Scottish video artist Douglas Gordon has populated the Malba with a series of possessed characters. A psycho, a fly in the throes of death, a crazed young girl, a religious visionary and a performing elephant are some of those protagonists that respond to powerful hidden forces emanating from beyond the screen.
Appearing within abstracted film classics as well as Gordon’s original material, they stalk across huge translucent screens and stare out from strategically placed TV monitors, as if in altered states of consciousness.
Film in Gordon’s work is often broken down into its constituent parts, slowed down, overlaid, shrunk or enlarged, allowing strange amplified dialogues pertaining to life and death, or good and evil, to surface between his protagonists.
Moments of synchronicity emerge from the viewer’s path through the show, steered by the chance timing of their visit. With the practical impossibility of watching the entire of ‘24 Hour Psycho’ – Gordon’s version of Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ slowed down to last a whole day – your experience of the film depends largely upon happenstance.
You are more likely to come upon a peripheral scene rather than a climactic piece of action. This might be Norman Bates retrieving the motel room key, or helping Marion Crane with her luggage, only now the scene is a stilted collection of stills, drawn out to seem endless.
Every gesture and expression is intensified and abstracted, giving more space to ambivalence and double meanings: is Bates giving her a second glance? Is she alarmed, or is it just an effect of the strange posture in which she has been frozen?
By bringing us the film as a progression of stills, Gordon dissects the codes and conventions of the suspense genre, and yet thwarts that suspense by the same token. We remain hovering between our memory of the film and what we now see on the screen.
Catching the climactic moments, says Gordon, is not the point of the work. Rather, it presents the viewer with ‘a continual suspension of the event’. “If the future doesn’t happen fast enough and the past has already happened, what about the present?” he asks.
That said, if you are lucky enough to catch any part of the infamous shower scene, it is compelling. In one part the camera closes in upon the water spiralling down the dark and now monumentally huge plughole. Then, as we feel we are about to become swallowed up by the dark orifice, we spiral back out from the murdered woman’s eye, locking the viewer into her frozen, vacant gaze for what seems like an eternity.
Later in the show, Gordon’s camera fixates with the same proximity upon the eye of a performing elephant, on a TV monitor in the corner of one room. The elephant plays dead.
This strangely melancholic, uncannily human eye promises expression, even appearing to cry, and yet – as with Hitchcock’s iconic depiction of the ‘window to the soul’ – we are faced with the impossibility of entering into its world.
Meanwhile the rest of its lumbering body is shown moving around on huge suspended screens, directed by off-screen orders, as the camera revolves around the creature. Its feet, strangely out of context as they pad around the clean white space of a gallery, look like monster feet from a 50’s horror movie set.
This installation in particular makes the most of the film-viewing experience afforded to visitors to an art gallery. The huge hanging screens can be appreciated not only for the compelling images projected onto them, but also for their sculptural qualities. The films can be watched from either side of the screen and, as with many of Gordon’s installations, the viewer becomes aware of their own presence, leaving a shadow as they walk across the path of this huge beast.
Gordon points out that the viewer’s consciousness of their own physicality also appears in other ways throughout the show: “As the characters in ‘24 Hour Psycho’ are so slow,” he says, “you become aware of your own breathing.”
Space also plays an important role in the way the show unfolds: “The architecture of the gallery means that you experience the films in a certain way – after ’24 Hour Psycho’ you assume that the elephant film is in slow motion, but in actual fact the elephant is just slow because it is huge,” he says.
In contrast to the magnitude of the elephant, a tiny screen on an adjacent wall shows a fly on its back, struggling and twitching. Not only does this seemingly insignificant drama provide a disparity to the sheer size of the previous exhibit, but the fly’s immanent actual death affords a contrast to the elephant’s pretend death.
“The fly is something so irrelevant that it becomes relevant” says Gordon. “The elephant and the fly’s life have radically different time frames,” he notes. “When I made the film the elephant was 45 years old – older than me but very young in elephant terms.”
The fly, by contrast, had been alive for a much shorter amount of time, but was living its last moments. “This is a nice collision on expectations of life,” Gordon comments.
In another compelling collision of lives, ‘Between Darkness and Light (After William Blake)’ interweaves two films, and therefore the fates of their two very different leading characters. The work consists of two classic movies ‘The Song of Bernadette’ and ‘The Exorcist’, projected onto different sides of the same translucent screen.
The overlapping causes a dialogue to unfold between a historical character – Bernadette in Henry King’s 1943 historical biopic based on Saint Bernadette, who had visions of the Holy Virgin at Lourdes – and a young girl who is possessed by a demon in William Friedkin’s 1973 horror movie.
The results are haunting and strange, as good and evil come together in moments of odd poetry. In one moment, a crowd of pilgrims at Lourdes become spectators looking through the hospital ward window as the possessed Reagan undergoes tests to try to cure her affliction.
Later, when Reagan’s mother cries in despair at her daughter’s condition, her tears mutate into a spring of healing water which appears at the holy setting of the other film. Water therefore becomes a motif in the key moments of drama – murder, distress, and the miraculous.
Despite the rich synchronicity in imagery, the crossovers caused by ‘Between Darkness and Light’ appear largely by chance and are always different, as the two films are of different length and run continuously, taking 15 days to completely loop. The audience becomes the pivotal maker and interpreter of the ever-changing images as one film haunts or disrupts the other.
Gordon told the Guardian, “I was trying to get to the point where you can make sense of even the most chaotic images or pictures which formally and aesthetically are battling with each other. While one film is representing good, and one represents evil, the fact is that they can coexist quite easily – on a physical and conceptual level.”
Gordon’s distortions of formal film codes – in the haunting of the holy biopic by the horror genre in ‘Between Darkness and Light’ and the disruption of the suspense classic ‘Psycho’ – draw upon a shared viewing history.
Klaus Biesenbach, the curator of the show, recounts how the showing of ‘24 Hour Psycho’ in Berlin in 1993 united viewers from either side of the recently fallen Berlin wall, in the recognition of the iconic movie: “It was incredible as people from former East Berlin and others all shared a knowledge of the film.”
The importance of such movies, according to the curator, is indicative of the way we structure our consciousness: “Everyone sees life as a storyboard as we are obsessed with plots and narratives.”
In an exploration of shared memory, the book that accompanies the current show ‘Timeline’ contains some of the most important media images of a generation, which Gordon refers to as the ‘marginal references’ to his work.
Che Guevara’s death, Woodstock, Vietnam, the Ethiopian famine, the death of Diana and 9/11: these images chart a timeline of the lives of the artist and the curator, who both happened to have been born in 1966. “This is all the news you cannot forget – all the images that stay with you throughout your life,” Gordon says.
Just as Gordon’s films bring our own presence to the fore, as we witness murder, disaster and divine revelation, the ‘Timeline’ series brings to our attention how each of us has overlaid these iconic images with our own personal memories and subjectivities.
For instance, everyone can remember where they where when the Berlin Wall fell, or when the Twin Towers were attacked. Perhaps you were working late in the office, sipping wine with your ex, or stepping into the shower when you heard the news. We chart out the unfolding timeline of our own lives against those of disaster victims and screen protagonists, overlaying private narratives upon public dramas, both fictional and real.
The tendency towards the dark, the morbid, and disturbing in Gordon’s work is echoed in the choice of images in the timeline – the vast majority of which show disaster and misery. “Make a timeline for yourself of all the news you cannot forget,” he says, “all the images that stay with you throughout your life as they punctuate your memory. Is your life remembered through images of disaster or happiness?”
Douglas Gordon’s ‘Timeline’ runs until 5th November 2007 at Malba, Avenida Figueroa Alcorta 3415. www.malba.org.ar