Douglas Gordon on 20 years of duality, football and menace between Glasgow and Berlin.
Text: Kevin Braddock
IN THE POPULAR consciousness the city of Glasgow has what people who work in the law call “form”. Put it this way: a joke, which circulated after the attempted terrorist attack on its international airport in 2007, suggested that Glasgow was the only place where people would punch a man who was on fire. It may be a gross of slander on its inhabitants, but it was a comedian from Scotland’s unofficial capital who coined it nevertheless. Glasgow is often known as a place of poor health and fast food, of thuggery, football, sectarianism, and drink problems. But the city is known for other things too: a site of lore and myth, shipbuilding, community, song, wit, art – and the macabre.
Creativity inevitably arises from disjunctures like that, and you could argue that they are embodied in the work of the artist Douglas Gordon. Here, sitting in the Akademie der Künste a few days before the opening of a retrospective marking his 2012 Käthe Kollwitz Prize, is the master of the dark arts himself, with his tattoos and chains, his whiskers, sneakers and dewy blue eyes. This deadpan, lugubrious romantic certainly looks like the tabloid idea of a Glaswegian, but given that the idea of duality – his famous “devilish interest in doubles” – has long been his artistic signature, you’d be nuts to believe he was anything so simple.
Douglas Gordon complains about his gout and says he doesn’t drink whisky any more. Doctor’s orders? “No, missus’s orders.” He grins and makes jokes and comments that the only bitterness he feels is in the taste of the coffee he’s drinking. Then he says, “Did you ever read that Waldemar Januszczak piece in The Times? It was the most offensive article where he called me a typically bellicose Scotsman, which really wasn’t nice, and that my ‘back alley philosophy’ didn’t equate with my position in the art world. I just thought, you know… if that’s what I represent because I’ve got a skinhead and a gold tooth and tattoos, then my mum was right: I should never have gone this way if I was gonna get too upset about it”.
Did she say that? “Yep… ‘Don’t look like that, son’. It was too late, I’d done it…”
The odd thing – at least, it’s a shock to him when the realisation comes to him over his coffee – is that it’s 20 years now that he’s been doing “it”: doubling, making multimedia art, exploring voodoo, football, music and psychopathy between the brutal, beautiful cities of Berlin and Glasgow. He’s accumulated the garlands to match his gifts – his 1996 Turner Prize, the Hugo Boss and so on – like the pot belly that creeps up on men inhabiting the far side of 40.
In the adjacent room, a scrapheap of analogue TVs (“I wanted it to have a feeling of Paddy’s Market circa 1984; luckily in a city like Berlin, you can still source old shitty tellies”) present “Pretty Much Every Video and Film Work from About 1992 Until Now To Be Seen On Monitors Some With Headphones Others Run Silently and Simultaneously”, the beautifully prosaic and defiantly unpunctuated title of his video works to date. “Douglas Gordon: Feature Film”, “24 Hour Psycho”, “k.364”, they’re all there, and are suitably impressive in sum, not to mention surprising – at least for Gordon.
“Twenty years”, he nods. “Sometimes I think I’ve overproduced. But it’s only 90 works in 20 years – I should probably work harder. I haven’t done a big show in Berlin for a long, long time. Rather than trying to do one big installation here, it was more appropriate to give them everything. It leaves the door open for another big show, of course: a rather large series of starters before the main course.” The actuality of it appears to make him content. “I’m happy”, says Gordon. But here’s the proviso: “…whatever that means for someone from Glasgow…”
Indeed, what does it mean? Is Glaswegian happiness something entirely different? It’s tempting to read the effects of the Berlin-Glasgow axis of ugly into Gordon’s austere work, the thought that he seeks out shadows, ghosts and brutalism, feeding off them and transforming them into his troubling pieces. A mist of menace hangs round parts of his oeuvre, just as it does around the perceptions of those two cities. The writer Robert Chalmers pointed out a few years ago that all countries have a city that doesn’t seem to really belong to it, a tough, awkward and lyrical place: Liverpool in England, Marseille in France, along with Gordon’s hometown and the one that adopted him. What does he see as the kinship?
“A lot of the [Berlin] architecture felt very familiar to me when I arrived here. We happen to be sitting in a brutalist architecture building right now. Close your eyes and you could be in Glasgow; the Hansaviertel does remind me of places in Maryhill and Springburn. There’s a familiarity to that. Thank God there are no trams in Glasgow, otherwise the death rate would be significantly higher.”