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“Intrinsic/Extrinsic Relationship between Time and Space in the

work of Douglas Gordon”- Delphine LOPEZ, essay submission for

the course Scottish Art in the Age of Change, University of

Edinburgh, December 2012 [3 pages text, illustrations and

bibliography]

Every society requires definitions of its rules

from conceptual foundations. Following the example of Greek polis,

rules and laws are applied in a certain space, and for a certain time,

to define a conceptual sphere under which people can live. In our

contemporary society, we still see theses fundamental principles.

However, with constant progress in technology, time is now

characterised by its shortness, space by its real or figurative

proximity. These notions are strongly entangled: proximity between

two spaces cannot be understood without the shortness of time.

Hierarchies between things tend to be reduced. In the end, speed

and proximity can erase any critical judgment, asserting ideas

without taking time nor distance- and this is the point- to question

it.

Aware of this, Scottish artist Douglas Gordon (born 1966)

has asserted since the 1990s his subtle but efficient critique. He

uses postmodern strategies in visual art to deal with familiar images

and subvert their inner logic. Playing on the fact that these images

are precisely close to the viewer both in space and time, he asks

him/her to play an active role in the re-construction of the meaning

of the work. Consequently, Douglas Gordon creates an “in-between

dimension” whose main ambition is to awake the viewer’s

consciousness. Resorting to cinematic images and twisting their

inner properties, he creates a new link between time and space.

The viewer’s position thus requires a redefinition, and is now

considered in terms of discursive space, a space which extends to

reach society, out of the museum.

Douglas Gordon is a polymorphic artist using

lots of different media such as photography or body art. His

resorting to cinematic images is however a major device in his work.

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Cinematographic sources have been the origin of a critical

reflection about the role played by cinema in production of social

experience. Indeed, in cinematographic devices- and particularly in

Hollywood films -Douglas Gordon’s main sources- narratives are

exposed following a linear continuity. This time-related syntactic

form plays a considerable part in communicative process. As

underlined by Peter Wollen in his essay Time in Video and Film Art 1,

artists’ works with film are more likely to fragment linear time and

to re-distribute it in the interests of narrative complexity. The

viewer understands the meaning of successive events on screen,

but this meaning also depends on the way time is thought,

constructed and presented in the film. Douglas Gordon’s work

precisely plays on this filmic characteristics by oscillating between

film and video. Video is more about recognizing primacy of time as

duration, which unfolds with the unconscious, independent from a

physical measure of time2. Entities such as memory (and all its flaws)

become of peculiar interests.

1 P. Wollen in Making Time : considering time as a material in contemporary video and film, 2000- p.6 2 Concept borrowed from H. Bergson in Creative Evolution, 1911, p.1-87

Italian linguist Emilio Benveniste’s research work appears to

sum up Douglas Gordon’s subversive devices. In Problems in

General Linguistic, 1971, he theorized two planes in language: the

“here and now” in which we can speak and be present to each

other; and the “elsewhere and elsewhen” inhabited by people and

things absent from the act of enunciation. In proscenium arts such

as cinema, the viewer is kept out of the field to be contemplated.

There is a division between the “here and now” of the spectator

and the “elsewhen and elsewhere” of what is represented. Douglas

Gordon’s use of cinematic images through video devices turns a

representational art into a presentational one. Confronted with the

uncertain status of what he/she is looking at, the viewer has to

constantly question it.

This oscillation in the status of the image matches the

conception of “collage/montage” as a postmodern device for

critical analysis. In the essay, The Object of Post-Criticism, Gregory L.

Ulmer defines collage as the “transfer of materials from a context

to another”. Montage “is the dissemination of these borrowings

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through the new setting”3. 30 Seconds Text[1] displays a text from a

medical experience led in 1905 by doctor Baurieux to determine if

human consciousness survives physical death. This factual

description of the experiment is combined with a precisely

determined physical space: a light bulb illuminates the text for

thirty seconds- time during which the decapitated man kept on

reacting to doctor Baurieux’s sound stimulation- before plunging

the viewer in the dark. Medical material is mixed with art wall

installation to create a fusion between two different time frames,

that of Baurieux’s experiment, and that of the viewer’s experience

of the piece. Moreover, when the light goes off, the viewer is cut

from the visual contact with space. He/she has to quickly create a

new relationship to it.

Through different devices, Douglas Gordon uses

cinematic images to challenge traditional relationship between the

viewer and time and space.

3 G.L. Ulmer in Postmodern culture, 1983- p.84

Far from staying unchanged, the viewer is not a

simple consumer anymore; he/she is bodily and mentally involved

in the work and thus becomes a place for art to occur.

To understand this changing position, Klaus Biesenbach in

his work on Douglas Gordon4 , noteworthy reminds us that cinema

got a wider recognition at the same time that the understanding of

psychoanalysis enabled individuals to see their lives as narratives,

influenced by causes and effects, and imprinted by external

influences.

Thus, the act of editing images became considerable, implying

causal connections in parallel with psychoanalytic narratives. In 24

Hour Psycho, the artist slowed-down Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho for

the projection to last the same time as the narrative. Ordinarily, a

succession of shots suggests that they are causally linked. But, with

slow speed, Gordon breaks this causality and thus stops the linear

narrative, disturbing the traditional viewer’s status as a passive

consumer receiving an already constructed meaning. Because

Psycho is clearly printed in collective consciousness, it is probable

4 K. Biesenbach, Douglas Gordon, Timeline, 2006-p.18

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that the viewer will already know the plot and will be tempted to

anticipate its content. But by doing so, he/she will become

engrossed in what Katarina M. Brown calls a “schizophrenic

experience”5: the viewer, “simultaneously knowing past and future”,

is actually trapped in a suspended, “in-between” present.

No possible escape thus, which is an important dimension to

understand the link between time and space in Douglas Gordon’s

works. Indeed, the artist seems to inscribe his work in previous

research work of video art as a privileged stage for expressing

psychic stakes of contemporary individuals. The video Divided

Self[3], shows a struggle between two hands, a hairy one and a soft

one belonging to two different characters. But, while looking

carefully at the video, we find out that the two hands eventually

belong to the same person. Using aesthetic components directly

extracted from Henry Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde,

Gordon asserts his refusal of the idea of the artist as a genius, a

unified personality the viewer can relies on to establish the

meaning of the work. Far from the Cartesian conception of a

5 K.M. Brown, DG=Douglas Gordon, 2004-p.40

coherent cogito, neither time nor space are unifying principles to

self anymore.

This questioning of the unifying status of time and space

leads to question the viewer’s position. In Divided Self, the

multiplication of screens displaces the visitor form any direct

engagement with the scene. But, with their large scale, he/she

cannot avoid a confrontation with the image. Thus, Douglas Gordon

forces the viewer to occupy an active but unbiased position

towards the work. This encounter conveys the notion of “discursive

space” as defined by Victoria Baker in “ Intrinsic and extrinsic

nature of time and space in contemporary installations”6: “the

discursive space exists when a discourse is created between the

viewer and the object”. Here, the discursive space is an extrinsic

dimension, an “in-between” space unifying the viewer and the

artwork in the same time (that of video) and in the same space

(that of gallery). More accurately, Gordon creates not only an

extrinsic discursive space but also an intrinsic one, this time unifying

the viewer and the artwork in the same duration (time of the

6 V. Baker in Colloquy : text, theory, critique, 2006-p.195-208

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viewer’s reflection about the work) and in the same dimension

(that of the collage device which raises different layers of

knowledge).

Through this concept of a totalising discursive space, we can

see how the artist plays on space and time to renew the

relationship between the viewer and the work. Far from staying

within the spatial limit of the gallery and the temporal end of the

visit, he tends to extend his questioning out of the artistic sphere.

Like other artists of his generation, Douglas

Gordon refuses hierarchy and boundaries in art. He conceives an

extended space for art, out of gallery and evolving at the same

rhythm and pace as everyday life.

This is particularly embodied by a notable sensitivity to site.

In Meaning and Location[4], he has applied a sentence from the

New Testament around the edge of an aperture in University

College’s ceiling in London. Katrina M. Brown 7 highlights this

7 K.M. Brown, 2004-p.10

important meaning of the site: University College was one of the

first secular universities to accept both female and Jewish students.

However, its library does not contain any theological texts. Playing

both on this history, and more generally on “the perception of the

library as a source of learning”, the artist creates an “in-between

space”. The work becomes a bridge between the viewer and the

site. The choice of a biblical text is, in its very form, significant. The

use of “you” and “I” implies any viewer at any time, creating a

transcendence in the work. On the other hand, the technical device,

a text stuck on the wall, reasserts the immanent nature of the work.

This constant “in-between” status helps his work be

considered only as a temporary occupation of space. They can

never be freed from subject, time or place of their enunciation. Yet,

as Margaret Morse suggests in her essay Video installation art: the

body, the image and the space in-between“, severance from the

process of enunciation is what ordinarily allows a magical aura”8.

The concept of aura, developed by Walter Benjamin in A short story

8 M. Morse in Illuminating Video, 1990-p.153

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of Photography9 consists in an ineffable quality that opens on wider

spiritual reflection. The immanent dimension in the artist’s work

turns away from the aura. But as always, Douglas Gordon prevents

from a Manichean reading. In Bootleg (Empire)[5], the camera films

Andy Warhol’s Empire of 1964, a series of consecutive shots laid

end to end, recording minimal changes occurring in the Empire

State Building. Gordon records both this previous video, and what

happens in the room where Empire is exhibited. Thus, we can see

the colored silhouettes of people passing behind the camera

against the black and white image of the building in the background.

The title, an important dimension in Gordon’s work, is operating

within the very artwork, and emphasizes the idea of a lost aura. A

“bootleg”, illegal reproduction of something, echoes Benjamin’s

idea of the technical reproduction of artworks as responsible for

their loss of aura. Here, an ironic dimension is added by the idea of

illegal copy. However, by recording people as living entities moving

in the present time along the inert and historical building, Douglas

Gordon carries on with Warhol’s work, elongating his previous

experience. J-C Royoux’s analysis of remake in his article “Remaking

9 W. Benjamin in The work of art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 2008

cinema” seems to perfectly conclude the reflection about Gordon’s

artistic stakes: “the phenomenon of the remake implies the

development of a process of anamnesis, the dredging up of buried

events […], a development likely to keep reviving and renewing

future modes of appropriation”10. While reproduction at the basis

of Bootleg (Empire) could make for the loss of aura, the perspective

opened through borrowing reasserts Douglas Gordon’s work as an

artwork, an embodied art form opening on remote perspectives.

To conclude: Douglas Gordon or The end of history and the

last man11 ?

The artist Douglas Gordon constantly plays on concepts of time and

space to create an in-between dimension likely to raise the viewer’s

critical awareness. Refusing the hermetic definition of a high art, he

deals with the real world without forgetting transcendent ideals.

The work List of names[6] perfectly sums up the notion of time and

10 J.C. Royoux in Cinema Cinema: COntemporary art and the cinematic experience, 1999-p.23 11 Title of a book by Francis Fukuyama The end of History and the Last Man, published in 1992 about the end of ideologies.

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space in the artist’s work. This living commemoration achieves what

Katrina M. Brown calls “continuity through contiguity”. The names,

close to one another, are probably not organized for causal or

temporal reasons, but rather at random of the artist’s memory. This

enterprise is time related to the artist’s own timeline, and we

cannot help wondering whose name will be the last one. But, by

being inscribed on an institutional sphere, the list is dedicated to

eternity, thus asserting its artistic ambition beyond the “here and

now” of creation.

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Illustrations

[1] 30 Seconds Text, 1996- white vinyl text in Bembo and Helvetica typefaces, black wall, timing device and lightbulb, dimensions variable

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[2] 24 Hour Psycho, 1993- video installation with screen and black-and-white video, 24hr loop, dimensions variable

[3] Divided self- 1997, video installation

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[4] Meaning and Location, 1990- wall text:”Truly I say to you today, you shall be with me in paradise” and ”Truly I say to you, today you shall be with me in paradise“, dimensions variable. Installation view: University College, London

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[5] Bootleg (Empire)- 1997, VHS videotape, continuous loop

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[6] List of Names - from 1990 until now Installation view at ARC Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2000

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS H. Bergson, Creative Evolution- 1944 (New York : Random House) P. Monk, Double-Cross: The Hollywood Films of Douglas Gordon- 2003 ( The Power plant, Art Gallery of York University) R. Cork, Breaking down the barriers-Art in the 1990s- 2003 (New Haven : Yale University Press) W. Benjamin, The Work Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction- 2008 (London, Penguin)

ARTICLES M. Connolly, “Cinematic space, televisual time” in Critical Quaterly- October 2012, vol. 54, issue 3, p.46-60 V. Baker, “Intrinsic and extrinsic nature of time and space in contemporaray installation” in Colloquy: text, theory, critique- May 2006, issue 11, p. 195-208 CHAPTERS IN BOOKS J. Lowry, “Projecting Symptoms” in T. Trodd, Screen/Space; the projected image in contemporary Art- 2011 (Manchester, Manchester University Press) M. Morse, “Video installation art : the body, the image and the space in-between” in D. Hall and S.J. Fifer, Illuminating Video, an essential guide to video art- 1990 (Aperture, BACV) EXHIBITION CATALOGUES Douglas Gordon- Superhumanatural- 2006 (Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland) Douglas Gordon, Timeline- 2006 (New York, Museum of Modern Art) K.M. Brown, DG=Douglas Gordon- 2004 (London, Tate Pub) Making Time: considering time as a material in contemporary video and film- 2000 (Lake Worth, Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art) What Have Douglas Gordon Done- 2002 (London, Hayward Gallery Publishing)