Douglas Gordon, Feature Film, 1999, Video installation; DVD (transferred from 35 mm film), running time: 122 min., DVD player, 2 projectors, sound system, Dimensions variable, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, film still: Courtesy of the artist.
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
Hollerplatz 1
38440 Wolfsburg, Germany
Once you become immersed in one of Douglas Gordon's video installations (b. 1966 in Glasgow), it can be very difficult to extricate yourself from its hold. Whether they involve seemingly familiar images, sequences or music from the films of Alfred Hitchcock, historical documentary footage of patients from psychiatric institutions - making the viewer more like a voyeur than a detached observer – or elaborate film productions, his works make recollected material appear familiar and strange at once. Here, good and evil, life and death, guilt and innocence, the banal and the sublime are closely entwined, and sometimes cannot be separated. Douglas Gordon uses a wide range of artistic and filmic techniques to explore the ambivalent sensitivities of human nature: images that have been vastly enlarged or reduced, reflected, inverted, endlessly repeated, speeded up or slowed down, or are brought (temporarily) to a complete standstill.
