The Left Hand Can't See That the Right Hand is Blind
2004 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
12:14 minutes
Douglas Gordon
Douglas Gordon’s single-channel video The Left Hand Can’t See That The Right Hand is Blind, captures an unfolding scene between two hands in leather gloves—at first seemingly comfortable to be entwined, and later, engaged in a struggle. As suggested by the work’s title, each of the hands assumes a character with a distinct personality, as if we were witnessing a lovers’ quarrel and embrace, or the embodiment of opposing forces of an internal struggle. Gordon has previously created performance-based works depicting his own body or parts of it—arms, hands, fingers, eyes—usually enacting simple, repetitive movements. Hands, in particular, have held his interest due to their ability to evoke internal emotional states and express aspects of identity, sexuality, fetishism and even our ability to communicate. These characterizations suggested by simple movements reflect his ongoing interest in notions of the ego, and internal struggles—and are illustrative of the formal techniques of doubling and mirroring, which can be seen in several of his works.
Douglas Gordon is a celebrated Scottish artist whose work revolves around the themes of memory, time and our perception of it. Spanning across film, video, installation, photography, and sculpture, his work offers a new experience of the cinematic in the space of contemporary art, creating what critic Dominique Païni described as ‘exhibition cinema.’ Interested in how we experience temporality, Gordon has often slowed down either original or appropriated footage in order to play with the viewers’ perception. An example is his celebrated work 24 Hour Psycho (1993) , in which Gordon stretched the duration of Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic movie to last 24 hours. This gesture both monumentalized time and intensified the imagery, structurally reframing the film by shifting our perception away from the movie’s original narrative and directing it towards the finer details that constitute every single frame. Several of his works incorporate that universal dichotomies: of life and death, innocence and guilt, and dual identities. Harboring the tension between opposing forces, Gordon then employs formal strategies of repetition, mirroring, and doubling to construct a deliberate ambiguity and multiplicity of meaning.
Colors:
Related works of genres: » young british artists, » contemporary artist, » scottish contemporary artists, » photography, » neo-conceptual art, » video installation, » video art, » appropriation art, » born 1966, » relational art
» see more
© » KADIST
Martin Creed
2003This photograph of Martin Creed himself was used as the invitation card for a fundraising auction of works on paper at Christie’s South Kensington in support of Camden Arts Centre’s first year in a refurbished building in 2005...
© » TATE EXHIBITIONS
Martin Creed
Martin Creed | The Dick Institute Experience the work of one of this country’s most ingenious, audacious and surprising artists at the Dick Institute ARTIST ROOMS Martin Creed presents highlights from the British artist’s thirty-year career...
© » KADIST
Tacita Dean
2001The photographic quality of the film Baobab is not only the result of a highly sophisticated use of black and white and light, but also of the way in which each tree is characterized as an individual, creating in the end a series of portraits...
© » KADIST
Charles Avery
2012Since 2005, Charles Avery has devoted his practice to the perpetual description of a fictional island...
Related works featuring themes of: » Appropriation Art, » Celebrity, » Color Photography, » Contemporary Conceptualism, » Scottish
» see more
© » KADIST
Mungo Thomson
2008The White Album (2008) presents a compilation of one hundred issues of Artforum magazine released between 1970 and 1979...
Other related works, blended automatically
» see more
© » KADIST
Douglas Gordon
1996In Monster (1996-97), the artist’s face becomes grotesque through the application of strips of transparent adhesive tape, typical of Gordon’s performance-based films that often depict his own body in action...
© » KADIST
Mungo Thomson
2008The White Album (2008) presents a compilation of one hundred issues of Artforum magazine released between 1970 and 1979...
Related works sharing similar palette
» see more
© » KADIST
Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige
Rocket Society refers to a space project led by a group of Armenian researchers at the beginning of the 1960s...
© » KADIST
LaToya Ruby Frazier
2011LaToya Ruby Frazier is an artist and a militant; her photos combine intimate views of her relation with her parents and grandparents with the history of the Afro-American community of Braddock, Pennsylvania, where she grew up and where her family still live...
© » KADIST
Anthony Goicolea
2008Goicolea has made drawings based on a family album of relations that he did not know but who in one way or another contributed to his history and to the predicament in which he now finds himself as a Cuban in America...
Related works from the » 2000's created around » Berlin, Germany
» see more
© » KADIST
Tino Sehgal
2004Tino Sehgal’s This Exhibition requires an interpreter (in this particular piece, a gallery attendant) to faux faint each and every time a visitor enters into a given space...
© » KADIST
Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck
2008Part of a larger series of photographic works, Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck’s Corrupted file from page 14 (V1) from the series La Vega, Plan Caracas No...
Other works by: » Douglas Gordon
» see more
© » KADIST
Douglas Gordon
1996In Monster (1996-97), the artist’s face becomes grotesque through the application of strips of transparent adhesive tape, typical of Gordon’s performance-based films that often depict his own body in action...
© » KADIST
Douglas Gordon
2002Blind Spencer is part of the series “Blind Stars” including hundreds of works in which the artist cut out the eyes of Hollywood stars, in a symbolically violent manner...
Related artist(s) to: Douglas Gordon » Philippe Parreno, » Pierre Huyghe, » Liam Gillick, » Hans Ulrich Obrist, » Andy Warhol, » Rirkrit Tiravanija, » Anri Sala, » Bruce Nauman, » Carsten Höller, » Jimmie Durham
» see more
Related works found in the same semantic group
» see more
© » KADIST
Miguel Angel Ríos
2012Superb production values and special effects that in the hands of Miguel Angel Rios do not get in the way or distracts from the content and deep essay of this work...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
Solid are the Winds: Aeolian Encounters at The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial (Part II) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles January 10, 2019 By Marcus Yee (1340 words, five-minute read) This is the second of a two-part essay on the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial running at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia, from 24 November 2018 to 28 April 2019...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
Women making history: Snow Whitening Revisited | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles Anders Jiras February 10, 2021 By Brian Toh (814 words, 4-minute read) Snow Whitening Revisited presents an allegory on being a female artist in Cambodia, playing with imagery that evokes visceral feelings of clinging, and a sense of embodied helplessness that pays tribute to both cultural heritage and a deep historical trauma...