A walk through Scottish artist Douglas Gordon’s exhibit at the Hirshhorn is an exploration of the complexities of the human psyche. Using photography, text, mirrors and video installations, Gordon invites you to be a voyeur of his intimate self-exploration and to examine the contradictions, double meanings and intricacies of all human experience.
There are several photographs examining one of Gordon’s eyes and his small thunderbolt-shaped facial scar, with the inscription “Close Your Eyes, Open Your Mouth.” In one self-portrait, he wears a short bobbed blonde wig disguising himself as a simultaneous Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol, and Kurt Cobain. His most striking self-portrait is “Monster,” which presents two different images of Gordon: one as his normal self, the other as a distorted image of his face with his eyes, ears, and nose re-shaped with tape.
In his text piece “30 Seconds,” Gordon examines time by toying with our perceptions of how it passes. In a room lit by one light bulb, a segment of text that tells the story of how, in 1905, a doctor examined the decapitated head of a prisoner and discovered that it took 25 to 30 seconds for its eyes to finally stop blinking. To heighten this emphasis on time, the room is lit for 30 seconds before falling into darkness for 30 seconds.
Gordon follows this theme of death and darkness with a series of enlarged photographs of his nine-month-old niece playing with her fingers, hands and toes. These photographs contrast the confinement and darkness of nine months in the womb with the wonder that the nine-month-old baby experiences as she explores her new world.
The theme of time is evident again in his video installations. In “24-Hour Psycho,” Gordon dramatically slows down the speed of the movie Psycho so that viewers can closely examine the subtly of characters’ emotions in each frame. Unfortunately, the piece feels heavy-handed and forced.
More successful is “Dj vu,” which examines time in the film noir classic D.O.A., in which a man discovers that he has been poisoned and has exactly 24 hours to find his killer before dying. The movie plays on three screens; each version begins at the same time but is shown at various speeds so that one ends before the other. This lengthening and condensing of the movie succeeds in reshaping the viewer’s concepts of time.
Gordon’s other provocative pieces deal with good and evil and the overall struggle of the human experience. In one installation, he juxtaposes The Song of Bernadette and The Exorcist. The movies play together on the same screen to compare the story of two young girls, one compelled by goodness and the other controlled by evil. The last two installations in the piece relate life’s daily struggle with clips of a circus-trained elephant trying to come to its feet set against World War I footage of an injured soldier desperately tying to stand up.
Gordon’s exhibit is ripe with meaning about the polarity of the human experience. Though some pieces can seem over analytical, disjointed, and confounding, the exhibit is successful in provoking the viewer to question the ambiguity of the human psyche while revealing that rarely are there any real answers in life.
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is located at 7th Street N.W. and Independence Avenue. The exhibit runs until May 9.
