DOUGLAS GORDON.

We were delighted to receive an invitation to take a sneak peak at Douglas Gordon’s new exhibit. We thought that the exhibit was suitable for discussion here.
 
Gordon’s ruthless and cerebral logic fastens the mind, his magical skill is in playing with the element of darkness and with us. The show amounts to an index of the ways a film can repulse, but Mr Gordon also makes films that do not push the limits of optical tolerance or personal endurance.
 
Whether he is stretching Hitchcock’s Psycho out to twenty-four hours long or isolating nuances in Martin Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver, Gordon offers reconfigurations of Hollywood films that are mirrors on fire, with reflections not of the clichéd gaze but of the mirror itself.
 
Anyway, you never know which Gordon you’re going to see, the terrific, the dry, the dull or the iffy. For this show, he seems to have combined several old ideas in a persuasive new way. It’s hypnotic, multi-leveled and much more moving than it has any right to be, but at the end it falls flat and comes off moralistic. This charges the atmosphere with something sad.
 
Gordon shot his own footage, he has gone back to the freestanding screens he used for the medical pieces. He shifts between revealing details of his personal life and obscuring other aspects of his identity.