What will we see from you at Glasgow International? Douglas Gordon It’ll be funny coming back and playing on my home turf, as it were. I suppose the Glasgow thing will be quite a trip down memory lane for a few old codgers like me. I’m back at Tramway and showing a REDUX version of ‘24 Hour Psycho’, 17 years after the first version. Oh, and there’s another wee thing we will show, too, called ‘Lookin’ doon wi his black, black ee’.
And are you and Rufus Wainwright working together?
DG Yes, and as if that wasn’t enough, on the other side of the city, Rufus Wainwright is playing at the Royal Concert Hall the same evening as we open at Tramway. I met Rufus some years ago when I was still living in New York. He was introduced as a friend of a friend and his boyfriend comes from the same world as my girlfriend and so on and so on. It wasn’t difficult to imagine that if Peter Pan met the Artful Dodger, the two of them might come up with some little scheme or craziness together. By the way, I’m not saying which one of us is the boy who never grew up or the Dodger! Rufus’ new album is just out and the tour will premiere a suite of songs to which I have made a suite of short films. I’ve been editing like a maniac since the beginning of March to try and get it all finished on time and I think we may have just about made it. I also managed to shoot his album cover too.
It’s been a busy year.
What about you and ideas? Take your work ‘Between Darkness and Light’, for example. It’s such a fab idea to project Song of Bernadette and The Exorcist on opposite sides of the same screen. You must have jumped out of the bath when you thought of that?
DG ‘Between Darkness and Light’, ah yes, the all-time favourite installation of Mark Kermode, no less. I was in Paris, 1995, I think, and I was supposed to install ‘24 Hour Psycho’ at the Centre Pompidou but, as usual, the French were on strike, so the curator at the centre offered to throw me a party and gave me some money to go and buy a few tapes to show at the party. I went out and tried to buy The Exorcist and King of Kings. I thought it would work well together. Anyway, I’m standing in line with the two VHS’s and realised I didn’t have enough money so I put them back on the shelf and ran out to a cashline. When I came back, you wouldn’t believe it, but someone had just bought King of Kings. Of all the gin joints in all of the world etcetera . . . So time was running out and I scoured the shelves for something else to show and found The Song of Bernadette. I’d never seen either film before, neither Bernadette nor Friedkin’s film but I took a chance on it and hey, it worked out pretty well, I think. More then pretty well. The two films seem made for each other. As if they were meant to be that way. As if directors Henry King and Billy Friedkin got together over a bottle of whisky and planned a diptych, and only one person in the world – a Glasgow bloke with lots of tattoos – would
discover their plan. It looks, in a way, like that’s one of the things you try to do in your art: find a form that had to be. Movie star photographs should have had their eyes removed (though there’s a violence, an almost stalker quality to those works that still freaks me a bit). DG Ach, you know that no matter what you say about what you do, it always seems to be a bit fey or awkward or coy. But the truth is that I think if you work hard enough and are lucky enough then some works just happen to find you, in a way. As for the ‘blind star’ photographs, well, I should tell you that they were thought about a lot during the preparation for ‘24 Hour Psycho’ as I was milling around Glasgow Art School IT area. I had just about given up on the whole idea for this 24-hour film when a couple of pals of mine told me that there was this thingie wonderful Panasonic industrial VHS deck available and it had a ‘nonstopjog’ function. Well, that conversation saved my life, in a way. I ran home to make a T-shirt that said ‘NONSTOPJOG’ but found myself pinning up wee 10 x 8 black and white images of [Psycho stars] Martin Balsam, Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins etc around the alcove in the flat, exactly above my bed, actually. I fell to sleep all excited and must have been having crazy dreams as I woke up in the middle of the night and decided that I didn’t like all of these people ‘looking’ at me. Aye, right, I wasn’t up to no good in any case! But I took them off the wall and simply cut their eyes out. They never looked at me again and after we showed ‘24 Hour Psycho’ at Tramway, I never looked at them again either, at least not until I was invited to a group show in London some 10 years later. The show was called xxxxxx at Gagosian Gallery and I thought to myself, at the last minute, hey, this is perfect for all my old blind stars. After this show I spent the next few years doing more cutting, burning, tearing and ultimately reframing everything to idolise them all over again. A little bit of ‘kill yr idols’ and sort of voodoo that you know how to do too . . .
It looks to me like that head of yours is always buzzing, a bit of a wild place. Do you ever wish that you had a switch behind your ear that could turn your thoughts off? And another switch to turn your erotic imagination off? Wouldn’t life be calmer without either?
DG I don’t think there’s really any need to turn off, tune out, or drop in . . . I think that a certain kind of workaholism is maybe a good balance for all the other types of ‘holisms that might be flying around. I do switch off eventually and I think I might be doing it more and more recently. Being a good family man and all that is something that makes you realise that ‘you’ ain’t always the most important or needy person in the world, as it happens. I suppose if you try to be as devoted a person to your family and friends, then any little ‘extra time’ you might carve out in a day . . . bring on the sherry and let’s A – party, B – watch telly C – read a guid book D – work hard or E – all of the above and sometimes all at the same time. Answers on a postcard please . . .
Douglas Gordon: 24 Hour Psycho Back and Forth and To and Fro, Tramway, Glasgow, Fri 16 Apr–Mon 3 May.
GLASGOW International
Past, Present, Future GI director Katrina Brown introduces some of the festival’s themes and highlights
This year’s festival takes place across a vast array of spaces and places in Glasgow, from major museums and regular contemporary art venues to temporary sites and locations. For the first time it extends to Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum, where David Shrigley will show a group of new sculptures in a specially commissioned installation in the museum’s first floor ‘Study Centre’: his first exhibition in
Glasgow for over a decade and
full of his distinctive sense of the absurd. For this outing of the festival we have been working around the theme of ‘past, present, future’. This was in part suggested by prevalent trends in contemporary art practice of recent years and in part by the fact that 2010 is the 20th anniversary of Glasgow’s reign as European Capital of Culture, which seemed to offer an interesting moment to look back – and, we hope, forward.
So much contemporary work has taken
existent material as its starting point: whether film, found artifacts, design or architecture, the processes of re-enactment, reconstruction and re-use are widespread. There are two key examples of this at the heart of the Festival in the work of David Maljkovic (Croatia) and Gerard Byrne (Ireland): Maljkovic’s exhibition, Images with their own shadows, a group of recent collage and film works; and Gerard Byrne’s A thing is a hole in a thing it is not, a major new video work that looks at the emergence of Minimalism, will both be shown in a fantastic temporary venue on Miller Street in the heart of the Merchant City. This will also serve as the ‘hub’ for NVA’s brilliant White Bikes Plan. Elsewhere there’s Claire Barclay at Glasgow Print Studio; Jim Lambie at The Modern Institute’s great new space on Osborne Street; David Noonan in the Mitchell Library as part of a project by Washington Garcia; and a collaboration between Kate Davis and Faith Wilding at CCA.
There is a particularly strong
range of work to be found across all of the spaces at Tramway: Christoph Büchel, Keren Cytter (both showing in Scotland for the first time) and our own Douglas Gordon as well as a busy programme of screenings and a symposium. And alongside so much work made in our present, with the Hunterian Art Gallery and Artist Rooms we are presenting a remarkable selection of
unique works on paper and sculptures by one of the 20th century’s most enduringly resonant and influential figures: Joseph Beuys (see review, page 89). 15–29 Apr 2010 THE LIST 21