Contemporary magazine article: Douglas Gordon

To combine my choice of journal with my choice of artist, I found an article from Contemporary magazine issue 71 from 2005, simply entitled Douglas Gordon. The piece would have attracted me to read it purely because it is about Gordon, but the image of Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver on the first place certainly helped.

From initial read of the article, interesting points that have been raised so far are;

'Time has always been the subject of Gordon's projections'
'Repetition is as much the subject of as temporality in these works but so too is dissimulation'

Note to self, must watch Taxi Driver

A few hours later............

Just watched Taxi Driver, well the important part of Taxi Driver, De Niros 'you talking to me?' monologue, the dialogue that every one knows, but many, (including me) does not know where it comes from. Gordon uses this 71 second section for his piece 'through a looking glass' He extends this section through repetition, futher instilling the already iconic line within our minds. The work is shown across two screens, so it appears that De Niro is having a conversation with himself.

Refering this to the statements above, I suppose time is a key feature of Gordon's work. It is used in the capacity of a constant, a structure that Gordon it playing with. This dialogue is a section of time taken from the fixed time that the entire film lasts for. Time is then altered to create the effect Gordon is after. The same is true of the piece '24 Hour Psycho', also mentoned in the article; Gordon lengthens the Hitchcocks classic so that it plays over a 24 Hour period. Time is also used in a different fashion however, through comidic timing. The idea that DeNiro is speaking the words 'you talking to me?' to himself is ludicrous, Gordon visualises the mirror he is speaking into in the original film for the benifit of the audience, which removes the idea of a rehersal were the final performance may have terrifying consequences. Instead, the characters performance is right now, and so without the preperation, appears laughable.

Looking at the second comment I felt interesting enough to record, the words that jump out are repitition, temporality and dissimulation. The use of repitition has been noted and quite frankly is quite obvious. Temporality links to the use of time, how Gordon's pieces are succesful through alteration in this area of the original narrative. Dissemblance is an intriguing concept however, being discribed in the article as 'introducing a new structure that includes the original film but also exceeds it'. I do not believe that the writer, Philip Monk, thinks that Gordon's 'skits' if you will, are better than the original feature film, but maybe that they focus on one aspect of the film or character and exploit it, something that the film length could not acheive, solely due to its nature.

The truth is, people will continue to be attracted to the work of Douglas Gordon as its content is already familiar to the them, but perhaps through his clever atention to detail, they may learn something new, not only through the guise of film, but the relation of this to themselves. Isn't that what everyone is trying to do anyway?