Douglas Gordon was born in 1966 in Glasgow to a working class family.  From 1984 to 1988 he studied at the Glasgow School of Art, and then from 1988 to 1990 at the Slade School of Art in London [1].  In 1996 he was awarded the Turner Prize, and the following year he was presented with one of three Premio 2000 prizes at the Venice Biennale.  Although he is best known for his video installations, his work takes on many forms: photography, performance, musical collage, text, diverse projections, sound installations.  His video installations are largely inspired by cinematic classics, especially those of Alfred Hitchcock: 24 Hours Psycho (1993) based on Psycho (1960) and Feature Film (1999) based on Vertigo (1958), and also Through a Looking Glass (1999) based on Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) and Otto Preminger's Whirlpool (1976) which inspired Left is Right and Left is Wrong and Right is Right.  Douglas Gordon offers a new interpretation of these classics and in addition invites the viewer to contemplate questions of perception, memory and time.  It deals with “an art that doesn't speak of cinema but rather uses cinema as a point of reference to envisage another comprehension of the image, free from the constraints imposed by traditional narration: beyond time, beyond limit.[2]  24 Hour Psycho , produced in 1993 is a prime example.  The artist slows down Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho to the point that the movie lasts 24 hours.  Hitchcock's film becomes unrecognizable and the plot impossible to follow.  The viewer is required to rely on his own recollections of the film and is also subjected to an extreme distortion of time. 

Similarly, the system put in place for Déjà-vu (2000) provokes a heightened awareness of our temporal points of reference: the same film (DOA – Dead On Arrival- by Rudolph Maté, 1949) is projected onto three large scale screens that are placed side by side.  The three projections are slightly unsynchronized:  the first is shown at a speed of 24 frames/second, the second at 23 frames/second and the third at 26 frames/second.  This system causes a time lag of 8 minutes between the three projections thus provoking a sensation of “déjà-vu” for the viewer. 

In addition to video installations, the artist works with photography and written texts:  List of Names, started in 1990, occupies an entire wall at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.  This piece is a “work in progress” in which the artist tries to list every person he remembers meeting.  Through this action he explores the mechanics of memory.  These works are in a way hybrid, existing between the realms of autobiography and universality.  His series of photographs of tattooed bodies such as the Tattoo for Reflection (1997) an image of a shoulder with the word Guilty inscribed on it, only legible when reflected in a mirror or the photographs of the artist's own arm with the inscription “Trust me” (Tattoo (I) and Tattoo (II) 1994) show a more personal aspect of his work, which focuses on the individual.

The title of the work Something Between My Mouth and Your Ear (1994) emphasizes a desire to establish a connection between the artist and the viewer.  This spatial and sound installation displayed in a large room and lit only by a few blue neon lights, causes the visitor to lose his bearings: there, he hears songs from the 1966 “hit-parade”, the same songs that the artist's mother listened to during her pregnancy.  This “pre-natal” memory recreated by the artist is a work that deals with recollection, cultural context and the factors that condition our perception of the world.

In 2006 Douglas Gordon along with Philippe Parreno directed a documentary film Zidane: A 21^st Century Portrait.  During an entire football match at the Spanish championship between Real Madrid and Villareal, seventeen cameras, some with very powerful zooms, were trained on Zinedine Zidane and recorded all of his movements.  The two artists film the match in a way that breaks the accepted codes of tele-visual language at the level of the field and without commentary.  

Emilie Benoit

Translated by Silvia Sabino

________________________________________

[1] “Considering my family environment, I should have begun working when I was 16 years old.  I am the oldest of four kids and towards the end of high school my father had lost his job, my mother was pregnant.  Except I didn't want to stop my studies.  But I didn't know what to do.  I wanted to be a writer, filmmaker or artist, even an architect.  A teacher of min had written on my report card when I was 10 years old that I was destined to study art.  And my parents never forgot.  I would draw all the time and I was bad at football.  I had to do something.  I enrolled at Glasgow School of Art.” Douglas Gordon, cited by Jade Lindgaard, “Touche ecossaise” (Scottish Touch), Les Inrockuptibles, Dec 20, 2000, Paris.

[2] Jade Lindgaard, “Touche ecossaise” (Scottish Touch), Les Inrockuptibles, Dec 20, 2000, Paris