Perhaps what was missed in the broadsheet characterisation of Douglas Gordon is that the artist who seems often led by trauma, darkness and the gothic is also driven by competing, antithetical properties, things like love, desire and empathy. Sentimentality as the other side of brutality, if we’re to be simplistic about it. He ruminates at length on his “Self Portrait of You + Me” series, in which photos of filmic icons – James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and so on – are re-represented with their features literally defaced, eyes burned or scratched out, a brutal erasure of stardust identities. He comes to the unexpected conclusion that these works are, in the end, acts of love. Tough love, you could say.
It began – where else? – in Glasgow: “I was having sleepless nights. In the alcove where my bed was, I had black and white photos of [“Psycho” actors] Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh and Martin Balsam. I woke up one night and couldn’t take it any more. Rather than destroy the whole photograph, I cut the eyes out and kept them in a wee envelope in a drawer. “Yeah… I started to convince myself that it was because I loved them too much. Then it developed from there and I started to get a little more… loving.”
Specifically, Gordon evolved the practice into something more arcane. “I had a recipe list that I asked an assistant to go and get: black, red, and white sex candles, pigs’ feet, shampoo, washing powder, all your typical voodoo stuff. It really did become much more ritualistic. We did some big burning sessions in Glasgow, and I realised it was about the adoration of the idol, the idea that the closer you get to someone you love, the more likely you are to destroy them.”
Some of those images were mounted on mirrors, resulting in a clever identity transfer: look into the eyes of, say, James Dean, and the viewer sees his or herself. “I keep thinking it’s always my image in the mirror, but I keep forgetting that I’m not there and other people might be reflected in the mirror.”
Mirror, mirror
Recently, Gordon’s interest in mirrors was rekindled after a story he heard about a friend who visited a house in Scotland. The guest was shown around the rooms, and the owner was particularly keen to show them the bathroom. “Is there anything special here, is there anything you notice?” the woman asked. “Anything you feel?” It transpired she was drawing attention to the shaving mirror which, she claimed, her husband had liberated from Berlin and its owner, Adolf Hitler.
Gordon’s eyes light up as he tells this story. “I said, ‘Any chance to get it?’ How many images of Adolf Hitler have been allowed to penetrate? And if you imagine the silver on the back of the mirror, and the basis of photography being silver, there’s probably, over time, an imprint of this person, who would be the only person to use it. There’s something to me very curious about that idea.”
Of course, it’s not the artist’s job to be polite or acceptable to society, or to avoid talking about the things that everyone else avoids talking about, but instead to pursue them, and see where they lead and what can be made of them, what can be said of them. What in the end do they reveal about Douglas Gordon – Glaswegian and Berliner, master of the macabre and cuddly dad, the deep thinker in the football terrace togs – apart from the notion that he is himself the embodiment of the duality he infuses into his art, existing somewhere in the flux between images and their mirrors?
We’re back to that “devilish interest in doubles.”
“I’m trying to give it up”, Douglas Gordon says, finishing his coffee. “I’m 45, and it’s beginning to double back on me. I can’t really talk about it just now, ’cos I’m trying to quit.”
Douglas Gordon shows at Blain Southern Berlin until 28th April 2013 www.blainsouthern.com