Douglas Gordon (Mit Press) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262062224 ISBN 13: 9780262062220

Publisher: MIT Press, 2001

Synopsis

A survey of the work of the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon.

This book examines the innovative work of thirty-four-year-old Scottish artist Douglas Gordon. Gordon is perhaps best known for installations that feature classic films by directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, and Martin Scorsese. In each of these works the original film has been manipulated--slowed down, mirrored by the use of split screen or dual projection, or had its soundtrack altered--to emphasize the artist's own signature themes, which include trust, guilt, madness, confession, deception, and doubling.

Produced in conjunction with a survey of Gordon's work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the book features essays by MOCA assistant curator Michael Darling, exhibition curator Russell Ferguson, Scottish novelist Francis McKee, and Guggenheim Museum curator Nancy Spector. Darling's essay places Gordon's work in the context of the Romantic tradition. Ferguson's essay looks at Gordon's work to date. It focuses on the issue of trust as it weaves its way from early works such as the performance/installation Trust Me, through his tattoo and instruction works, to more recent works such as Feature Film, which incorporates the Hitchcock film Vertigo. McKee compiles Gordon's literary sources into a kind of hybridized text. Spector's essay focuses on the autobiographical nature of Gordon's oeuvre, showing how he shifts between revealing details of his personal life--for example, the ongoing List of Names lists all the people he has met in a given period of time---and obscuring other aspects of his identity. Designed by the studio of Bruce Mau in close collaboration with Gordon himself, this book promises to be the definitive reference on one of today's most exciting young artists.

About this title

About the Author

Russell Ferguson is Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs and Chief Curator at the University of California, Los Angeles, Hammer Museum.

Reviews

A companion guide to the retrospective now on view at Los Angeles's Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), this catalog is intended as the first comprehensive monograph on Gordon. Exhibition curator Ferguson (In Memory of My Feelings) opens with an essay that requires some prior knowledge of Gordon's themes. His interpretive journey can be dizzying and labyrinthine and often leads to lengthy, initially inexplicable sojourns into literary analysis. Essays by MOCA assistant curator Michael Darling and Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector provide a more solid rationale for their interpretations, while Scottish writer Francis McKee (Luminous) stitches together a Frankenstein-like fabric of textual snippets by other writers that tell the tale of a good man who struggles against his inherently evil side and loses. The late critic David Sylvester closes with an interview of Gordon that reveals the motives behind his use of the film medium. The catalog's graphics, which include white text that seemingly hovers over dark-toned film stills, is a visual manifestation of Gordon's conceptual preoccupation: dualism and battling opposites. A valuable, comprehensive bibliography follows the essays. Recommended for collections focusing on contemporary art. Savannah R. Schroll, Washington, DC
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262062224
• ISBN 13: 9780262062220
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200
• Editor: Ferguson Russell