61cm x 65.3cm
Blind 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. An emptiness (some are burned letting appear a white or mirror background or a mirror) replaces the eyes, giving the impression of a blind eye deprived of all expression. Paradoxically, the work looks at us all the more intensely. The glamorous black and white portrait of Spencer Tracy evokes the golden age of Hollywood, with all of its codes like seductive smiles and directional light, not to mention a perverse use of the gaze. Gordon talks about his work as a process of “research, memory, of stories that took place, the films I’ve seen … I am interested in looking for what happens when you look at something so long that it disappears. You are viewing an image, you start looking through the image, and you reach the other side and then you return to the surface. ” This act of cutting, pertinent to a new generation of artists focusing on the ready-made, image fragments and found sound footage, juxtaposes temporalities like in video editing and introduces a hint of melancholy. The act of cutting fascinates and repels, in what Freud called an experience of “the uncanny.” The viewer can only contemplate a loss of the soul which is traditionally reflected in the eyes. After Andy Warhol and his celebrity portraits, Douglas Gordon tracks the iconic and deadly character of his subjects.
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.
This 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...
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...
Gabriel Orozco often documents found situations in the natural or urban landscape...
Charco portátil congelado (Frozen Portable Puddle, 1994) is a photographic record of an installation of the same name that Gabriel Orozco made at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam for the group exhibition WATT (1994)...
The White Album (2008) presents a compilation of one hundred issues of Artforum magazine released between 1970 and 1979...
South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....
In Thomson’s Untitled (TIME) , every front cover of TIME magazine is sequentially projected to scale at thirty frames per second...
In 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...
The White Album (2008) presents a compilation of one hundred issues of Artforum magazine released between 1970 and 1979...
This untitled drawing was part of Sung Hwan Kim’s solo exhibition Sung Hwan Kim: A Still Window From Two or More Places , which took place in tranzitdisplay in Prague, Czech Republic in 2010...
Tino 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...
Untitled (rolled up) , is an abstract portrait of Owen Monk, the artist’s father and features an aluminum ring of 56.6 cm in diameter measuring 1.77 cm in circumference, the size of his father...
Part 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...
In 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...
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...
How Alien We Seem: On Being Blind and Obsessed with Photography ‹ Literary Hub Craft and Criticism Fiction and Poetry News and Culture Lit Hub Radio Reading Lists Book Marks CrimeReads About Log In Literary Hub Craft and Criticism Literary Criticism Craft and Advice In Conversation On Translation Fiction and Poetry Short Story From the Novel Poem News and Culture History Science Politics Biography Memoir Food Technology Bookstores and Libraries Film and TV Travel Music Art and Photography The Hub Style Design Sports Freeman’s The Virtual Book Channel Lit Hub Radio Behind the Mic Beyond the Page The Cosmic Library The Critic and Her Publics Emergence Magazine Fiction/Non/Fiction First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing Future Fables The History of Literature I’m a Writer But Just the Right Book Keen On The Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan New Books Network Read Smart Talk Easy Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast Write-minded Reading Lists The Best of the Decade Book Marks Best Reviewed Books BookMarks Daily Giveaway CrimeReads True Crime The Daily Thrill CrimeReads Daily Giveaway Log In How Alien We Seem: On Being Blind and Obsessed with Photography M...
Jonas Van and Juno B’s video work Kebranto is anchored by the figure of Boitatá, a snake that is part of the imaginary Guaraní communities that live between the current nation-states of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay...
Gypsy shows an ambivalent scene, in which broken blinds and its unsmiling subject are balanced with the stilllife plentitude of watermelon slices and the beautifully lit nudity of the sitter...