Douglas Gordon and Cinema as Art

Douglas Gordon is one of the most important artists enriching our current art world – and especially the art market. He is currently ranked 24th artfacts.net

Do you love cinema, well-made films, drama, still captivating and artistically unsurpassed classics of the film world, and even quirky experiments with the medium, on screen or video? Then Douglas Gordon is actually "your" artist:

What kind of art does Douglas Gordon create?

Douglas Gordon is passionate about conceptually designed media art, and his work also touches on many other areas of visual art: Douglas Gordon also works artistically as a photographer, he turns texts into works of art, and he also likes to work as a draftsman and painter.

Since the mid-1980s, however, Gordon has primarily made a name for himself with his video installations, film art projects, audio artworks, and paintings . The jury that awarded Gordon the Roswitha Haftmann Prize in 2008 stated:

The aesthetic brilliance and emotional impact of his video works are in no way inferior to those of his role models – especially the films of Alfred Hitchcock.”

The world into which Douglas Gordon was born

Douglas Lamont Gordon was born on September 20, 1966 in Glasgow, the son of Gordon Brown (no, not the former UK Prime Minister, although he was also born in Glasgow; Douglas Gordon's father was a carpenter) and Mary Clements Gordon.

He grew up with three siblings, and it is recorded that during his childhood and youth, Gordon was among the first enthusiastic consumers of mass media, which began to play an increasingly important role in daily life in the 1970s.

Anyone who looks at Douglas Gordon's work quickly learns that these early experiences had a lasting artistic impact on him.

This is how Douglas Gordon learned art

After graduating from high school in 1984, Douglas Gordon went to the venerable Glasgow School of Art, where he completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1988. For his subsequent Master's studies, he left Glasgow and moved to London, where he graduated from the Slade School of Art in 1990.

The choice of this educational institution demonstrates insight, self-confidence and a commitment to quality: The Slade School of Fine Art is the art school of University College London, a college of the University of London, which is one of the largest colleges in Great Britain and also one of the most prestigious.

University College, together with Oxford and Cambridge Universities, the London School of Economics and Political Science and Imperial College London, forms the G5, a group of super-elite universities, and UCL is ranked second after Cambridge and thus ahead of Oxford.

The art school of this college is therefore naturally one of the most important British art schools; moreover, the Slade School is also internationally known as a leading training institution for artists.

In any case, this educational institution was a good choice; Slade has produced many famous artists, including Martin Creed and Antony Gormley, Richard Hamilton and Mona Hatoum, William Turnbull and Rachel Whiteread, to name just a few, and design legend Eileen Gray and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) co-founder Mary Quinn Sullivan also acquired their knowledge of art at this institute.

When and why did Douglas Gordon become famous as an artist?

Douglas Gordon also managed to climb the ladder of artistic success quite quickly; in 1990 he graduated, and from then on he exhibited at the “Transmissions Gallery” in Glasgow and quickly became internationally known through exhibitions held together with artists such as Ross Sinclair, Christine Borland, Simon Starling and Martin Boyce.

In 1993 he had his first solo exhibition, and in 1993 he also presented the work that would henceforth be considered the trademark of his work: At that time, the video installation “24 Hour Psycho” a sensation, in which Gordon Hitchcock’s classic “Psycho” was shown as a 24-hour slow-motion version and without sound on the screen.

It is sometimes claimed that Douglas Gordon came up with the idea of ​​reducing the film's pace to two frames per second while quite drunk… But Gordon is simply telling the truth about how he came up with the idea for this video installation: He had always wanted to make a film, but like most young people, he didn't have the money for it.

Gordon envisioned a “kind of epic” film, and in his situation it seemed like a good idea to use an already existing film.

That it became Hitchcock's "Psycho" was a happy accident born out of boredom. Gordon was visiting his family for Christmas, was bored, the television had finished broadcasting, and nobody wanted to go out for a drink with him. So he watched the available video of Hitchcock's "Psycho ," started playing around with the freeze-frame and slow-motion functions, and before he knew it, a work of art was in the making…

And this artwork was so well received that the alienation and manipulation of existing or specially created film material became Gordon's main theme from then on, which he interpreted in quite surprising ways: In 1994, in “something between my mouth and your ear”, on the time he spent in his mother's womb before his birth and on his experiences during pregnancy – in a dark room, the art-viewer is played the hits that the expectant Gordon had listened to between January 1966 and September 20, 1966, from speakers installed all around, a journey back in time to a past in which the artist himself was still in the process of becoming a physical being.

This style continued with considerable attention; by the turn of the millennium, Douglas Gordon had around 70 solo exhibitions and around 40 solo exhibitions in most of the world's major art centers.

Douglas Gordon's artistic triumph

Douglas Gordon quickly won over the art critics of the world; in 1996 he was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize by the London Tate Gallery featured at the Venice Biennale “Premio 2000” , and in 1998 he received the Hugo Boss Prize from the New York Guggenheim Museum .

And time and again he delights people for whom film art is paramount: in 1997, the video installation “Between Darkness and Light (after William Blake)” , in which Gordon paired one of the original creations of the mystically darkened horror film and an epic historical drama with a religious background.

William Friedkin's *The Exorcist* (1973) collides here with the film drama *The Song of Bernadette*, which director Henry King (*The Snows of Kilimanjaro*, *Bravados*, 1950s) created in 1943 based on Franz Werfel's novel about the life of Saint Bernadette. In Gordon's artwork, the films are projected onto both sides of a semi-transparent screen, where they meet in reverse, creating effects that would surely have delighted William Blake, the old master of painted nature mysticism.

In 1998, Gordon had the idea to stage John Ford's iconic film "The Searchers" (Der schwarzbefalde) , filmed in 1956, "somewhat more literally": He relates the duration of the film's plot, 5 years, to the duration of the film in life – In the 113-minute film, it is shown how John Wayne needs five years to track down a kidnapped child.

Douglas Gordon's "5 year drive-by," lasts almost seven weeks, and this is not a randomly chosen length, but precisely calculated: Gordon relates the length of the film's plot to the length of the installation; a single-image projection of approximately 6 hours, shown over 47 days, corresponds to the film's length of 5 years.

In 1998 he received the Central Art Prize, awarded by the Cologne Art Association and the Cologne health insurance company of the same name, which, in addition to the prize money of 75,000 euros, gave the winner a six-month stay in Cologne, and the realization of an art project with a solo exhibition in the art association.

In 1998, Douglas Gordon exhibited in Tel Aviv and went to Berlin as a guest of the DAAD; in one year he got to know two places with which he would develop a lasting relationship, and in Berlin he already had a solo exhibition in the Neue Nationalgalerie in 1999.

In 1999, Gordon directed his first solo film, “Feature Film,” which was once again an engagement with a Hitchcock film, this time Vertigo. Here, Gordon took the memorable score of the masterpiece, had it re-recorded by the orchestra of the Opéra National de Paris, and during this recording, filmed the face and hands of chief conductor James Conlon with multiple cameras and from various perspectives.

The connection between the captured images and the familiar sound and plot of the classic film is left to the viewer's imagination.

In 2000, the “Douglas Gordon: Feature Film” was screened at the Royal Festival Hall in London. He also had solo exhibitions in Paris (“Croque-morts”, Yvon Lambert; “Sheep and Goats”, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris), Liverpool (“Douglas Gordon”, Tate Liverpool), and Toronto (“Double Cross: The Hollywood Films of Douglas Gordon”, The Power Plant). He remained in Canada for a retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and in 2001, further Douglas Gordon retrospectives were held at the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City and at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.

Douglas Gordon is now really “in” , between 2001 and 2006 he can be seen in Baden-Baden, Barcelona, ​​Bregenz, Champagne-Ardenne, Edinburgh, Esslingen, Folkestone, Kent, Karlsruhe, Copenhagen, Krakow, Leipzig, London, Los Angeles, Munich, New York, Nice, Paris, Pittville (UK), Seoul, Tamei (Japan), Twentynine Palms (California), Vancouver and Washington DC, in group exhibitions or solo exhibitions – in some of these cities several times.

In 2005, Gordon was once again in Berlin, where he presented his artwork “staying home and going out” in “The VANITY of Allegory.” The exhibition was organized by the Deutsche Guggenheim, a collaboration between Deutsche Bank and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

Douglas Gordon deals with the theme of self-reflection here in more than prominent company; alongside him are, for example, Bernardo Bertolucci, Francis Ford Coppola, Walt Disney, Marcel Duchamp , Federico Fellini, John Ford, Jean-Luc Godard, Damien Hirst , Jeff Koons, Stanley Kubrick, Man Ray , Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luchino Visconti, Andy Warhol and Lawrence Weiner, all represented with works on the theme of fleeting vanity.

In 2006, his career continued in Italy (Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto), Spain (Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona), and Scotland (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh), before returning to New York for the opening of a major solo exhibition, “Timeline,” at the Museum of Modern Art. Also in 2006, he presented his film, Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, a collaboration with French filmmaker Philippe Parreno, at Art Basel.

The two artists portray football star and national player Zinédine Zidane without words: 16 high-speed cameras and powerful zoom lenses track Zidane throughout an entire league match from the sidelines and the highest tier of the stands. Only Zidane is observed; the course of the game remains unclear. The focus is on movement and sequences of actions, on Zidane's facial expressions and gestures, creating a unique and enigmatic portrait.

In 2007, the solo exhibition “Between Darkness and Light” at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg took him to Wolfsburg, and in 2008 he received the Roswitha Haftmann Prize in Zurich.

Exactly 10 years after his first stay, Douglas Gordon returned to Berlin in 2008. He liked the city's creative, relaxed atmosphere and healthy green surroundings so much that he made it his third home (along with Glasgow and New York).

Does Douglas Gordon do anything besides create cinematic masterpieces?

Of course, as I said, he also works on conceptual texts. In “List of Names” he listed all the people he had met up to that point in 1990; the 1990 list contains 1440 names and is apparently intended to be continued.

He incorporates historical found footage material (uncut film material) and painted images into his video installations (Hysterical, 1994/95, 10 ms-1, 1994) and uses artistic photographs in installations; “Everything Is Nothing without Its Reflection – A Photographic Pantomime” (2013) consists of 360 individual objects.

Much honored and much collected – world-renowned artist Douglas Gordon

In addition to the aforementioned awards (Turner Prize, Hugo Boss Prize, “Premio 2000”, Central Art Prize and Roswitha Haftmann Prize), Gordon received the Käthe Kollwitz Prize from the Berlin Academy of Arts in 2012. In 2008, he was bestowed with a very significant honor – jury president Wim Wenders appointed Gordon to the jury of the 65th Venice Film Festival .

Today, Douglas Gordon is at the forefront of every list of most successful artists, and his works can be seen in many public collections in many countries: at the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Goetz Collection in Munich, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt, and in six locations in France (Avignon, Montpellier, Puteaux, and three times in Paris).

Two public collections in Canada (Ontario and Vancouver) and two in Austria (Maria Enzersdorf and Vienna) own a Gordon, as do one in Italy (Naples), one in the Netherlands (Amsterdam), one in Norway (Oslo), and one in Portugal (Alcoitão). Gordon is represented in important public collections in Switzerland (Zurich), the USA (Los Angeles), and England (London), and in his native Scotland, art enthusiasts can admire his work twice, in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Only his adopted home of Berlin has apparently not yet been able to afford a work by Gordon… however, his work can often be seen here in group exhibitions at truly reasonable admission prices.

How much does a work of art by Douglas Gordon cost?

In a living-room-friendly size and not as the world's only unique piece, at affordable prices: A limited edition of Douglas Gordon's work "staying home and going out," which was shown in the 2005 exhibition "The Vanity of Allegory" at the Deutsche Guggenheim, is now available for purchase. "staying home and going out" depicts the artist himself in two disguises: in "staying home" with a black wig and in "going out" with a blonde wig. The 100 Polaroids taken for this work present an ever-changing image. Gordon reveals himself as sensual and angry, exhausted and shy, defiant and curious—you get "pure Gordon," in many unique moments that together (perhaps) reveal the true image of the artist.

Edition No. 32 consists of 100 unique Polaroid prints (7.3 x 9 cm) in two series of 50 each, dated and signed. The series "staying home" features a black wig, and the series "going out" features a blonde wig. The prints are priced at €400. This Edition No. 32 is available from the Deutsche Guggenheim Museum Shop at Unter den Linden 13-15, 10117 Berlin, or online at www.deutsche-guggenheim.de/ .

The artist Douglas Gordon in daily life

Douglas Gordon's great passions are indeed film and football, just as his art suggests. That's why Gordon is showing his Zidane film in Berlin to coincide with the European Championship, and why he was so thrilled to be appointed to the jury of the Venice Film Festival by Wim Wenders in 2008 – Gordon himself said that after the birth of his son, he had been limited to cinematic pleasures like "The Simpsons," "Charlotte's Web," and "Finding Nemo," and he was incredibly excited to see "real cinema" again.

When Douglas Gordon is not “making art”, he might be sitting in a café in Berlin-Mitte, drinking Earl Grey tea and letting passers-by admire his numerous tattoos.

Or he writes his gastronomy column in the French "Playboy", or plays a round of golf, in Berlin or in Scotland.

Gordon says that after the success of "24-Hour Psycho," he discovered a desire to slow everything down for the rest of his life, and that he has partly succeeded in doing just that. With his art, he wants to raise questions—open questions that are already present in people's minds and to which he himself "certainly doesn't want to provide any answers.".