Douglas Gordon: Timeline [Hardcover]

Klaus Biesenbach (Editor), Peter Fischli (Author), David Weiss (Author), Douglas Gordon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2006

Throughout his career, Douglas Gordon has engaged in an ongoing reflection on the motion picture, examining the relationship between the movies and our common knowledge and perception of them. In altering, monumentalizing, and alienating our collective understanding of film, he visualizes, pictures, and "sculpts" time. Douglas Gordon, which was organized by MoMA curator Klaus Biesenbach, collects images and texts from the past 40 years (a nod to Gordon's birth date of 1966), all of which deal with ideas of visual memory, shared visual knowledge, and the interwoven texture of imagined and remembered sounds and images. It explores the relationship between film and psychoanalysis, and the way in which these systems of thought have affected the idea of individual biography: Gordon is acutely attuned to the relation of such deep experiences as love, longing, loss, and trauma to what one feels while watching film. He understands how films refer to other films, how they superimpose themselves upon each other and upon their viewers' memories, and how, through their ubiquity and accessibility, films express and represent the ideals and fears of their times. Essay by Klaus Biesenbach.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

A companion guide to the retrospective now on view at Los Angeles's Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), this catalog is intended as the first comprehensive monograph on Gordon. Exhibition curator Ferguson (In Memory of My Feelings) opens with an essay that requires some prior knowledge of Gordon's themes. His interpretive journey can be dizzying and labyrinthine and often leads to lengthy, initially inexplicable sojourns into literary analysis. Essays by MOCA assistant curator Michael Darling and Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector provide a more solid rationale for their interpretations, while Scottish writer Francis McKee (Luminous) stitches together a Frankenstein-like fabric of textual snippets by other writers that tell the tale of a good man who struggles against his inherently evil side and loses. The late critic David Sylvester closes with an interview of Gordon that reveals the motives behind his use of the film medium. The catalog's graphics, which include white text that seemingly hovers over dark-toned film stills, is a visual manifestation of Gordon's conceptual preoccupation: dualism and battling opposites. A valuable, comprehensive bibliography follows the essays. Recommended for collections focusing on contemporary art. Savannah R. Schroll, Washington, DC
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Russell Ferguson is Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs and Chief Curator at the University of California, Los Angeles, Hammer Museum. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art, New York (June 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0870703900
• ISBN-13: 978-0870703904
• Product Dimensions: 10.5 x 10.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.6 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,256,922 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)