![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/Final_DouglasGordon_01-682x1024.jpg\" "\\"Douglas")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Douglas Gordon on 20 years of duality, football and menace between Glasgow and Berlin. IN THE POPULAR consciousness the city of Glasgow has what people who work in the law call \u201cform\u201d. 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 and the macabre.<\/p>\n 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 K\u00fcnste a few days before the opening of a retrospective marking his 2012 K\u00e4the 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 \u2013 his famous \u201cdevilish interest in doubles\u201d \u2013 has long been his artistic signature, you\u2019d be nuts to believe he was anything so simple.<\/p>\n Douglas Gordon complains about his gout and says he doesn\u2019t drink whisky any more. Doctor\u2019s orders? \u201cNo, missus\u2019s orders.\u201d He grins and makes jokes and comments that the only bitterness he feels is in the taste of the coffee he\u2019s drinking. Then he says, \u201cDid 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\u2019t nice, and that my \u2018back alley philosophy\u2019 didn\u2019t equate with my position in the art world. I just thought, you know\u2026 if that\u2019s what I represent because I\u2019ve 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\u201d. The odd thing \u2013 at least, it\u2019s a shock to him when the realisation comes to him over his coffee \u2013 is that it\u2019s 20 years now that he\u2019s been doing \u201cit\u201d: doubling, making multimedia art, exploring voodoo, football, music and psychopathy between the brutal, beautiful cities of Berlin and Glasgow. He\u2019s accumulated the garlands to match his gifts \u2013 his 1996 Turner Prize, the Hugo Boss and so on \u2013 like the pot belly that creeps up on men inhabiting the far side of 40.<\/p>\n In the adjacent room, a scrapheap of analogue TVs (\u201cI wanted it to have a feeling of Paddy\u2019s Market circa 1984; luckily in a city like Berlin, you can still source old shitty tellies\u201d) present \u201cPretty Much Every Video and Film Work from About 1992 Until Now To Be Seen On Monitors Some With Headphones Others Run Silently and Simultaneously\u201d, the beautifully prosaic and defiantly unpunctuated title of his video works to date. \u201cDouglas Gordon: Feature Film\u201d, \u201c24 Hour Psycho\u201d, \u201ck.364\u201d, they\u2019re all there, and are suitably impressive in sum, not to mention surprising \u2013 at least for Gordon.<\/p>\n \u201cTwenty years\u201d, he nods. \u201cSometimes I think I\u2019ve overproduced. But it\u2019s only 90 works in 20 years \u2013 I should probably work harder. I haven\u2019t 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.\u201d The actuality of it appears to make him content. \u201cI\u2019m happy\u201d, says Gordon. But here\u2019s the proviso: \u201c\u2026whatever that means for someone from Glasgow\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed, what does it mean? Is Glaswegian happiness something entirely different? It\u2019s tempting to read the effects of the Berlin-Glasgow axis of ugly into Gordon\u2019s 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\u2019t seem to really belong to it, a tough, awkward and lyrical place: Liverpool in England, Marseille in France, along with Gordon\u2019s hometown and the one that adopted him. What does he see as the kinship?<\/p>\n \u201cA 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\u2019s a familiarity to that. Thank God there are no trams in Glasgow, otherwise the death rate would be significantly higher.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n City of ghosts<\/strong><\/p>\n He came here in the Nineties and, he says, \u201calways liked the anonymity of Berlin. It\u2019s getting less and less anonymous at the moment. I really like it in the winter: less tourists and it\u2019s easier to see the ghosts. There\u2019s no anonymity in Glasgow, because of the scale of it. Every student knows every waitress and bartender. They all know each other.\u201d<\/p>\n And those ghosts? \u201cAt 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\u201d, he says. \u201cLate at night when it\u2019s 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\u2026 I swear I\u2019ve seen some.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s true though, that just as Glasgow has its background pantheon of spirits, stories and traumas \u2013 the killer Bible John, the ice cream wars, the Gorbals Vampire and one Ian Brady, the Moors Murderer \u2013 Berlin\u2019s macabre is not only alive and present but vividly memorialised, in the Stolpersteine, among other landmarks. \u201cYou do literally trip over them sometimes.\u201d<\/p>\n Douglas Gordon recently opened a complex of artists\u2019 spaces in the friendly street of Kurf\u00fcrstenstra\u00dfe, 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s Market pile of TVs: \u201cZidane: a 21st Century Portrait\u201d, 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\u2019s sensational \u2013 one could say epochal \u2013 gifts as an attacking midfielder. Like the greatest players \u2013 Pel\u00e9, Maradona, Messi and David Beckham since he transformed into a fashion model \u2013 you just couldn\u2019t stop looking at him. In Zidane\u2019s game, the footballer often seemed bigger than the match; his figuration transcended the play. It was said that Zizou\u2019s 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\u2019s other most notorious work, \u201c24 Hour Psycho\u201d.<\/p>\n Zizou Redux<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not over yet\u201d, 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: \u201cJust 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\u2026 I don\u2019t know what the Hebrew for \u2018fuck off\u2019 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n \u201c[Philippe Parreno and I] had different attitudes towards him\u201d, Gordon recalls. \u201cI didn\u2019t want any autographs and photographs with him \u2013 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\u2019ve been skirting around the idea of getting back in touch with him.\u201d<\/p>\n The fascination the two artists had for the player seems amply justified, especially as a few months after the film\u2019s 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 \u2013 an act in which the player sacrificed the highest prize in football in order to salvage his own dignity. The event was shocking, unimaginable \u2013\u00a0 spectacular, in fact. \u201cIt was like, \u2018Did that really happen?\u2019\u201d Gordon says, ruminating on the incident. \u201cI 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, \u2018Oh son, your pal let you down\u2019. \u201cI couldn\u2019t believe it. It took a couple of years to get to know what it was really about, which wasn\u2019t what was written in the papers\u201d. Gordon goes on to outline in detail what, in his understanding, the aggro was really all about, not that those details are printable.<\/p>\n There\u2019s 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\u2019s settled into a certain kind of family life, and is considering for his next tattoo \u201csomething soft, to calm it down a bit\u2026 I had a dream about doing a huge tattoo last night, but there\u2019s literally not enough space on my wee hairy body to do it. [The next tattoo] will be to do with my children.\u201d<\/p>\n His partner is Ruth Rosenfeld, a soprano from Israel, while his four-year-old daughter, he says, is \u201ca Berliner; she speaks German, Hebrew, English and Portuguese, she was born on German reunification day. You wouldn\u2019t get that in Glasgow\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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\u2019re to be simplistic about it. He ruminates at length on his \u201cSelf Portrait of You + Me\u201d series, in which photos of filmic icons \u2013 James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and so on \u2013 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.<\/p>\n It began \u2013 where else? \u2013 in Glasgow: \u201cI was having sleepless nights. In the alcove where my bed was, I had black and white photos of [\u201cPsycho\u201d actors] Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh and Martin Balsam. I woke up one night and couldn\u2019t 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. \u201cYeah\u2026 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\u2026 loving.\u201d<\/p>\n Specifically, Gordon evolved the practice into something more arcane. \u201cI had a recipe list that I asked an assistant to go and get: black, red, and white sex candles, pigs\u2019 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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. \u201cI keep thinking it\u2019s always my image in the mirror, but I keep forgetting that I\u2019m not there and other people might be reflected in the mirror.\u201d<\/p>\n Mirror, mirror<\/strong><\/p>\n Recently, Gordon\u2019s 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. \u201cIs there anything special here, is there anything you notice?\u201d the woman asked. \u201cAnything you feel?\u201d It transpired she was drawing attention to the shaving mirror which, she claimed, her husband had liberated from Berlin and its owner, Adolf Hitler.<\/p>\n Gordon\u2019s eyes light up as he tells this story. \u201cI said, \u2018Any chance to get it?\u2019 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\u2019s probably, over time, an imprint of this person, who would be the only person to use it. There\u2019s something to me very curious about that idea.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, it\u2019s not the artist\u2019s 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 \u2013 Glaswegian and Berliner, master of the macabre and cuddly dad, the deep thinker in the football terrace togs \u2013 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?<\/p>\n We\u2019re back to that \u201cdevilish interest in doubles.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m trying to give it up\u201d, Douglas Gordon says, finishing his coffee. \u201cI\u2019m 45, and it\u2019s beginning to double back on me. I can\u2019t really talk about it just now, \u2019cos I\u2019m trying to quit.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Text: Kevin Braddock<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n
Did she say that? \u201cYep\u2026 \u2018Don\u2019t look like that, son\u2019. It was too late, I\u2019d done it\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/Final_DouglasGordon_03.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/Blain-Southern.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n