Douglas Gordon

This book examines the innovative work of thirty-four-year-old Scottish artist Douglas Gordon. Gordon is perhaps best known for installations that feature classic films by directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, and Martin Scorsese. In each of these works the original film has been manipulated–slowed down, mirrored by the use of split screen or dual projection, or had its soundtrack altered–to emphasize the artist’s own signature themes, which include trust, guilt, madness, confession, deception, and doubling. Produced in conjunction with a survey of Gordon’s work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the book features essays by MOCA assistant curator Michael Darling, exhibition curator Russell Ferguson, Scottish novelist Francis McKee, and Guggenheim Museum curator Nancy Spector. Darling’s essay places Gordon’s work in the context of the Romantic tradition. Ferguson’s essay looks at Gordon’s work to date. It focuses on the issue of trust as it weaves its way from early works such as the performance/installation Trust Me, through his tattoo and instruction works, to more recent works such as Feature Film, which incorporates the Hitchcock film “Vertigo,” McKee compiles Gordon’s literary sources into a kind of hybridized text. Spector’s essay focuses on the autobiographical nature of Gordon’s oeuvre, showing how he shifts between revealing details of his personal life–for example, the ongoing List of Names lists all the people he has met in a given period of time—and obscuring other aspects of his identity. Designed by the studio of Bruce Mau in close collaboration with Gordon himself, this book promises to be the definitive reference on one of today’s mostexciting young artists.