ‘editor’ and less as an ‘artist’ - creates a space of evocation and association for the audience; a space where people think and talk about what they have seen. “I suppose it has to do with perception – or how the mechanics of perception work”, he says. “By looking at something as broad as these mechanisms, I can make specific explorations into the territory of memory and the ways in which perception breaks up or breaks down. And it also means that I don’t have to be tied down to any one medium… to use whatever material seems to be appropriate for the idea.” Therefore, he uses not only video installation as medium but also text, sound and photographs. In Something Between My Mouth And My Ear (1994), he offers the viewer an interesting and original installation. The work is a blue room, which grows lighter and darker according to the time of day since it is not provided with artificial light. Inside the room he plays all the songs his mother listened to when she was pregnant with him, between January and September of 1966. Indeed, these are the first sounds that Gordon may have heard. As he said once, “I was interested in a hidden influence on my perception of the world, by using the idea that we can be conditioned by culture even when we aren’t conscious of that.” Using an autobiographical strategy, he leads us into a set of collective associations and cultural references. If at first sight the room seems to be impersonal, it becomes visceral and increasingly intimate. Considering the extreme relevance of cinema in Gordon’s work, his aim has always been making the viewer more aware of the shifting subjectivity of the world. He is therefore concerned with the viewer’s psychological relationship with the moving image. In other words, he is interested in the reception of cinema, knowing that the circumstances in which we watch a film change the way we read it. As he stated, “that’s the social aspect of film, the social aspect of the perception of film. I am interested in it because it is beyond definition. This is a crucial difference between cinema and other art forms – it is constantly moving and building. Most people don’t watch movies on their own… It is funny that there is an ironic kind of intimacy around a medium that is commercially so vulgar sometimes.” Moreover, he also reflects on how voyeurism has entered the cultural consciousness through cinema: “(…) most films play with the idea of ‘what-should-not-be-seen’ as an essential part of the narrative in order to provoke feelings of guilt, fear or sexual excitement in the viewer.” Douglas Gordon connects his interest in film to the childhood experience of falling asleep to the films his parents used to watch on television. “For me there was no difference between seeing a Truffaut film late at night when I was sixteen in bed watching television, and watching a John Ford movie or a Huston movie in bed with my parents when I was maybe three, four or five years old. It was not exactly the social context but the physical context of watching that knitted together all my experiences.” Consequently, there was no distinction between art-house movies and Hollywood classics for him; there were simply good or bad films. Besides the fascination and the engagement with Alfred Hitchcock, the most influential cinema for him was the French Nouvelle Vague (Truffaut, Godard and Rhomer among many others), B movies, noir movies and westerns. In his methodology of work, Gordon re-examines archival film footage, often in slow motion, revealing psychological and socio-cultural aspects of history. By using both original and appropriated footage, often in the form of video installations with suspended screens, his work has explored themes such as temptation and fear, life and death, good and evil, and guilt and innocence. Undoubtedly, Gordon asks for an active involvement of the viewer in order to express a perception of human condition as mutable and paradoxical. As one may easily recognize, the artist often employs films whose protagonists suffer from unstable personalities or are in some sort of possession. 24 Hour Psycho (1993) consists of Hitchock’s 1960 film ‘Psycho’, slowed down so that a single viewing lasts for twenty-four hours. We can experience narrative elements by associating with the original, but the slowness cuts our expectations. The pace is, therefore, slow enough for contemplation and association. Here, if time cannot be experienced as a sequence, it must be experienced as presence. Gordon comes up with essential themes in his work such as recognition and repetition, time and memory, authorship and authenticity. “As I see it, it is not simply a work of appropriation. It is more like an act of affiliation”, he said once. “The original work is a masterpiece and I’ve always loved to watch it… I wanted to maintain the authorship so that when the audience would see my 24 hour psycho they would think much more about Hitchcock and much less about me.” In Hysterical (1995), Douglas Gordon recycles a turn-of-the-century medical film in which a masked woman, apparently suffering from hysteria, was maltreated by doctors supposedly engaged in a cure. The material is looped, continuing the crisis indefinitely; this medical footage is extended ad infinitum bringing the ideas of myth of disease and repetition: he duplicates the video-projection so that they appear on two separate free-standing screens. One projection runs at normal speed while the other has been slowed down and reversed in a mirror reflection of itself. As a matter of fact, the notions of duality, doubling and split identity are often present in Gordon’s works, addressing again this concept of paradox within the human condition. Some video and photographic pieces show how much the artist and his body are constantly implicated in the work. Self-representation is a method that, in Gordon, is not much about an idiosyncratic approach (or closed self-reference), but more about the use of the individuality in a larger collective sphere of recognition: how the image is also part of ourselves, making us more aware of the contradictions of the human nature. The video called Divided Self I and II (1996) is part of an ongoing series of single screen videos featuring parts of the artist’s body engaged in different movements and actions. In this specific work, we see two arms – one smooth clean-shaved, one hairy – fighting each other for dominance. Both belong to Douglas Gordon, although one hardly recognizes this at first glance. Within this struggle for control of the self, there is a clear fascination with doubling and mirroring. The effect is complicated by the inclusion of real mirrors in the installation space, which further disorient the viewer adding levels of experience and content. One of his best-known self-portraits is Monster (1996-1997). Here, Gordon appears captive of dual personalities, between innocence and guilt, good and evil, normality and aberration. The photograph guides us into conflicting but coexisting states: Gordon as a normal young man and, beside it, as a disfigured creature (image made by covering and pulling the face with scotch-tape). This conversion from the familiarity to the weirdness brings up the idea that something monstrous and outrageous can eventually lie very close to the surface. Self-Portrait As Kurt Cobain, As Andy Warhol, As Myra Hindley, As Marilyn Monroe (1996) is another interesting example of how Gordon explores self-representation and transformation. The picture shows the artist in masquerade, performing an identity that places references to pop-cultural icons together with a serial killer. When Gordon was awarded the Turner Prize in 1996, this was the photo he gave to the media. Regardless of the intended of provocation, joke or critique of the prize and its name, this work was, to a certain extent, a way for the artist to distance himself from his own representation. Also using the photo as medium, Tattoo I and Tattoo II (1994) emphasize Gordon’s utilization of the body as a site of constant alteration and, simultaneously, as a place where certain things become fixed. His “trust me” tattoo is a work of art but it is also a permanent inscription on his left arm. It is a permanent appeal; we have no reason not to trust him, except for the phrase itself: it eventually leads us into a realm of doubt and distrust. In Tattoo (For Reflection) we have again, literally and metaphorically, the idea of mirror. The word “guilty” can be seen on the writer Oscar Boogaard’s left shoulder only when he reflects his back in the mirror we see in the picture. Thus, the mirror becomes symbolic of self-examination, keeping its common meanings: the process of recognition and the notion of double. Going back to the analysis of video installations as the core of Douglas Gordon’s artwork, Confessions Of A Justified Sinner (1995-1996) takes further this idea of duality. In this installation, Gordon combines two Scottish novels: The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson and Private Memories and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg. Appropriating the schizophrenic transformation scene from Mamoulian’s Hollywood version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932), the artist shows the character’s slow process of change from one to another identity. Again, the viewer is immersed in this tension between the concepts of good and evil, while watching the duplicated image on two separated screens, one positive and the other negative. In doing so, Gordon enrolls himself in the tradition of split identity established by those writers, always addressing the luminous and obscure sides of human nature. Between Darkness And Light (1997) is another identical work in terms of concept and combination of different sources. However, this video-projection stages now a confrontation between two films: The Song of Bernadette (1943), in black and white, and The Exorcist (1973), a film in color. Shown at the same time on a single screen, the films are played without any kind of alteration to the original sound or speed. Both are about possession – the Devil against the Virgin Mary in a struggle for control over the mind of the individual. At first, this seems to be a simple juxtaposition of opposites, but the combined effect is anything but divided: everything comes together in a new kind of purgatory and we find ourselves as spectators in-between. The resulting ‘third image’ is actually peculiar and mysterious. As Gordon stated, he was “trying to get to the point where you can make sense of even the most chaotic images which formally are battling each other. While one film is representing good, and one represents evil, the fact is that they can coexist quite easily on a physical and conceptual level.” Developing once more the ideas of double and recognition, the artist takes a scene from Martin Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver to create Through The Looking Glass (1999). In that 71-second scene, the lead character talks to himself in the mirror and rehearses a confrontation with some unnamed enemy. Played by Robert DeNiro, the character repeats “You talking to me?” as he slips an automatic pistol from under his shirt and points it at the camera. In Gordon’s video installation, with real sound and two projections on opposite walls, the viewer feels somehow caught in a random act of violence by an armed madman. Facing each other, the two screens (from floor to ceiling) generate a specific kind of place that immerses the audience in a spectacle of aggression and paranoia. Douglas Gordon has duplicated and inverted films in order to complicate the cinematic gaze, but he has also divided film into its components. In Feature Film (1999), he detached the soundtrack from the Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo (1958), transforming the musical score into an independent entity with a visual dimension. While Gordon attests again his fascination with the ‘master of suspense’, taking from the movie questions of double identity, desire and obsession, he simultaneously pays homage to the score of Bernard Hermann. Thus, this complex, emotional and impressive installation consists of a large projection in which one only sees a close-up of James Conlon, principal conductor of the Paris Opera, performing the score for Vertigo. The music runs along with the dramatic movements of the hands and the head of the orchestra’s conductor. Feature Film is not a deconstruction of Hitchcock’s thriller. Rather, it relies on the ability of evoking that film while giving new life to the original score. Resisting a definitive presentation, the piece exists in three versions: a 35mm film; an installation combining a projection of the film with a mute copy of Vertigo itself which is shown in a smaller scale beside the larger one; and, finally, just as music on a CD recording. “(…) For now, I love the version that includes the projection of Vertigo in the same space as my Feature Film,” as he put it. “That’s my love, because it’s confusing. I loved that when we showed it in London with a tiny Vertigo and a huge Feature Film, most people still watched the Hollywood version. (…) They were compelled, in a way.” Considering all these emblematic works by Douglas Gordon, it seems relevant to briefly analyze them under the light of the art scene during the last two decades. Even though Gordon had said that the Scottish art and himself were away from the ‘object-making’ of the 1980s (the whole recuperation of painting and sculpture), it is inevitable to locate Gordon’s attitude within the broad postmodernist context; within a period of time where concepts of appropriation, quotation and popular culture were actually undermining an intellectualized and serious way to make art. Many other artists have also used appropriation to question notions of authorship and authenticity. In Britain, several artists of his generation (nominated or winners of the Turner Prize) have employed filmic mechanisms and used the process of cinematic narrative as well. Steve McQueen (London, 1969) has developed strong video and film installations, addressing social and anthropological issues, and showing an extreme and unexpected use of the camera. By putting it in unfamiliar positions, he questions the way we tend to look at things. Also, an internationally recognized artist, Isaac Julien (London, 1960) co-founded Sankofa Film and Video, a pioneering group of young black British filmmakers. Always innovative and controversial, Julien has used filmic strategies of narrative and beauty to subvert stereotypes of gender and race. Born in Birmingham in 1963, Gillian Wearing has been recognized not only for her photographs but also for her videos where she develops filming techniques. Both funny and disturbing, her works often explore the friction between public and private spheres, between impulse and norms of behavior in everyday life. As artists, they all have found in the cinematic experience and in video production a solid basis for a process of communication. Among them, Douglas Gordon might be one of the most interesting examples of an extraordinary ability to point out the ambiguities of our condition and to question concepts of authenticity through his appropriation of countless movies, texts and sounds. # # # # # |
SPRING 2005 ISSUE BIBLIOGRAPHY FERGUSON, Russell. Douglas Gordon. The Museum of Contemporary Art, LA, The MIT Press, Cambridge, and London, England, 2001 GORDON, Douglas. Feature Film – catalogue of exhibition, 1999 GORDON, Douglas. Douglas Gordon . Black spot – catalogue of the exhibition, Tate Liverpool, 2000 GORDON, Douglas. Kidnapping. Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 1998 Several websites HALL, Dough & FIFER, Sally Jo (ed.) Illuminating Video – An Essential Guide to Video Art. New York, Aperture and Bay Area Video Coalition, 1990 RUSH, Michael. New Media in Late 20th-Century Art. New York, Thames & Hudson, 1999 # # # # # Jose Carlos Teixeira (b. 1977) is a Portuguese artist currently pursuing an MFA at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) as a Fulbright Scholar, after having recently studied and lived in New York City. His work is interdisciplinary by nature, and mostly focused on installation, video and performance. So far, he has been recipient of some awards, involved in many art projects, workshops and collaborations, as well as exhibited in several art shows in Portugal, UK, Spain, Cyprus and USA (New York and Cincinnati). Besides that, he has had experiences in music, experimental theater and has worked as docent in the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art and as teacher of art. jct260ATnyu.edu # # # # # The exhibition “Douglas Gordon”, curated by Russell Ferguson, was on view at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Feb. 12 through May 9. It was organized and debuted at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in Sept. 2001 and has traveled to the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver (spring 2002) and Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (spring 2003). IMAGE INFO: Photo by Lee Stalsworth at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC. Installation shots.
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