City of ghosts
He came here in the Nineties and, he says, “always liked the anonymity of Berlin. It’s getting less and less anonymous at the moment. I really like it in the winter: less tourists and it’s easier to see the ghosts. There’s no anonymity in Glasgow, because of the scale of it. Every student knows every waitress and bartender. They all know each other.”
And those ghosts? “At the studio I work in, I look out of my windows and into a courtyard, where F. W. Murnau and Hans Richter shot their early films”, he says. “Late at night when it’s pitch black, I turn the lights off and blow some smoke and turn the lights back on and see if the smoke between me and them has illustrated a ghost… I swear I’ve seen some.”
It’s true though, that just as Glasgow has its background pantheon of spirits, stories and traumas – the killer Bible John, the ice cream wars, the Gorbals Vampire and one Ian Brady, the Moors Murderer – Berlin’s macabre is not only alive and present but vividly memorialised, in the Stolpersteine, among other landmarks. “You do literally trip over them sometimes.”
Douglas Gordon recently opened a complex of artists’ spaces in the friendly street of Kurfürstenstraße, and if he has found a home from home in the Hauptstadt, he visibly embodies his actual hometown, or what people might like to believe of it. There’s the tattoo across his chest proclaiming allegiance to Maryhill, the home of his beloved Partick Thistle. And there is above all the unswerving devotion to football itself.
If anything he has done in those 20 years has transcended the art world, then it must be the one work missing from the Paddy’s Market pile of TVs: “Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait”, which he made with Philippe Parreno and released in 2006. Prior to that, very little had been made of Zinedine Zidane as a subject of artistic speculation in the world of football. Back in the art world, meanwhile, very little critical meaning had been drawn of Zidane’s sensational – one could say epochal – gifts as an attacking midfielder. Like the greatest players – Pelé, Maradona, Messi and David Beckham since he transformed into a fashion model – you just couldn’t stop looking at him. In Zidane’s game, the footballer often seemed bigger than the match; his figuration transcended the play. It was said that Zizou’s talent was so extravagant that he effected a time-change in the tempo of a match; just as the most starry of celebrities and models are said to change the air surrounding them, the game would appear to actually slow down as the midfielder took control of the ball, an effect not so far from that of Gordon’s other most notorious work, “24 Hour Psycho”.
Zizou Redux
“It’s not over yet”, he says of the fascination with this most luminous of figures. The Zidane project may be reprised, while its genesis arose in a suitably football-y location: “Just before the Turner Prize, I was playing keepie-uppie in a football stadium in Jerusalem, before the security came and told us, in no uncertain terms… I don’t know what the Hebrew for ‘fuck off’ is. We started talking about how interesting it might be to make a film where the central character was always there: what was going on around them didn’t have to be shown. Why not make a portrait of a football player, and who would we want? Zidane was the only one that came up.
“[Philippe Parreno and I] had different attitudes towards him”, Gordon recalls. “I didn’t want any autographs and photographs with him – much to the annoyance of my brothers. Philippe wanted to keep Zidane informed and have him as a fellow traveller with the project. That meant hundreds of trips to Madrid, which meant hundreds of games. Which was fantastic. It was two years from meeting to screening, so we saw him quitting the French national team, then going back, being injured, seeing him after a big loss and a big win. All of that is in the psyche of someone playing football. We’ve been skirting around the idea of getting back in touch with him.”
The fascination the two artists had for the player seems amply justified, especially as a few months after the film’s release, the entire global media focused on Zidane after he head-butted the Italian defender Marco Materazzi during the World Cup Final in Berlin and was duly red-carded – an act in which the player sacrificed the highest prize in football in order to salvage his own dignity. The event was shocking, unimaginable – spectacular, in fact. “It was like, ‘Did that really happen?’” Gordon says, ruminating on the incident. “I was in the stadium, and as usual there was another Italian player lying on the ground, a lot of people had really no idea what had happened. I phoned my dad and he said, ‘Oh son, your pal let you down’. “I couldn’t believe it. It took a couple of years to get to know what it was really about, which wasn’t what was written in the papers”. Gordon goes on to outline in detail what, in his understanding, the aggro was really all about, not that those details are printable.
There’s another, rather more tender Douglas Gordon, the one in the powder blue Abercrombie & Fitch hoodie who scratches his chin and wearily rubs his head. He says he’s settled into a certain kind of family life, and is considering for his next tattoo “something soft, to calm it down a bit… I had a dream about doing a huge tattoo last night, but there’s literally not enough space on my wee hairy body to do it. [The next tattoo] will be to do with my children.”
His partner is Ruth Rosenfeld, a soprano from Israel, while his four-year-old daughter, he says, is “a Berliner; she speaks German, Hebrew, English and Portuguese, she was born on German reunification day. You wouldn’t get that in Glasgow…”