The first video work created by the artist as a student at Glasgow School of Art, Scotland. The collage of images, scratchy signs and clips is layered with his own footage. The video was made for a track called I’m Not an American by The Dragsters, a 1980s new-wave band from Greenock near Glasgow.
Loop of medical archive footage from World War I, in which the hand of a psychotic patient mimes the movement of pressing a trigger. The video reveals how memory, in this case a trauma, is inscribed in the body.
The first in a series using low-resolution bootleg footage. The video, which the artist plays slowly and silently, shows a performance by The Cramps, an American neo-punk group, at the famous CBGB club in New York in the 1980s. The Cramps were notable for the eccentricity of their lead singer Lux Interior, sometimes described as ‘a cross between Elvis and Frankenstein’s monster.’ The videos in the series pay homage to counter-cultural expression and the way that it endures in the collective memory.
| silent
A textual work especially conceived to appear on a TV monitor. The phrase ‘a moment’s silence (for someone close to you)’ is fraught with meaning: it is generally used at funerals or commemorations of someone’s death. However, decontextualised in this way the phrase is ambiguous, because there is no reason to suppose the ‘person close to you’, the subject of the viewer’s silence, is dead.
The video appropriates Otto Preminger’s classic film noir Whirlpool (1950), separating and alternating the even-numbered frames from the film on one side with the odd-numbered frames on the other. The frames of the left image – the side associated with the devil – are a mirror of the right. These operations result in the creation of two separate mirrored movies. The disorientation, arising from the ambiguity of the characters in the film, is increased by these formal methods and the video’s title. The strobing effects create a hypnotic impact that alludes to the plot of Whirlpool: a struggle for power between a psychiatrist, a kleptomaniac and a hypnotist. 1999 — LEFT IS RIGHT AND RIGHT IS WRONG AND LEFT IS WRONG AND RIGHT IS RIGHT
2008 — FUCKING FROGS
A triptych of films of equal duration, showing toads copulating at night. In the West, the toad is associated with evil and witchcraft, and was described as one of the ten plagues of Egypt, but the creature is also believed to be the result of a punishment or the source of a protective magic stone, the ‘toadstone’.
A Moroccan snake charmer is shown perched on one of the towers of the Palais des Papes in Avignon, France, at sunset on the day of the summer equinox, where he is in dialogue with the golden Virgin of Notre-Dame des Doms.
Two screens show sequences inspired by two extremely violent scenes from the original screenplay for the film Rebel Without a Cause (1955), directed by Nicholas Ray. These scenes, never shot, were brought to the attention of the artist by the actor James Franco. The first deals with a burning man escaping from a house, the second with a girl stripped naked and whipped by a group of young men. For both, the artist offers a metaphorical reading in which the body is the true space of projection: a young man is shown alone in an empty setting, a victim of violent emotions, sometimes stripping himself and trembling on the ground, at others, violently drawing in red pen on his body. While the first scene is shown on one screen, the second is shown on the other, inverted from top to bottom, and vice versa. The actor is Henry Hopper, the son of Dennis Hopper, who appeared in the original film and presented the Hugo Boss Prize to the artist in 1998.
2011 — HENRY REBEL
An echo of Play Dead (2003), this monumental projection shows an elephant in a gallery space. The animal’s movements are arduous: it plods slowly, lies down and then stands back up. The ghost of the same footage is projected slightly out of sync, creating a phantom of the elephant, as if its soul is leaving its body. The installation includes three monitors placed directly on the ground – a kind of elephant’s graveyard – which plays footage of its teary, blinking eye.
Cover
Douglas Gordon, Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now’ish…, installation view
Photo Luis Do Rosario, courtesy Fondazione MAXXI
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