We have Damien, they've got Douglas. Scotland has its own fabulously successful artist who came to prominence in the 1990s, and recently turned 40: Douglas Gordon. Just don't say "Scotart."
There are some strange artistic parallels between Hirst (b.1965) and Gordon (b.1966). First there are the dying flies. Hirst's A Thousand Years was a large pair of vitrines in which flies feed off a cow's head in one, and are electrocuted in another. Gordon made Film Noir (Fly), a video in which he glued a fly on its back to a table and filmed it twitching its legs in the air. And there's the shark and the elephant. We all know about Hirst's shark, but how many of us are familiar with Gordon's elephant? Play Dead; Real Time is a film of an elephant in an art gallery. It enters frame and then lies down as if dead. Hirst won the Turner in 1995; Gordon in 1996.
After these similarities, the artists diverge, becoming mirror images of each other. Hirst is the pride of private collectors—the art world's hottest auction property; Gordon is the darling of museum directors and supercurators—he's had big solo shows at Moca in LA, Moma in New York, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and now the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. Unlike Douglas, Damien is always cropping up in the news pages of the daily papers; unlike Damien, Douglas has won top international art prizes—including the Guggenheim Museum's Hugo Boss prize and the Venice biennale premio. And in fact, Gordon's shark is not really an elephant but an ultra-slow-motion video, 24 Hour Psycho.
24 Hour Psycho is Gordon's iconic work, produced in 1993, a year after Hirst's shark. It's a video installation, in which Hitchcock's classic is slowed down so that it runs over 24 hours. The idea is that this minimal but radical transformation of a cinema classic gives us a sinister sense of our familiarity with—and internalisation of—the narrative and images of this film. The slow-mo seems to trap us in the world of the film. It is the art gallery manifestation of Baudrillard's notion of the simulacrum—that "the real is no longer possible" and our reality is constructed by media.
This line of investigation into cinema is only one half of Gordon's work—the other is a set of text works and videos about his body. Untitled Text is a list of opposites, written up on a gallery wall—"Hot is cold, day is night, lost is found, everywhere is nowhere…" and so on. In his video works, such as A Divided Self I & II, a hairy arm battles a hairless one. The messages may be a little obvious, but the art world loves them. Unlike Hirst, it's impossible to find a curator or critic who has a bad word to say about Gordon.
It ain't what he does, it's the way that he does it—the source of the critical adulation is Gordon's technique. Nowadays the index of art is found in the gulf between effort and effect. Call it Lewis's law of contemporary art: the quality of an artwork can be measured as the inverse proportion of the simplicity of the action and the scale of philosophical and aesthetic impact. It's the artistic equivalent of a lethal karate blow. Gordon is, curators might say, a Zen master. He uses cinema against itself: the tropes of slow motion, magnification, superimposition and duplication are deployed to expose its mythology and artifice.
One of the problems of art made this way is that it's very difficult to work out the difference between the simple and the simple-minded, the revelatory and the obvious, the kung-fu chop and the slap-across-the-face. Two new works by Gordon illustrate the problem. At the Gagosian gallery in London, Gordon is showing a series of images based on a gesture as banal as it is unoriginal. Gordon's idea is to glue photographs of the Bond girls on to mirrors and burn away their eyes and mouths so that the viewer looks through the blackened edges of these holes to the mirror behind. The mutilation of images of celebrities, however beautifully executed, is a foundation-course idea, which throws into question the rest of the artist's oeuvre. However, according to Lewis's law, one might find virtue in the populism and familiarity of this gesture.
On the other hand, Gordon's film Zidane: a 21st-century portrait, which he made with the French artist Philippe Parreno, is a work whose action is so distinctive, well-conceived and precisely executed that it makes it difficult to imagine the artist could produce anything second-rate. Gordon and Parreno trained 17 cameras on the French footballer for the entire duration of a game. The conventional narrative of the filmed football match, which we all take for granted, dissolves. Instead we have a psychological portrait—of one man on the field. Zidane brings together video art, documentary and portraiture. Gordon's film turns the football player into a satisfyingly ambiguous, Ballardesque symbol of the early 21st century. Zidane pants and spits in long shot, a "mediatised" animal; behind him, the crowd roars and electronic adverts flash, an anonymous sea of mass culture.
Every Gordon artwork is a Sampras serve, fast and sleek, but as one might expect, some of his balls land out of court. In the art world, though, there are no umpires.
