Artist Research: Douglas Gordon
I have been looking at Douglas Gordon and his video installations he is a Scottish video and installation artist. His work is often based on a disruption of perception; by making his audience aware of their own fugitive subjectivity, he questions how we give meaning to our experience of things. I really want to represent this in my own work by making the audience aware of them self and there size and space. Making the audience connect is important to my work. The piece I really liked is Play Dead;Real time, in which Gordon films an elephant but I like the way he play with the size in his installation’s.
ARTIST ROOMS: Douglas Gordon: Play Dead; Real Time
Tate Britain: Display
6 May – 29 September 2013
In his video installations, Douglas Gordon (born 1966) plays with the cinematic techniques of duration, doubling and mirroring to explore the dynamic between audience and image. Play Dead; Real Time was filmed at an empty Gagosian Gallery in New York, where the artist arranged to have Minnie, a four-year-old Indian elephant, brought in to perform a series of tricks – ‘play dead’, ‘stand still’, ‘walk around’, ‘back up’, ‘get up’ and ‘beg’ – on the command of her off-screen trainer. The footage showing Minnie’s sequences of tricks is simultaneously presented in a front and a rear life-sized projection and on a monitor, with each one depicting the same event from a range of perspectives.
The viewer is presented with an opportunity to see the animal with an intimacy and perspective that are very rarely offered. For Gordon, Play Dead; Real Time sits between ‘a nature film and a medical documentary, to observe the subject in a way that could be used for a practical purpose but also had a very certain aesthetic. One of the beautiful things about film and video is that it can imbue a sense or sensibility that doesn’t actually physically exist.’
