The Opposite of Dorian Gray
Douglas Gordon on vanity,
death, and wax figures
Exhibition view
Photo: Eva Maria
Ocherbauer
Stagings of the self,
identities, and transience: in "The VANITY of Allegory" at the Deutsche
Guggenheim, Douglas Gordon combines his own art with works of other
artists ranging from Man Ray to Jeff Koons as well as films from Hollywood
and the underground. Ulrich Clewing visited the Scottish Turner
Prizewinner shortly before the exhibition opening in Berlin.
A meeting room on the fourth floor of the Deutsche Bank building Unter den
Linden. Douglas Gordon has just come from the exhibition hall, where he’s
busy setting up the show. He seems tired; a result, perhaps, of last
night’s train journey from Paris to Berlin, on which he didn’t seem to get
all that much sleep. But then, all of a sudden, he’s highly concentrated;
for one, he likes to talk, and secondly, he obviously has fun giving
interviews.
Douglas Gordon, Confessions of a Justified Sinner, 1995-96, Video Installation
Ulrich Clewing: Mister Gordon, you like to play
with different identities in your work. You’ve claimed the main character
of James Hogg’s
novel The
Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Robert
Wringhim, as your e-mail identity and appropriated the book’s title for
your split-screen video installation "Confessions of a Justified Sinner".
If we were about to evoke the spirit of Douglas Gordon – who would he be
today?
Douglas Gordon: It’ s a funny thing, you know,
because I traveled here last night from Paris on a train. It was very
funny, because it reminded me of when I was young and the idea that when
you meet people you could be anyone or anything. Last night, I’d forgotten
that when you travel in Europe in the summer, it’s like a circus: you meet
the strangest people. I ended up at three o’clock in the morning sitting
in the buffet car with a French-African filmmaker, two interior-designers
from Pakistan, a DJ from the north of France, an anthropologist from the
American Midwest and five or six American guys, you know, from St. Cruz.
And everyone is telling each other what they do. Of course I was conscious
of the fact that everyone could have been lying.
|
Exhibition view
Photo: Eva Maria Ocherbauer
So what did you
say?
I told them the truth: My name is
Robert Wringhim...I think they’ll all come to the exhibition on Friday.
Let’s see who turns up…
We live in a straightforward
culture. Why should we care about allegory today?
Oh, I think
that it’s maybe difficult to imagine the place for allegory in the present
time. But you see, there are bombs in London, there’s war all over the
world, maybe it’s time we need the extended metaphor.
Proposal for a Posthumous Portrait, 2004 Photo: David Heald,
©Collection Sean and Mary Kelly, New York
Your work "Proposal for a Posthumous Portrait" (2004) seems quite morbid.
It shows a carved skull embedded in a mirrored case. At the same time, it
refers to a classical
Vanitas motif. What fascinates you about the transitoriness of being?
If you think that’s morbid, you should see some of the other things [laughs].
The Proposal for a Posthumous Portrait is a reference not only to
Vanitas, but to Duchamp
. Because the star carved in the back of the head is measured exactly from
the photographs of Marcel Duchamp with the star-shaped tonsure. There’s
another piece that’s not in the show – we discussed it, and came to the
conclusion that it would make a very different type of show. It involves
buying a skull, a real one, for every year of my life, 38 in all, and
making a trepanation into the skull, one star shape for each year. The
first one would have one, the second two, the third three, and so on. And
by the time I’m fifty years old, it will become very difficult to have a
skull with fifty stars. Imagine, when I get to be an old man and I’m very
fragile, then my little birthday present to myself is going to be
extremely fragile. So you could say that my interest in defeating death is
inevitably some kind of vanity.
[1]
[2]
[3]
|
