Douglas Gordon

Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris
Through April 30

Among the young British artists more than ever riding high, the Scotsman Douglas Gordon (born in Glasgow in 1966) is perhaps the one who produced the best video and film installations. Utilizing mostly the technique of slow motion to the extreme, he was able to create such extraordinary effects of alienation, temporal and spatial, that he was able to question, in original terms, the normal key to the understanding and interpreting of film images, even, and particularly, those which came to be part of the collective memory, and therefore of mass culture, such as the most famous movies. His most famous work, which determined his international success, is Twenty Four Hour Psycho (1993), which is the projection, on a screen in the middle of an empty room, of Hitchcock’s famous movie (a mirror image is also visible on the back of the screen), slowed down so much that the famous murder scene in the shower takes half an hour instead of two minutes. This temporal dilation triggers a mental short between the well defined and harrowing rhythms of suspense and those of analytical recognition of each projected frame. In the show devoted to Gordon by the Musèe d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, this video installation is on view together with many other works utilizing film materials, such as, for instance, Déja Vu and Words and Pictures (1966), but the curator’s intention is to stage the whole of the artist’s research, which uses also other means to develop his poetics, characterized by a more articulate conceptual attitude. At the center of Gordon’s attention, in fact, is the question of a person’s identity, based on memory, in relation to the society in which that person lives. On the one hand, concerning the artist’s personal identity, a singular work in progress is shown, just a space on the wall where the names of all the people that he had connections with are listed. A list that in 1990 had 1440 names, and today has many thousands. To this realm belongs also another work which presents the list of all the movies shown in his hometown during the interval from his conception to his birth (December 20, 1965 – September 20, 1966). On the other hand – the side of anonymous identities, erased by society – we find videos documenting, through images in slow motion characterized by a lucid and tragic obviousness, the living conditions of alienated people, reduced to a mere “clinical body”.




Francesco Poli
Translation by Bruna Pegoraro Brylawski