Intrisinc Extrinsic Douglas Gordon
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Transcript of Intrisinc Extrinsic Douglas Gordon
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“Intrinsic/Extrinsic Relationship between Time and Space in the
work of Douglas Gordon”- Delphine LOPEZ, essay submission for
the course Scottish Art in the Age of Change, University of
Edinburgh, December 2012 [3 pages text, illustrations and
bibliography]
Every society requires definitions of its rules
from conceptual foundations. Following the example of Greek polis,
rules and laws are applied in a certain space, and for a certain time,
to define a conceptual sphere under which people can live. In our
contemporary society, we still see theses fundamental principles.
However, with constant progress in technology, time is now
characterised by its shortness, space by its real or figurative
proximity. These notions are strongly entangled: proximity between
two spaces cannot be understood without the shortness of time.
Hierarchies between things tend to be reduced. In the end, speed
and proximity can erase any critical judgment, asserting ideas
without taking time nor distance- and this is the point- to question
it.
Aware of this, Scottish artist Douglas Gordon (born 1966)
has asserted since the 1990s his subtle but efficient critique. He
uses postmodern strategies in visual art to deal with familiar images
and subvert their inner logic. Playing on the fact that these images
are precisely close to the viewer both in space and time, he asks
him/her to play an active role in the re-construction of the meaning
of the work. Consequently, Douglas Gordon creates an “in-between
dimension” whose main ambition is to awake the viewer’s
consciousness. Resorting to cinematic images and twisting their
inner properties, he creates a new link between time and space.
The viewer’s position thus requires a redefinition, and is now
considered in terms of discursive space, a space which extends to
reach society, out of the museum.
Douglas Gordon is a polymorphic artist using
lots of different media such as photography or body art. His
resorting to cinematic images is however a major device in his work.
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Cinematographic sources have been the origin of a critical
reflection about the role played by cinema in production of social
experience. Indeed, in cinematographic devices- and particularly in
Hollywood films -Douglas Gordon’s main sources- narratives are
exposed following a linear continuity. This time-related syntactic
form plays a considerable part in communicative process. As
underlined by Peter Wollen in his essay Time in Video and Film Art 1,
artists’ works with film are more likely to fragment linear time and
to re-distribute it in the interests of narrative complexity. The
viewer understands the meaning of successive events on screen,
but this meaning also depends on the way time is thought,
constructed and presented in the film. Douglas Gordon’s work
precisely plays on this filmic characteristics by oscillating between
film and video. Video is more about recognizing primacy of time as
duration, which unfolds with the unconscious, independent from a
physical measure of time2. Entities such as memory (and all its flaws)
become of peculiar interests.
1 P. Wollen in Making Time : considering time as a material in contemporary video and film, 2000- p.6 2 Concept borrowed from H. Bergson in Creative Evolution, 1911, p.1-87
Italian linguist Emilio Benveniste’s research work appears to
sum up Douglas Gordon’s subversive devices. In Problems in
General Linguistic, 1971, he theorized two planes in language: the
“here and now” in which we can speak and be present to each
other; and the “elsewhere and elsewhen” inhabited by people and
things absent from the act of enunciation. In proscenium arts such
as cinema, the viewer is kept out of the field to be contemplated.
There is a division between the “here and now” of the spectator
and the “elsewhen and elsewhere” of what is represented. Douglas
Gordon’s use of cinematic images through video devices turns a
representational art into a presentational one. Confronted with the
uncertain status of what he/she is looking at, the viewer has to
constantly question it.
This oscillation in the status of the image matches the
conception of “collage/montage” as a postmodern device for
critical analysis. In the essay, The Object of Post-Criticism, Gregory L.
Ulmer defines collage as the “transfer of materials from a context
to another”. Montage “is the dissemination of these borrowings
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through the new setting”3. 30 Seconds Text[1] displays a text from a
medical experience led in 1905 by doctor Baurieux to determine if
human consciousness survives physical death. This factual
description of the experiment is combined with a precisely
determined physical space: a light bulb illuminates the text for
thirty seconds- time during which the decapitated man kept on
reacting to doctor Baurieux’s sound stimulation- before plunging
the viewer in the dark. Medical material is mixed with art wall
installation to create a fusion between two different time frames,
that of Baurieux’s experiment, and that of the viewer’s experience
of the piece. Moreover, when the light goes off, the viewer is cut
from the visual contact with space. He/she has to quickly create a
new relationship to it.
Through different devices, Douglas Gordon uses
cinematic images to challenge traditional relationship between the
viewer and time and space.
3 G.L. Ulmer in Postmodern culture, 1983- p.84
Far from staying unchanged, the viewer is not a
simple consumer anymore; he/she is bodily and mentally involved
in the work and thus becomes a place for art to occur.
To understand this changing position, Klaus Biesenbach in
his work on Douglas Gordon4 , noteworthy reminds us that cinema
got a wider recognition at the same time that the understanding of
psychoanalysis enabled individuals to see their lives as narratives,
influenced by causes and effects, and imprinted by external
influences.
Thus, the act of editing images became considerable, implying
causal connections in parallel with psychoanalytic narratives. In 24
Hour Psycho, the artist slowed-down Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho for
the projection to last the same time as the narrative. Ordinarily, a
succession of shots suggests that they are causally linked. But, with
slow speed, Gordon breaks this causality and thus stops the linear
narrative, disturbing the traditional viewer’s status as a passive
consumer receiving an already constructed meaning. Because
Psycho is clearly printed in collective consciousness, it is probable
4 K. Biesenbach, Douglas Gordon, Timeline, 2006-p.18
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that the viewer will already know the plot and will be tempted to
anticipate its content. But by doing so, he/she will become
engrossed in what Katarina M. Brown calls a “schizophrenic
experience”5: the viewer, “simultaneously knowing past and future”,
is actually trapped in a suspended, “in-between” present.
No possible escape thus, which is an important dimension to
understand the link between time and space in Douglas Gordon’s
works. Indeed, the artist seems to inscribe his work in previous
research work of video art as a privileged stage for expressing
psychic stakes of contemporary individuals. The video Divided
Self[3], shows a struggle between two hands, a hairy one and a soft
one belonging to two different characters. But, while looking
carefully at the video, we find out that the two hands eventually
belong to the same person. Using aesthetic components directly
extracted from Henry Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde,
Gordon asserts his refusal of the idea of the artist as a genius, a
unified personality the viewer can relies on to establish the
meaning of the work. Far from the Cartesian conception of a
5 K.M. Brown, DG=Douglas Gordon, 2004-p.40
coherent cogito, neither time nor space are unifying principles to
self anymore.
This questioning of the unifying status of time and space
leads to question the viewer’s position. In Divided Self, the
multiplication of screens displaces the visitor form any direct
engagement with the scene. But, with their large scale, he/she
cannot avoid a confrontation with the image. Thus, Douglas Gordon
forces the viewer to occupy an active but unbiased position
towards the work. This encounter conveys the notion of “discursive
space” as defined by Victoria Baker in “ Intrinsic and extrinsic
nature of time and space in contemporary installations”6: “the
discursive space exists when a discourse is created between the
viewer and the object”. Here, the discursive space is an extrinsic
dimension, an “in-between” space unifying the viewer and the
artwork in the same time (that of video) and in the same space
(that of gallery). More accurately, Gordon creates not only an
extrinsic discursive space but also an intrinsic one, this time unifying
the viewer and the artwork in the same duration (time of the
6 V. Baker in Colloquy : text, theory, critique, 2006-p.195-208
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viewer’s reflection about the work) and in the same dimension
(that of the collage device which raises different layers of
knowledge).
Through this concept of a totalising discursive space, we can
see how the artist plays on space and time to renew the
relationship between the viewer and the work. Far from staying
within the spatial limit of the gallery and the temporal end of the
visit, he tends to extend his questioning out of the artistic sphere.
Like other artists of his generation, Douglas
Gordon refuses hierarchy and boundaries in art. He conceives an
extended space for art, out of gallery and evolving at the same
rhythm and pace as everyday life.
This is particularly embodied by a notable sensitivity to site.
In Meaning and Location[4], he has applied a sentence from the
New Testament around the edge of an aperture in University
College’s ceiling in London. Katrina M. Brown 7 highlights this
7 K.M. Brown, 2004-p.10
important meaning of the site: University College was one of the
first secular universities to accept both female and Jewish students.
However, its library does not contain any theological texts. Playing
both on this history, and more generally on “the perception of the
library as a source of learning”, the artist creates an “in-between
space”. The work becomes a bridge between the viewer and the
site. The choice of a biblical text is, in its very form, significant. The
use of “you” and “I” implies any viewer at any time, creating a
transcendence in the work. On the other hand, the technical device,
a text stuck on the wall, reasserts the immanent nature of the work.
This constant “in-between” status helps his work be
considered only as a temporary occupation of space. They can
never be freed from subject, time or place of their enunciation. Yet,
as Margaret Morse suggests in her essay Video installation art: the
body, the image and the space in-between“, severance from the
process of enunciation is what ordinarily allows a magical aura”8.
The concept of aura, developed by Walter Benjamin in A short story
8 M. Morse in Illuminating Video, 1990-p.153
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of Photography9 consists in an ineffable quality that opens on wider
spiritual reflection. The immanent dimension in the artist’s work
turns away from the aura. But as always, Douglas Gordon prevents
from a Manichean reading. In Bootleg (Empire)[5], the camera films
Andy Warhol’s Empire of 1964, a series of consecutive shots laid
end to end, recording minimal changes occurring in the Empire
State Building. Gordon records both this previous video, and what
happens in the room where Empire is exhibited. Thus, we can see
the colored silhouettes of people passing behind the camera
against the black and white image of the building in the background.
The title, an important dimension in Gordon’s work, is operating
within the very artwork, and emphasizes the idea of a lost aura. A
“bootleg”, illegal reproduction of something, echoes Benjamin’s
idea of the technical reproduction of artworks as responsible for
their loss of aura. Here, an ironic dimension is added by the idea of
illegal copy. However, by recording people as living entities moving
in the present time along the inert and historical building, Douglas
Gordon carries on with Warhol’s work, elongating his previous
experience. J-C Royoux’s analysis of remake in his article “Remaking
9 W. Benjamin in The work of art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 2008
cinema” seems to perfectly conclude the reflection about Gordon’s
artistic stakes: “the phenomenon of the remake implies the
development of a process of anamnesis, the dredging up of buried
events […], a development likely to keep reviving and renewing
future modes of appropriation”10. While reproduction at the basis
of Bootleg (Empire) could make for the loss of aura, the perspective
opened through borrowing reasserts Douglas Gordon’s work as an
artwork, an embodied art form opening on remote perspectives.
To conclude: Douglas Gordon or The end of history and the
last man11 ?
The artist Douglas Gordon constantly plays on concepts of time and
space to create an in-between dimension likely to raise the viewer’s
critical awareness. Refusing the hermetic definition of a high art, he
deals with the real world without forgetting transcendent ideals.
The work List of names[6] perfectly sums up the notion of time and
10 J.C. Royoux in Cinema Cinema: COntemporary art and the cinematic experience, 1999-p.23 11 Title of a book by Francis Fukuyama The end of History and the Last Man, published in 1992 about the end of ideologies.
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space in the artist’s work. This living commemoration achieves what
Katrina M. Brown calls “continuity through contiguity”. The names,
close to one another, are probably not organized for causal or
temporal reasons, but rather at random of the artist’s memory. This
enterprise is time related to the artist’s own timeline, and we
cannot help wondering whose name will be the last one. But, by
being inscribed on an institutional sphere, the list is dedicated to
eternity, thus asserting its artistic ambition beyond the “here and
now” of creation.
8
Illustrations
[1] 30 Seconds Text, 1996- white vinyl text in Bembo and Helvetica typefaces, black wall, timing device and lightbulb, dimensions variable
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[2] 24 Hour Psycho, 1993- video installation with screen and black-and-white video, 24hr loop, dimensions variable
[3] Divided self- 1997, video installation
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[4] Meaning and Location, 1990- wall text:”Truly I say to you today, you shall be with me in paradise” and ”Truly I say to you, today you shall be with me in paradise“, dimensions variable. Installation view: University College, London
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[6] List of Names - from 1990 until now Installation view at ARC Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2000
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOOKS H. Bergson, Creative Evolution- 1944 (New York : Random House) P. Monk, Double-Cross: The Hollywood Films of Douglas Gordon- 2003 ( The Power plant, Art Gallery of York University) R. Cork, Breaking down the barriers-Art in the 1990s- 2003 (New Haven : Yale University Press) W. Benjamin, The Work Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction- 2008 (London, Penguin)
ARTICLES M. Connolly, “Cinematic space, televisual time” in Critical Quaterly- October 2012, vol. 54, issue 3, p.46-60 V. Baker, “Intrinsic and extrinsic nature of time and space in contemporaray installation” in Colloquy: text, theory, critique- May 2006, issue 11, p. 195-208 CHAPTERS IN BOOKS J. Lowry, “Projecting Symptoms” in T. Trodd, Screen/Space; the projected image in contemporary Art- 2011 (Manchester, Manchester University Press) M. Morse, “Video installation art : the body, the image and the space in-between” in D. Hall and S.J. Fifer, Illuminating Video, an essential guide to video art- 1990 (Aperture, BACV) EXHIBITION CATALOGUES Douglas Gordon- Superhumanatural- 2006 (Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland) Douglas Gordon, Timeline- 2006 (New York, Museum of Modern Art) K.M. Brown, DG=Douglas Gordon- 2004 (London, Tate Pub) Making Time: considering time as a material in contemporary video and film- 2000 (Lake Worth, Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art) What Have Douglas Gordon Done- 2002 (London, Hayward Gallery Publishing)