From the Issue: Douglas Gordon
Read the full interview in Musée Magazine Issue 23: Choices, available here.
DOUGLAS GORDAN: “Happy Birthday To Me” kind of goes back about 14 or 15 years. The piece was conceived in New York. I picked up my son from his pre-school in Tribeca. I used to live on Lafayette, so I used to pick him up and walk up along Spring street, and that’s where The Evolution Shop was. I have never seen a shop like this. I didn’t know that you could buy a human skull, like a real one. I’d always been fascinated, kind of obsessed, when I was a child. You know, I grew up with a bit of a knowledge of art and movies. So, having this interesting idea of - is it a trophy, or is it vanitas, or is it, you know, fear of the future, of recognition of a past event? It’s kind of a feast of ideas. So I bought it, and I took it home. I was fascinated by the back side of it. It reminded me of Marcel Duchamp’s Tonsure In The Form of a Shooting Star. I decided to buy a human head for every year of my birth. I bumped into the The Evolution Shop on Broadway....they had this disarticulated skeleton. We went and got a price on it.
ANDREA BLANCH: What I found interesting when you were showing me the skull is that, when you turned it around and I saw the back side, it looked like another face with the mouth open and two eyes. I’d never seen it like that before. Our upcoming issue is about Choices. Being that you’re a conceptual artist, there are a lot of them made. Lets play with fire to start. I’m curious how this series of self portraits came about? DOUGLAS: The knife came in first. In the development of the self portraits, all the stars were blind. Sometimes, these things appear to be conceptual, but maybe they grew from a much more visceral root, and as they grew, and existed, they adapted to be conceptual. Between 1992 and 1993 I was developing this piece of work called 24 Hour Psycho. I was in a small apartment with Katrina Brown and I had 10x8 black and whites of Janet Lee, Hitcock, Anthony Perkins...all posted around my bed.
ANDREA: Why?
DOUGLAS: Just so that I would be constantly thinking… Even if I wasn't thinking about 24 Hour Psycho, it would be physically peripheral to my life. Even if I had been doing something else, there would always be a little image of Hitchcock somewhere in my peripheral vision. One night, I woke up and freaked out with all those photographs looking at me, so I got up and took a scalpel and cut the eyes out, which was more comforting to me. I made a whole series of blind stars. I suppose the conceptual aspect would be that, maybe the personality exists in the soft tissue of the eye. The personality is usually communicated through the tongue and eyes. I started to put a mirror behind them, very playfully, imagining that you could have your eyes in the place of Clark Gable or Betty Grable or someone. I think embracing a bit of child’s play is always a healthy way to move things out of the dark. Then the mirrors weren’t enough, so the fire came in.
Douglas Gordon. Self Portrait of You + Me (Muhammad Ali II), 2007.
Douglas Gordon, Self-Portrait of You + Me (The Beatles), 2007.
