Seeing double - video artists Douglas Gordon and Stan Douglas

Interview, April, 1999 by Thomas McEvilley

For years, video art may have been the art world's equivalent of the brussels sprout - the thing you had to get down in order to ensure you were "keeping up." But the medium has taken root and gotten more and more interesting, and it's now a reason to follow what's going on in art. Stan Douglas and Douglas Gordon are two artists whose work shouldn't be missed

Scotsman Douglas Gordon and Canadian Stan Douglas are artists in their thirties. The two have mounted an exhibition at New York City's Dia Center for the Arts (542 West 22nd Street) on view through June 13, for which each is showing a major new installation, both involving double-screen video projections (Gordon's uses footage originally done as film) - but to very different ends. In addition, Gordon has a one-man show up at Gagosian Gallery (136 Wooster Street) through April 10. As the title of the Dia show, "Double Vision," suggests, one cannot be secure in one's expectations about their work in general, or either exhibition specifically. Security is based on boundaries, and in the last generation the boundaries between artistic media and styles have eroded, allowing them to flow into one another: A painter may include sculptural elements in his or her work, for example, just as a performance artist may incorporate painting or sculpture. Both Gordon's and Douglas's works are polyglot in that way; more than double vision, they ask for multiple vision. Among traditional categories, perhaps conceptual art comes closest to describing their approach, since in that genre an artist tends to set up expectations only to subvert them, switching without warning from one way of looking to another. What appears to be a pretty picture may actually contain a nasty joke. The viewer is often left in suspense - never to be resolved - but with a smile on his or her face.

Consider these artists' earlier works: In Stan Douglas's Overture (1986) a cinematic shot of a train going through a tunnel is accompanied by a seemingly unrelated voice-over reading from Proust; repetitions and loopings weave the strange pair into a jewellike enigma about time, motion through time, and memory. In other works the artist deals with found film footage and allusions to out-of-date television shows that have acquired an iconic value for him. In response to the observation that the references in his work are not likely to be familiar to many viewers, Douglas says he does not want to cut off the audience's need to "find a language of its own to understand the project." Still, the references are there, so the audience is divided at once into the group that knows them and the group that doesn't. But unlike more traditional art strategies, neither's interpretations are to be regarded as having authority over the other's.

Like Stan Douglas, Douglas Gordon also uses film and broadcasting elements, altering them to free them from the original intentions of their makers. In his most famous work of this type, 24 Hour Psycho (1993), Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) is projected at a few frames per second, so the story takes twenty-four hours to unfold. The original story line disappears and the observer discovers microscopic details that may seem to constitute entirely new ministories. In through a looking glass, his piece currently on view at Gagosian, Gordon simultaneously projects the same short clip of Robert De Niro from Taxi Driver (1976) on opposite ends of the gallery. Initially both projections are perfectly in sync, but after a few minutes one begins to lag behind the other, until what was initially a monologue becomes a heated conversation. Again the audience is left to find its own way to understand the works, and again there is the division between viewers who can place the references and those who can't. If those "in the know" feel their reaction has more authority than that of those who aren't, then they have fallen into a trap of self-satisfaction.