He Tweaks the Language of Hollywood

In the last decade, Scottish artist Douglas Gordon, 34, has won the so-called Triple Crown of the art world--Britain’s Turner Prize in 1996, the Premio 2000 at the 1997 Venice Biennale, and the Hugo Boss Prize from the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1998. Known for his photographs and video installations, he has shown only occasionally in the U.S. But today, the Museum of Contemporary Art presents his first American survey, installed at the Geffen Contemporary.

The survey, curated by Russell Feguson, formerly an associate curator at MOCA and now chief curator at the UCLA Hammer Museum, is made up of 28 works, primarily photographs or video installations, with many of the videos based on Hollywood’s most famous films. Using “The Searchers,” “Psycho” or “Taxi Driver” as raw material, says Ferguson, creates a shared frame of reference for the audience.

“People are often taken by surprise by how quickly they can engage with Douglas’ work,” he says, “and I think part of that is the use of very accessible and available vocabulary, which in large part is the material of Hollywood films.”

Ferguson points out such major themes in the work as “memory and the loss of memory, time stretching out, reversals, the idea of fragmentation, which can be related to the fragmentation of the personality or identity.”

Taking a break from closely supervising the installation of the show, Gordon, who lives and works in Glasgow, talks rapidly in a distinctive Scottish burr. He is medium-sized, rugged, with closely cropped hair.

Question: It’s intriguing to read about your growing up in a deeply religious household. What was that like?

Answer: When you’re a child, you don’t know any different. Much later, I realized that going to church three times a week wasn’t such a normal thing to do. And even knocking on doors didn’t seem like an odd thing because that was what your community did. My mother was a Jehovah’s Witness. When I was 15 or 16, I kind of drifted into other things. It [was] a case of outgrowing something, shifting priorities.

Q: How important were films when you were growing up in Scotland?

A: Very. Some of [my] earliest memories of film are from when I was 4 or 5 years old.

Q: You must have been watching them at home then.

A: Exactly. For my generation, certainly in Europe, when we talk about film and cinema, it’s usually mediated through video. Which is, of course, a huge difference in the way you perceive any image.

Maybe your memory of “Star Wars” includes the smell of something your mother was cooking. The context around the experience is absolutely part of the experience. The cinema obviously focuses much more; the darkness isolates you a lot more.

Q: In your installations, some of them are shown in darkness, and some are out in the light.

A: In the way we’re planning the show here, it’s unusual that you’ll be able to look at one single image or hear one single thing. It should be the way you imagine a carnival, and some of the works might actually make you nauseous. What I would say is that when it’s difficult to orient [yourself], that’s where the fun part of it is for me.

Q: What was the significance of film for you; was it a diversion or

A: The influence of American cinema outside of America is probably more than the average American would be conscious of. In the west of Scotland, American cinema didn’t stand for something politically, but it certainly represented a lifestyle that people aspired to. Not that that was my aspiration.

Q: You went to two art schools, the Glasgow School of Art and the Slade School of Art in London--were you working with video then?

A: No, I hated video. I still don’t like video art. Most of it is extremely tedious, which sounds like a joke, coming from me, but video deals with an aspect of visual language I’m not interested in at all.

Q: How do you differentiate what you do from video art?

A: When I started to make what people would call video, immediately I needed something that would connect me to a bigger picture; i.e., the world of cinema and then particularly Hollywood. When you grow up in a small country, the impact of Hollywood and its visual vocabulary is huge. I wanted to get deeper into it.

Q: What was your interest in art school in terms of medium?

A: Like most kids, I came from high school wanting to be a painter, and that was kind of beaten out of me pretty quickly--I’m kidding. The painting department didn’t want me; they didn’t like my portfolio. So I ended up in a department called environment art, which basically took all the misfits and rejects, and we had a great time. I, mostly at that time, was doing performance art, very slow and long, which is not so different from my work here.

Q: The Geffen will include your first film-based piece, “24 Hour Psycho,” where you ran Hitchcock’s movie at such a slowed-down pace, it runs all day.

A: Yes, that was in ’93. Part of [graduate school] was constant reading of theoretical issues, especially in the mid-’80s through the ‘90s. It was a lot to do with photography theory. I might have been bored to death by it, but it certainly has had an influence. I was making hundreds of photographs at that time, and “24 Hour Psycho” probably grew out a combination of those influences--the still and the moving image. In some ways, you can read that piece as a still image and a moving image at the same time.

Q: Why “Psycho”?

A: Honest to God, I stumbled on it. Growing up, I never saw it, but the mythology around the movie is as big as the movie. It’s almost become part of the collective consciousness. As it happens, when I was studying in London, I had gone home at Christmastime. I was hanging out in my brother’s room; he happened to have a videotape of “Psycho.” I started watching and then rewatching scenes from it in slow motion. The more I looked at it, the more I realized I didn’t know what was going on. The more you look at something, the more you realize that it doesn’t actually make you more familiar with it; it can make you unfamiliar. That interested me--let’s take something familiar and turn it upside down.

Q: Have you ever actually watched it 24 hours through?

A: More or less, probably over the last 10 years, I’ve seen it all.

Q: The form that each of the film-based pieces takes, does that just come to you? Each one is displayed somewhat differently--”24 Hour Psycho” is projected on a screen suspended in midair; “through the looking glass,” based on “Taxi Driver,” runs on screens at either end of the room, in a mirror-image effect.

A: I want to try and take away the convention of the theater. Seeing it in a museum or art gallery is almost a halfway house between the bedroom and the academy. Most of the installations should look quite informal--there’s no one particular way to read an image; there’s no one particular place to stand.

Q: But in “24 Hour Psycho,” aren’t we meant to look more closely at each frame, which now lasts far longer on screen than normal? In other words, how do you want or hope people to perceive the work?

A: There’s always at least two sides of the coin. Yeah, on one hand you can look at it more closely, but when you actually stand in front of it, the experience becomes much less to do with deduction and pursuit of the truth and much more to do with coping with what you’re seeing. And slowing it down doesn’t make it more understandable; it can actually make it more confusing.

Q: In the past, Andy Warhol and Yoko Ono made films showing virtually the same image for a long period, or an image changing very, very slowly. In an Ono film, for example, it takes John Lennon 50 minutes to break into a smile, and part of the point was to induce boredom.

A: This I’m in absolute support of. Quite often, of course, people use art as an alibi to think about something other than what they’re looking at and other than what they should be thinking. That’s more than worthwhile, it’s necessary.

Q: So it could be a backdrop or platform for drifting into some other space or thing.

A: Oh, definitely. I think the best art does that....In many ways it’s more important what happens in your head when you’ve left the museum than when you’re in the museum. Any good art operates way after the event rather than at the event itself.

Q: Talk about “5 Year Drive-By,” which will be screened, in part, in Twentynine Palms on Saturday as a satellite event of the exhibition. This is the John Ford classic “The Searchers” stretched out to run five years, the time it takes for John Wayne in the movie to find Natalie Wood, who has been abducted by Indians.

A: I had wanted to make that piece in a desert environment. First time I came to Los Angeles was in 1995 or 1996, and some friends took me to Twentynine Palms to see the landscape. So what we’re going to do is to show the real-time “Searchers” in the drive-in there and have my five-year one up the road. So as the sun goes down in Twentynine Palms, you can have a drink and watch [“5 Year Drive-By”] emerge--because it’s going to be installed outside and in the day you won’t be able to see anything--so as the landscape disappears, the image of the landscape starts to come out.

Q: So each frame will be ...

A: Twenty, 25 minutes long.

Q: Let’s talk about your photographs. In “Monster,” which shows a double portrait of you, side by side, looking rather normal on the one hand and on the other, with your face taped up grotesquely. It reminds me of childhood, when kids used to tape up their faces for effect.

A: [Laughs.] A lot of this stuff is based on memories of things I’d done when I was a kid.

Q: In the exhibition catalog, Russell Ferguson writes, “He promises to tell us a story; then does something else.” Is that tweak of expectations something that you’re interested in?

A: That’s just me--no, actually, it’s everybody. Everybody likes a little bit of twist.

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‘DOUGLAS GORDON,’ MOCA at the Geffen Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., downtown L.A. Dates: Tuesdays-Sundays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Through Jan. 20. Prices: $8, adults; $5, students and seniors; free for members and children younger than 12. Phone: (213) 626-6222.