Douglas Gordon appropriates imagery and sound from popular media, exposing our ambiguous relationships to memory and meaning through his disorienting reconfigurations.
Read MoreIn his video works, Gordon tampers with time to disrupt preconceived notions of reality. This is gradually made apparent in 24 Hour Psycho (1993), where Gordon slows down Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho to run for 24 hours. Conceptually, this day-long deceleration reveals the complexity of memory mechanisms in the viewer's mind. Tension and drama is excised from the film and inverted into a kind of daydreaming reality where the viewer no longer attempts to interpret scenes in relation to another. All meaning is diverted to the viewer's subjectivity—a strategy Gordon also employs in 10ms-1 (1994) and Déjà-Vu (2000), both of which incorporate slowed-down footage and multiple projections.
Binary oppositions of good and evil are prominent in Gordon's work and are often reflected in his installation methods. Using multiple screens and projections, works like A Divided Self I and II (1996) represent this opposition within a single person, presenting a hairy and shaved arm endlessly grappling one another. Eventually it becomes clear that both arms belong to the artist, insinuating a mysterious internal conflict. 24 Hour Psycho Back and Forth and To and Fro (2008) doubles the original work with an adjacent iteration played in reverse.
Gordon's Turner Prize exhibition Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1995) presents two screens wrapping around a room's corner, a negative and positive slowed-down segment from Rouben Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). This emphasis on the characters' shifting personalities reflects Gordon's engagement with dualities, itself driven by the artist's interest in Scottish literary history, which is dominated by tensions between darkness and light.
Gordon also utilises text- and sound-based installations to explore themes of identity and memory. In List of Names (1990–ongoing), Gordon attempts to remember the names of everyone he has met, presented in memorial-type columns. This simple gesture conveys the functionality of imperfect human memory.
Text is also used in Pretty much every word written, spoken, heard, overheard from 1989... (2010), an installation of over 80 text-based works anointing the interior architecture at the Tate Britain. Simple phrases range from the biblical—'We Are Evil', 'Read the Word ... Hear the Voice'—to pop culture—'This May Be the Last Time'—taken from a Rolling Stones song. Here, Gordon appropriates textual semantics to question notions of authoritative truth.
Taking on another method of social communication, Gordon collates the songs most popular in the months preceding and following his birth in 1966. The sound installation Something Between My Mouth and Your Ear (1994) explores the hidden influence of this cultural context on the way that Gordon interprets reality. Throughout his works, Gordon appropriates these communal communication systems to consider how our perceptions are shaped by external and internal forces.
