Work
Much of Gordon's work is seen as being about memory and uses repetition in various forms. He uses material from the public realm and also creates performance-based videos. His work often overturns traditional uses of video by playing with time elements and employing multiple monitors.
In one early work, Meaning and Location (1990), a passage from the Gospel of Luke is given with a comma in different places, thus subtly changing the meaning of the sentence. List of Names (1990-present) is a list of every person Gordon has ever met and can remember. One version of this is applied onto the wall of a stairwell in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
Gordon has often reused older film footage in his photographs and videos. One of his best-known art works is 24 Hour Psycho (1993) which slows down Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho so that it lasts twenty four hours. Feature Film (1999) is a projection of Gordon's own film of James Conlon conducting Bernard Herrmann's score to Vertigo, thus drawing attention to the film score and the emotional responses it creates in the viewer. In one installation, this was placed at the top of a tall building, referencing one of the film's main plot points. In Through a looking glass (1999), Gordon created a double-projection work around the climactic scene in Martin Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver (1976), in which the main character addresses the camera; the screens are arranged so that the character seems to be addressing himself.
Gordon also made a film about Zinedine Zidane, Zidane, un portrait du 21e siècle (2006), an idea first seen in a film by Hellmuth Costard, who, in 1970, made a film about George Best titled Football as Never Before. The feature-length film, which he co-directed with artist Philippe Parreno and assembled from footage shot by seventeen synchronized cameras placed around the stadium in real time over the course of a single match, premiered outside the competition of the 2006 Cannes Film Festival before screenings at numerous international venues. k.364 premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2010.
Gordon has also made photographs, often in series with relatively minor variations between each individual piece. His Blind Stars (2002) featured publicity photographs of mid-century movie stars in which the sitters' eyes were replaced by expressionless black, white or mirrored surfaces.
In 2008, Gordon was a member of the Official Competition Jury at the 65th Venice International Film Festival. In 2010, he collaborated with Rufus Wainwright, creating the visuals for his tour which accompany Rufus' All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu album.
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Famous quotes containing the word work:
“It is ultimately in employers’ best interests to have their employees’ families functioning smoothly. In the long run, children who misbehave because they are inadequately supervised or marital partners who disapprove of their spouse’s work situation are productivity problems. Just as work affects parents and children, parents and children affect the workplace by influencing the employed parents’ morale, absenteeism, and productivity.”
—Ann C. Crouter (20th century)
“Memory is a wonderfully useful tool, and without it judgement does its work with difficulty; it is entirely lacking in me.... Now, the more I distrust my memory, the more confused it becomes. It serves me better by chance encounter; I have to solicit it nonchalantly. For if I press it, it is stunned; and once it has begun to totter, the more I probe it, the more it gets mixed up and embarrassed. It serves me at its own time, not at mine.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,—a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)