Douglas Gordon

Douglas Gordon was born on 20 September 1966 in Glasgow, Scotland and is still alive. He was brought up in a strict religious family. His mother was Jehovah’s witness and he often accompanied her to preach door-to-door. He graduated in 1990 at the Slade School of Art in London after studying at the Glasgow School of Art.

This famous video artist was revealed to the public thanks to his work « 24 Hour Psycho » which he won the Tuner Prize for in 1996. The film was produced in 1993 and is a slow motion film version of Hitchcock’s Psycho. The original version lasts 109 minutes with 24 frames a second whereas this one uses only 2 frames a second and therefore lasts 24 hours. After a few years he eventually considered this film as a mistake and reworked it. The remake, “One Minute Psycho”, is a one-minute fast motion version of it.

Gordon has more recently realised “Zidane: a 21st century portrait”, a documentary about the famous football player and “k.364”, his latest creation. “K.364” was to be seen last month during an exhibition at the Gagosian gallery in London. Douglas Gordon excels in other fields of art (sculpture, photography…) and his exhibitions attract a lot of people all over the world. One of his most famous works of art is undoubtedly « List of Names », a project initiated in 1990. It consists of an almost exhaustive list of the people the artist remembers to have met during his lifetime. It is currently exposed in the “Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris”.

Gordon has a very particular style. He often uses new video techniques and plays with time elements. In “Through a looking glass” he works on a famous monologue of Robert de Niro in the film Taxi driver. De Niro is talking to a mirror and asking it “You talkin’ to me?” For his adaptation, Gordon uses two facing screens: one projection representing the original film sequence, the reflection in the mirror, while the other one is a reversed image of the scene. The two images begin synchronically but they progressively differ, giving the impression that they respond to one another and echoing the mental disorder of the character. Duality and repetitions of the time characterize this film but also the style of Douglas Gordon in general.

Angèle Mars & Simon Nulens