Douglas Gordon,
Douglas Gordon handles humor and provocation with an appetite and a detachment that his early international renown (a winner of the Turner Prize at the age of thirty) never diminished. His multiform oeuvre testifies to the persistent of these traits. We caught up with the artist Douglas Gordon in his Berlin studio. L’OFFICIEL ART: You were born in Glasgow, where you studied at the Glasgow School of Art, before you completed your training at the Slade School of Fine Art in London—two places with strong reputations where you experimented with sculpture, film, and video. How did your artistic side get first expressed? DOUGLAS GORDON:
I suppose that when a teacher wrote in my report card when I was ten that “Douglas should be encouraged at art, whenever any opportunity presents itself,” my parents took that statement at face value. So when opportunity knocked, they encouraged me, and suddenly the rest of life just happened. Forty-something years later I’m still looking for opportunities…
In 1993, when you were twenty-six, you presented your first significant piece, “24 Hour Psycho,” which takes Hitchcock’s film and stretches it out to last twenty-four hours. How did this piece announce your future work?
In the Environmental Art Department during my few last years at the Glasgow School of Art, I, along with others, had begun to get very sticky fingers, as we were trapped in the honeypot of performance art. A lot of what we experimented with was “durational” testing of one’s own concentrated and repetitive gestures with minimal objects, props, I suppose—but mostly simple actions repeated, altered over a period of time, so that they began to approach a resemblance of “slow motion” evolving in real time before the viewers’ very eyes. And what was happening inside my head while looking at my gestures was even more extreme than the viewer experience—according to various arguments I had with people after the event. We were working with slow motion, slow objects, slow smell and even tried to slow down a burning flame. So it seemed natural for a young artist who had tried to slow down fire simply to wander away from the heat and close the doors and sit in the dark for as long as possible hoping for some light to ignite. I was brought up in quite a biblical, “believing” family, you know.
Classic cinema and literature are everywhere in your work. Which authors and film directors inspired you the most, and why?
Anything that glowed in the dark was a supernatural gift to a young boy from
Glasgow. The attraction to literary light and the moving image came way before art school or even my high school education. King of Kings. The Exorcist. The Greatest Story Ever Told. Carrie. The Great Escape. Marnie. The Birds. The Ten Commandments (the movie and the Old Testament). The Robe. Kidnapped. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The Red Balloon. The Raven (movie). The Raven (poem). More to add when I discuss this with my daughter over dinner tonight.… We dine in the dark, tonight! Inspiration is only “persuasion” under heavy disguise .... Disguises are always welcome in my B-movie version of life. Impregnation, though, have greater consequences, and I prefer to leave that to others to suffer.
In your many forms of artistic expression (videos, installations, photographs), you borrow many images that you then re-contextualize in your own ecosystem. How would you define your artistic language?
Highly artificial camouflaged intelligence. As if a small data bank contained in an unknown material had been left out in the sun for too long, then found by an ancient robot and given to and repaired by a bril
liant child prodigy insect that had been frozen in time from another planet and thawed out too quickly. As if my language is free from definition in the way that I can’t understand a binary system in which there are two “s”s too close to two “y”s... It doesn’t make sense when you stand too close, baby.
In 1996, at the age of thirty, you won the prestigious Turner Prize, which, for the first time, was awarded to a video artist. In a very short time, you caught the art world’s and the media’s attention. Separate from professional advancement, what was the impact of your early success on your practice and your trajectory?
Ah, if only you had asked what impact it had on my personal life, it would have been an answer many, many more pages long and much more interesting, I’m sure! But hey, you had your chance and you will never have that chance again...
You are living in Berlin where you have your studio. What persuaded you to settle down in this city?
I first stayed in Berlin way back, last century, as a guest of the DAAD. Although I had lived in London and spent a lot of time in Paris by 1998, I’d never really experienced living in a place where dark secrets were so close to the surface of the street and where ghosts appeared ‘round every corner. Berlin was, and still is, a city that is for me cinematic without escape—it’s telemythically visual. I left Berlin last century but came back about eleven or twelve years ago. A lot of things have changed, of course, but history still sits up and slaps you on the face when you least expect it. It’s a refreshing way to wake up in the morning...
Your exhibit “Hey Psycho,” which revolves around a dialogue with Florian Süssmayr, is being presented at the Venice Arsenal during the Biennale. How did it come about?
It’s a dialogue between two suspects, implicated in the same history, neither who has met the other before. One could be playful and say that we have both been accused of belonging to the same international network of unknowns, now identified. And this is some kind of The Usual Suspects script with the curator Wolfgang Scheppe as some kind of a Keyser Söze, and Florian and I only exist insomuch as Sozy can influence the interrogators, the public. Is there anything else, madam?
Well, I would really love to ask you that question about the impact of the Turner prize again...
Well, OK. I usually just avoid that question because no one really wants to point to one single significant event or drama as the “turning point”—that has become the joke among me and my family—“the turning prize.” But it was significant socially and professionally. You must remember that video was not really the big issue here, not as far as I was concerned. But I do believe that for the first time the prize went to an artist whose practice was based outside of London. It had a significant impact on the future lists of nominees and prizewinners: Gilbert & George, Richard Deacon, Tony Cragg, Richard Long, Anish Kapoor, Rachel Whiteread, Damien Hirst, Wolfgang Tillmans...
But for me, as the first Scottish person, the first from Glasgow, I felt like I had to get out of the UK as quickly as possible, partly to make space for the next wave and partly to lock the doors, close the windows, shave my head, grow a beard and just disappear from the art world for a while. That lasted for about five minutes, of course.