Douglas Gordon 24 Hour Psycho 1993 Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery © Douglas Gordon
From Psycho, 1960, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, Universal Studios © Universal
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. An early text work, Meaning and Location (1990), installed at University College London, demonstrates not only his emphasis on the importance of context, but also his exploration of semantic anomalies. By printing the same text twice with a misplaced comma (‘Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise. Truly I say to you today, you will be with me in paradise’), he compromises and multiplies the original meaning of the words from the gospel of St Luke. In the 1994 sound installation Something Between My Mouth and Your Ear (London, B. and M. Starkmann priv. col.), he played, in an entirely blue room, 30 popular songs that were current in the six months preceding his birth. This concern with memory and perception was developed in the acclaimed video projection 24 Hour Psycho (1993; Wolfsburg, Kstmus.), a rear-projected installation of Hitchcock’s film, slowed down to last an entire day. Gordon focuses the viewer’s attention both on the intricate detail of the film in its naked state, as a progression of stills, as well as on their own recollections of a cinema classic. In 1997 he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale.