MMP: Douglas Gordon

With his conceptually-based yet poetic work, Douglas Gordon (born in 1966 in Glasgow) has become one of the most outstanding artists of the 1990s. He moves with ease between different media using texts, performance, photography, video and installations. Often he confronts the viewer with both a psychological intensity and moral ambiguitiy. Many of his works are strongly related to cinema and he has utilised material ranging from cult films like “Psycho” and “The Searchers” to amateur videos and medical documentaries. These have been transferred to video and, through mirroring, duplication and slow motion, have been manipulated to re-present the image in different kinds of spatial installation.

For Moderna Museet Projekt Douglas Gordon has produced a new installation entitled “Harmony”. This makes allusions to Moderna Museet Projekt’s investigative and experimental character and is built like a laboratory of a research-based film archive. In Prästgården’s darkened former assembly hall, nineteen small monitors show feature films which are a fragment of a family tree of film history in which music plays an important role. Among the films are 2001- A Space Odessey, Wild at Heart, The Deerhunter, Platoon and The Godfather III. Surprisningly several of the films contain the same passages of music. Gordon has used film music as a basis for his work before. The powerful “Feature Film” (1999), the first film that he directed himself, shows the hands of a conductor conducting a symphony orchestra as it plays the music for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”, a film that uses dialogue sparingly.

While many of Douglas Gordon’s works are based on dichotomies – between passion and angst, hate and love, seduction and violence, life and death, perception and memory, “Harmony” contains ideas about unity and influence. Films from various periods and places are linked together in both expected and unexpected ways. However, as is so often the case in his work, the viewer is both physically and psychically engaged. In this sense “Harmony” is reminiscent of “Something between my mouth and your ear” (1994), a suggestive installation in deep blue, in which hit songs from The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, The Kinks and other popgroups are played. All these songs were hits during the period January to August 1966 – the time when Douglas Gordon was still in his mother’s womb.

Douglas Gordon is now showing the installation “Left is right and right is wrong and left is wrong and right is right” at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York and he is also participating in the group exhibition Locally Interested at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Sofia.

Curator: Maria Lind