25/11/2019 Douglas Gordon | Gagosian Quarterly

Gagosian Quarterly

Spring  Issue

DOUGLAS GORDON
Experimenting with temporal manipulation in his films and videos, Douglas
Gordon uses both his own work and that of others as raw material to distort
time, disorient, and challenge the viewer. In the following text, Katrina Brown
discusses the importance of Douglas Gordon’s  Hour Psycho () and some
of the films that followed, touching on threads that run throughout the artist’s
career.

Douglas Gordon, 24 Hour Psycho Back and Forth and To and Fro, 2008, two translucent projection screens showing two 4:3
ratio film projections, viewable from all sides, 24 hours, loop. © Studio lost but found/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018. Psycho,
1960, USA, directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock, distributed by Paramount Pictures © Universal City Studios. Photo:
Rob McKeever

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From the perspective of the twenty- rst century, which gives us constant
access to everything everywhere, it’s hard to imagine (or more accurately
recall, for those of us old enough) the impact that the domestic videotape
player—the VCR—had on how we viewed lms: not only what we could
watch, but how and when we could watch it, was utterly changed. e
technology became affordable in the mid-’s and commonplace in the
’s; today it is obsolete. Before its introduction, lms were viewed either in
the cinema or when broadcast on network TV channels—of which, when
Douglas Gordon and I were growing up in the United Kingdom, there were
exactly four. As well as introducing the ability to watch lms of your own
choosing (imagine!) at home, the VCR also of course opened up the ability
to control how you watched it; sections could be fast-forwarded, paused—
creating the delightful possibility of still images—or even played back in
slow motion.

Douglas Gordon, Looking Down With His Black, Black Ee, 2008, triple-screen video monitor work with
sound, 7:56 minutes, loop. © Studio lost but found/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018. Photo: Rob McKeever

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Douglas Gordon, B-Movie, 1995, iPod Touch screen showing a fly at life size, 34:41 minutes, loop, 2 ×
3 ½ inches (5.1 × 8.9 cm). © Studio lost but found/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018. Photo: Rob McKeever

Douglas’s  Hour Psycho, made in  and rst shown at Tramway in

Glasgow, was his rst work to use this newfound ability, which he deployed
to slow down a single lm so that it lasts a full day. e work opens up
unseen and unknowable space in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (), with
previously unremarked details appearing as stills (the lm’s extreme
protraction meaning that each frame appears on-screen for half a second,
where the normal projection speed is twenty-four frames a second).
Widespread public knowledge of the lm—whether through actually
having seen it or not—means that no one need watch it to nd out what
happens, so the viewing becomes inextricably connected to memory, be it
accurate or fallible. As legendary as Psycho is, this transformation plays with
our memory and shis the atmosphere from tense drama to a kind of
anxious languor, while still laying bare the irresistible drive to build
narrative from the simple succession of images in time.
 Hour Psycho was certainly an audacious move, and thousands of words
have been written about it since. I hardly need add more here, but its genes
are in many works that followed while its own signi cance has only grown.
My rst encounter with it—projected on a single large screen suspended in
the huge space that is Tramway—has certainly proved an indelible memory.
It is oen talked about as sculpture, and the experience was undoubtedly
spatial, but also intensely visual: there is, of course, no sound in the work,
though several people seem to recall hearing it—an apt trick of memory,
perhaps.  Hour Psycho allows the viewer to relish Hitchcock’s exquisitely
craed compositions, and the glorious contrasts among the lm’s blacks and
whites and silvery grays.
e group of Douglas’s works that followed in  and ’, including
Hysterical and ms-, applied a similar technique to historical
documentary footage. I rst saw both of these works on a small domestic
television set hooked up to a cheap VCR in the Glasgow at that Douglas
and I shared for a number of years in the early ’s. e slow-motion
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approach would be stretched to the extreme in  when Douglas

developed  Year Drive-By, which draws out John Ford’s legendary 
Western e Searchers to match the duration of the search referenced in the
lm’s story. It sets up a real-time experience, then, of the time frame the lm
depicts. e Searchers stars John Wayne as an American Civil War veteran
on a tortuous epic search for his abducted niece, played by Natalie Wood. It
is one of the rst lms Douglas recalls watching, at home with his parents as
a child; for some reason that remains unknown to me, there were always
Westerns on television at the time, especially on seemingly interminable
Sunday aernoons. (And, as Geoff Dyer has written of growing up in the
s, “Bear in mind how huge aernoons were back then.”) Douglas
recalls being perplexed by the lm:

How can one lm, which lasts only  hours, possibly convey the fear, the
desperation, the heartache, the real “searching and waiting and hoping”
that my father had tried to explain to me when I was younger?

How can anyone even try to sum up  miserable years in only  minutes?


Installation view, Douglas Gordon: back and forth and forth and back, Gagosian, New York, November
14, 2017–February 3, 2018. © Studio lost but found/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018. Psycho, 1960, USA,
directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock, distributed by Paramount Pictures © Universal City
Studios. Photo: Rob McKeever

His version therefore serves as a tribute to the heroic nature of the quest and
the suffering of Wayne’s character. In this instance, one second of cinema
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time equates to . hours in real time, or an incredible three frames per
hour, meaning that even the most dedicated of viewers is unlikely to ever
see more than a few seconds of the original lm. It is interminable. Just like
a Sunday aernoon at home in the s.
Described by Douglas as “something of a companion piece to  Hour
Psycho,”  Year Drive-By was rst shown in part at the Biennale de Lyon of
, when it marked a century of cinema. It ran for three months, just a
twentieth of its intended duration. It was to nd perhaps its most perfect
iteration in , when it was shown outdoors in the desert at Twentynine
Palms in California, set against the expanse of the arid sun-drenched
landscape in which so much of Ford’s lm unfolds.
e renown of  Hour Psycho has made it a substantial part of Douglas’s
biography—shown all over the world, it is regularly cited as a key work of
the s. His own history has been a regular thread in his work, through
narrative texts, exhibition titles (such as What have I done, at the Hayward
Gallery, London, in ), and the revisiting of his back catalogue in Pretty
much every lm and video work from  until now . . . (– ), an ongoing
compendium work that also saw a return to the TV-format presentation:
the videotapes for eighty-two works, with new works continually added, are
played on VCRs and on over  monitors (or CRTs), like a personal archive
or memory bank.

Douglas Gordon, 5 Year Drive-By, 1995, single projection work, 5 years, loop © Studio lost but
found/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2018. Photo: Kay Pallister

 Hour Psycho Back and Forth and To and Fro () tackles that rst work
head on, representing it alongside a divergent twin. e new version, shown
for the rst time at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in
 and at Tramway in —site of  Hour Psycho’s original coming to
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life—takes the form of two identical screens installed side by side, with
Douglas’s lm playing in full on each: forward on one, backward on the
other, with one ipped le to right such that—at exactly twelve hours in—
they present the same images, mirrored, in a kind of exquisite, time-limited
lm version of a Rorschach inkblot test. More recently at Gagosian in New
York, the screens were set perpendicular to one another so that one screen
dissected the other a third of the way along it, creating two separate pairings
of images. ese formats generate some entirely unforeseeable but
remarkable juxtapositions, and the tension is intense: what has happened
before will also happen in the future, and, of course, vice versa.
e two-screen, mirroring format is familiar from several earlier works of
Douglas’s, including Hysterical. His practice has oen involved ideas of
repetition, inversion, mirroring, doubling, and duality, in what the curator
Nancy Spector has called his “perpetual play of opposites.” ese are, of
course, works made from a position of love: a love of lm and a vivid
awareness of what Douglas has called the social aspect of watching a lm,
memories of rst viewings and the subjectivity of how we remember them.
It’s a love that may twist itself into an obsession, into extreme viewing, but
nonetheless allows the objects of his affection to endure, on an imposing
scale and with a physical presence that mirrors the scale of their impact on
our culture and imaginations.

 Geoff Dyer, “On Being an Only Child,” , in Dyer, Working the Room:
Essays and Reviews, – (Edinburgh and London: Canongate, ,
reprint ed. ), p. .
 Douglas Gordon, “ year drive-by; proposal for a public artwork,” copy of fax
sent by the artist in  and reproduced in Unbuilt Roads:  Unrealized
Projects, ed. Hans Ulrich Obrist (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, ).

Katrina M. Brown is founding Director of e Common

Guild, Glasgow, which presents an international program
of artists’ projects, events, and exhibitions. She was Director
of the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art in 
and . From  until , she was Curator and
Deputy Director of Dundee Contemporary Arts.

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