Skewed by the Light

Early this month, concert organizers in the small German town of Halberstadt began a performance of a 1985 composition by the American composer John Cage. Titled “ASLSP”--a homemade abbreviation for the instruction to play the keyboard work “as slow as possible”--the German version takes Cage’s original 20-minute piano piece to the outer limits of extended duration. The performance is planned to last 639 years, in order to commemorate the building of the first of a series of famous organs at the former Buchardi monastery in 1362.

Published estimates report, for example, that the elapsed time between the full inflation of the organ’s bellows and the sound of the composition’s first chord will take about 18 months.

Next to this extreme example of art intended to go against the grain of contemporary speed and dynamism, Douglas Gordon’s “24 Hour Psycho” seems downright fast. In 1993, the young Scottish Conceptual artist used new digital technology to slow the projection of the famous Hitchcock thriller, so that the movie’s original running time of about 109 minutes would stretch out over an entire day.

“24 Hour Psycho” is among the earliest works in a somewhat thin seven-year survey of Gordon’s art that opened Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary in Little Tokyo. The show, organized by former MOCA curator (and now UCLA Hammer Museum chief curator) Russell Ferguson, includes 13 video projections, many based on familiar Hollywood fare, as well as 18 photographs, one sculpture and a text-based installation.

Every four or five seconds, a single black-and-white frame of Hitchcock’s film is projected silently onto a transparent screen suspended from the ceiling. With an obvious debt to such precedents as Andy Warhol’s movie of a stolid and un-moving Empire State Building, the silence of the film helps make the almost static image more like a painting.

Viewable from both sides of the transparent screen, the movie also becomes a kind of Minimalist sculptural object. Twenty-four frames per second, the standard film-projection speed, means 1,440 frames per minute; that number matches the 1,440 minutes in a 24-hour day. Gordon transforms a famous Hollywood movie, which partly gained its shocking notoriety by “illogically” killing off the star before the picture was half over, into something like a logically ordered sequence of cubes by Sol LeWitt.

At least, that’s what a viewer assumes. Gordon’s art dramatically heightens the normal level of necessary trust between audience and artist. After all, it’s doubtful anyone--including the 34-year-old artist himself--has actually seen “24 Hour Psycho” in its entirety. Certainly nobody has seen Gordon’s 1995 “Five Year Drive-By,” which slows down projection of John Ford’s 1956 western, “The Searchers,” to a length of five years--the time it takes in the movie for a Civil War veteran to search for a niece abducted in an Indian raid. We must take the artist on his word.

Narrative cinema carries a viewer along on a prescribed path, but Gordon’s manipulation of movie time opens up a space to think about other things. It’s not as if you’re going to miss anything significant as the slow-motion drones on, especially as you’ve probably seen the movie many times before. Motivation in matters of life and death is one of those things you seem meant to ponder.

Anthony Perkins’ murderous motivation in “Psycho,” or John Wayne’s in “The Searchers,” reverberates against Robert DeNiro’s in “Taxi Driver” (the famous “You lookin’ at me?” scene is the basis of Gordon’s 1994 projection, “Trigger Finger”). Then there’s Edmund O’Brien’s curiously impacted motivation in “D.O.A.” (1950), a film noir study of a man who, having been told he’s been poisoned and has just a few days to live, tries to find his own murderer. In a recent work titled “Deja vu,” Gordon projects “D.O.A.” at normal speed but in triplicate, side-by-side, with a brief time lag separating each one. The already manic movie keeps trying to catch up with itself, sort of like the protagonist.

Gordon’s own motivation seems to be to use modern media imagery to perform a meditation on the human psyche. In a compelling, bust-length self-portrait called “Monster” (1996-97), he juxtaposes two photographs. One shows him head-on, emotionless; the other is identical--except for the clear tape applied to his face, which splays apart his lips, pulls up his nose, droops his eyes and distorts his brow.

The longer you look, the more you scan the “normal” image for hidden signs of interior trouble--the blankness of his stare starts to look like a subtle, ominous sneer. Meanwhile the hideously distorted face becomes a repository for gentle pathos--humanity inside Frankenstein’s beast. You project these learned assumptions onto an otherwise innocuous photographic image.

Gordon’s Jekyll-and-Hyde self-portrait also informs a pair of videos that show two arms--one hairy, the other shaved--wrestling on a rumpled bedsheet. First one arm wins, then the other. The angle of the arms within the pictorial frame suggests they both belong to a single off-screen person. The video pair is titled “A Divided Self.”

Standard dualities are everywhere in Gordon’s art--dualities of good and evil, life and death, black and white. So are ambitious literary and art historical references, which register everyone from Michelangelo and Shakespeare to William Blake and Warhol.

Indeed, one of the significant weaknesses of Gordon’s work is its tendency toward academicism, which relies heavily on the references to carry much of the art’s burden. The visceral power of color is wholly absent as a consideration; instead, an emphasis on black and white rides a veneer of intellectual seriousness that derives from 1970s image-and-text art. (This is no surprise; MOCA has long since established a profile as our premiere museum of black-and-white art.) The aura of the schoolroom extends even to Gordon’s movie choices.

Hitchcock, “The Searchers,” “Taxi Driver,” film noir--Gordon almost never deviates from the conventional repertory of established art school favorites. You’re not likely to encounter, say, “24 Hour Thoroughly Modern Millie” in his oeuvre. Instead, it’s all rather disappointingly predictable.

The exception is 1997’s witty “Between Darkness and Light (After William Blake).” A single transparent screen hangs diagonally in a darkened gallery. On one side “The Song of Bernadette” (1943) is projected, and on the other “The Exorcist” (1973). Wonderfully cornball images of delirious possession by God and by the devil merge in this pleasantly goofy work, in which the pop-visionary words and images do in fact partake of an opposition to current academic priorities that Blake would have admired. It’s finally as enjoyable as Gordon’s “monstrous” self-portrait.

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“Douglas Gordon,” Geffen Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., L.A., (213) 626-6222, through Jan. 20.

Gordon’s “Five Year Drive-By” and John Ford’s “The Searchers” will be shown in a special presentation in Twentynine Palms at 6 p.m Saturday; for reservations call (213) 633-5318.