I passed Douglas Gordon: Timeline a couple of times on my way to the Dada exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, but I didn't pay much attention to it. Its entrance was off-putting, somehow, with mirrored text on one wall, and I finally went in only to kill a half hour before the museum closed.
"In his most well-known works, Scottish artist Douglas Gordon (b. 1966) addresses the familiarity and popularity of moving pictures by manipulating, reframing, and superimposing them to alter viewers’ perceptions."
And then I suddenly realized that I had seen his work before, in the exhibition Double Vision, at Dia, when it was still located in Chelsea. Double Vision paired Douglas Gordon with Stan Douglas, both of whom used dual video projections, and was up for an agonizingly long time span of more than a year, from 1999 to 2000. I remember going in grudgingly, thinking "When are they going to change this already?," and then being freakishly mesmerized by both pieces, watching them repeatedly.
Douglas Gordon's installation was based on the 1949 film Whirlpool, by Otto Preminger, but he had manipulated the film so that its projection resulted in a flicker that mimicked the act of hypnosis. Gordon had separated the odd- and even-numbered frames to create two videos, filling the missing frames with black leader. The two were projected side by side, with one a mirror image of the other.
This installation is part of the MoMA retrospective, but it's not the most memorable. My favorite was a three-screen projection showing the face and hands of a conductor leading an orchestra performing the score for Hitchcock's Vertigo. The Times criticized this particular work as "humorless," but I enjoyed the play of light and shadows against the music.
snide & happy, this show is for you!
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