- Venue
- Akademie der Kunste
- Location
- Germany
The esteemed Käthe Kollwitz Prize is the German equivalent to our own Turner Prize. Running since 1960, it is awarded to an artist whose work makes a significant international contribution to the visual arts with the lucky prizewinner selected by a judging panel which this year included Miroslaw Balka. I am not sure what Käthe herself would have made of this year’s winner – Douglas Gordon.
Käthe Kollwitz was one of the most remarkable female artists of the twentieth century. Working in Germany through both World Wars, her output was politically inflected and devastating in its graphic renditions of the horrors of war. Perhaps it is here, in the darkness, that Gordon and Kollwitz might meet. Whilst war is not the ongoing subject of Gordon’s enormous body of video work, one is stuck once all his works are assembled to view as one narrative, by their insistence on mortality. His 92 screen installation, aptly named Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now, was on show at the Academie der Küste as part of the Prize, and allowed the viewer the opportunity to do just that.
Born in Glasgow in 1966, Gordon’s receipt of a German award is apt, given he has based his studio in Berlin for many years. Indeed he is no stranger to prizes, having won the Turner Prize in 1996 and the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Prize in 1998. Gordon’s achievement is not to be underestimated, despite bridging the art world and cinema his work has remained challenging, unsettling and deconstructive of cinema and film.
Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now incorporates 74 separate works by Gordon, including his world famous 24 Hour Psycho (1993), Play Dead; Real Time (2003) which starred an elephant, Henry Rebel (2011), and the evocative Through a looking glass (1999) in which Gordon doubled footage of Robert de Niro uttering the immortal lines ‘are you talking to me?’ in Taxi Driver, so that he endlessly addresses himself. Strangely Zindane; A 21st Century Portrait (2006), the work that took Gordon out of the gallery and into the cinema and more broadly into the public’s consciousness, is not represented here.
Each monitor in the installation sits perched atop stacked beer crates, giving the space the feel of some macho yet demented teenager’s room. Here the viewer is confronted by a multitude of wet creeping toads, glistening magnified horseflies, floating skulls, moments of psychological intensity and breakdown and uncomfortable performances where the artist painfully distorts his face with tape or blackens his hands with indelible marker. These visuals combine evocatively with screams from other video’s, or the maniacal pipe playing of an Arabic snake charmer. The manipulative techniques of the horror or film noir genre are here displayed in serialized form, each video quoting, appropriating and deconstructing cinematic tricks of the trade with Gordon’s trademark sense of humour.
In this reef of glowing screens works that were first presented as split-screen installations are shown on single monitors, a move that threatens to reduces not just their scale but their impact, providing more of an even greater interpretive challenge to the viewer. Spending time with the works individually is difficult in itself . The distraction of having so many flickering videos to choose from is problematic, as is the fact that the sound for each moves in and out of range, giving the viewer access to only fragmentary moments of sound and image alignment. In this pick and mix ensemble of Gordon’s greatest hits, it’s also easy to reduce the experience of the installation to a game of recognition, with bonus points to those who have seen every work. Those that seemed self-indulgent first time round, and are now rendered almost completely unintelligible given their radical reduction in scale and the unavailability of accompanying sound.
Perhaps then the happiest viewer would be the one who had encountered Gordon’s oeuvre before, and viewed each work in its intended format, be that spilt screen installations in cavernous warehouses, or the cinema itself. Whilst this amalgamation might undermine the power of Gordon’s video works when encountered individually, this installation strategy does provide a retrospective overview of what has made Gordon such a well-respected artist, and therefore a fitting prize winner. Despite the shortcomings of this method of presentation, it is beyond doubt that Gordon richly deserves the recognition his work has continued to receive.
