Harmony

Douglas Gordon’s Harmony
– the genealogy of soundtracks

Douglas Gordon’s “Harmony” could be described as a kind of genealogy of motion picture soundtracks. Nineteen movies shown on as many monitors form a vast genealogical tree whose branches are connected by the music; music forms the genetic link between them. The work flirts both with a strict scientific analysis and with the restless zapping between television channels. “Harmony”, contradictory though it may seem, is a chaotic experience with an impeccable logical structure. That structure, in turn, shows our own most individual and irrational association paths.

The chaos of sounds and images inside Prästgården [The Vicarage] is overwhelming, and the title “Harmony” at first glance seems to represent the exact opposite of what it says. It’s quite simply impossible for the human senses to perceive film sequences and sounds from nineteen different monitors at the same time. But that, on the other hand, is not the intention, and soon the eyes catch sight of the handwritten texts placed beside every monitor on the wall. The texts contain indexes of the music used in the movies shown on the monitors. From almost every index, or film, one or more lines extend to other films. Thus, the composer becomes the link that connects the different movies’ different plots, characters and moods. Our eyes resting on the thin cords which diverge above our heads, we can follow composers such as Rachmaninoff from the movie Brief Encounter (1945) to Shine (1996), and Beethoven from Shine to A Clockwork Orange (1971). And so it continues, with few but significant exceptions. From two or three monitors, loose cords hang by the composers’ names, indicating that the genealogical tree “Harmony” has the potentiality to grow, for new movies to be added to it, for new relations to be established. If the links between the movies – the composers – can be considered the structure of “Harmony”, there’s also another aspect which is equally, if not more, important to Gordon’s entire artistic production: experiencing movies through television.

Gordon suggests that movies as transmitted through television is his generation’s version of Proust’s madeleine. A movie or a sequence from it can trigger a large number of associations, all connected to the memory of watching a film in front of the television. Since Gordon is interested in the relation between our perception and our memory, he chooses to work with movies that are well-known to most of us. That’s why “Taxi Driver” or “Psycho”, for instance, are important features of his production.

“Harmony” has the same purpose of triggering memories around one or several of the movies. Furthermore, here the eye and the ear can zap or switch between different movies, just as if you were at home, holding the remote in your hand. At the same time, Gordon suggests that the music forms a pattern for our thoughts, a pattern akin to a scientific structure. That “Harmony” is made up of two antitheses – the scientific attitude and the one promoting random and chaos – is an example of a general interest in opposites in Gordon’s work; perception – memory, seduction – violence, hate – love, etc. The artist and the audience jointly establish and explore these opposites. “Harmony” also points at another phenomenon which returns in several of his works. He lets the audience face a certain confusion at first, before realising that the work contains a code which must be cracked. During this brief but important moment, the frustration possibly grows even larger. This is the case because what we perceive but still can’t interpret actually consists of well-known elements from movies we’ve seen before. The well-known is simply orchestrated in a different way than the one we’re used to. But once we catch the drift a structure or system appears, and that leads us further into Gordon’s works.

In “Harmony” we follow the cords stretched above our heads, from composer to composer, movie to movie. But in this impeccable logic, it’s equally obvious that the work triggers our own most individual memories and associations. Douglas Gordon, quite simply, makes us stretch out or own cords across time and space.

Text: Annika Hansson