Douglas Gordon: 'I retain the right to do whatever I want'

In Douglas Gordon’s view, the greatest public art installation in history took place in his hometown Glasgow in 1988. Celtic were playing Dundee in the Scottish Cup final, though the art didn’t happen on the pitch but in the stands. The British prime minister had announced her attendance, and union representatives were handing out red leaflets to every spectator at the gates.

“Margaret Thatcher walks into the stadium, and the entire crowd shows her the red card. Isn’t that fantastic?”, he says, sitting in his grand new studio in one of the seedier corners of west Berlin, dropping cigarette ash on the floor with excitement.

Gordon himself missed the cup final because he had just started art school at the Slade in London, but you can see how it would have fitted easily with his aesthetic. To the wider public, he is best known for another football-themed work, the film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, which he did with director Phillip Parreno in 2006.

But even his earlier work was distinguished by a refusal to think of art purely as something that is done with a brush and a canvas in a studio. For 24 Hour Psycho, he slowed down Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film so that it lasted 24 hours. When he won the Turner Prize in 1996, it was the first time the judges awarded it an artist working predominantly in video.

Recently, his works have increasingly included collaborations with other artists. K364, another film, portrays two Israeli musicians of Polish heritage travelling to Warsaw to play in an orchestral performance of Mozart’s concerto. Other collaborations include actor James Franco, pianist Hélène Grimaud, director John Tiffany and fashion designer Agnès B – a tendency, he says, inspired by his friend Parreno. “Philippe is the most promiscuous artist I know. I try, but I’m Scottish and not really allowed to be promiscuous.”

Does he ever worry that it could look like he has lost his focus and is just doing projects with celebrity mates? “That sounds like something my granny would say. When I was at Glasgow school of art, the great thing my teachers said was: never ever walk into a pigeonhole. The idea of art is to be as free as possible. I am the least hippy person. I am an extremely hardcore dogmatic bastard, actually. But I retain the right to do whatever I want.”

His contribution to this year’s Sydney Biennale, Phantom, is a 2011 installation featuring two Steinway pianos, one of them burnt, plenty of mirrors, the music of Rufus Wainwright and footage of the singer shot with a ultra-slow-motion Phantom camera.

Phantom is in part also a tribute to Berlin, where Gordon has since 2007 lived with his partner, the Israeli soprano Ruth Rosenfeld, and their five-year-old daughter. The video footage was shot here, and Wainwright’s song is inspired by his fascination with Louise Brooks, the US actress who made her significant films, such as Pandora’s Box, in the German capital.

Gordon describes these mirrorings and hidden links as a “phantastic situation”, the kind of which remain central to his work and which Berlin seems to attract in abundance. From the window of his first studio in the city, he says, he could look into the courtyard of an old film studio where FW Murnau and Hans Richter had made their early films. “If I was stuck for anything I would stand by the window, look across, blow smoke and see if I could see a ghost.”

Preparations for the Biennale, where Gordon will hold the keynote speech, have been interrupted by protests against the festival’s association with Transfield, the multi-billion-dollar infrastructure company in charge of running mandatory detention centres on the island of Nauru and Manus. Nine artists withdrew from the show, leading to the resignation of the Biennale chairman and Transfield Holdings director, Luca Belgiorno-Nettis, this month.

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But Gordon, in spite of his love for the red-card protests against Thatcher, views the boycotts critically: “I don’t see any significant change that would have happened if we had all boycotted the event. You have to be somewhere in order to make change. If people want to use the Biennale as a platform to make a point, we need a stage.”

He describes the treatment of refugees in Nauru and Manus as “horrific” and says that as a Scot who has spent a considerable amount of time in Belfast, he is particularly alert to the legacy of English imperialism. But simply boycotting the event would not just have been ineffective, he argues, but also “irresponsible”.

“If you really want to make a case for something, get your facts together, ask people how you want to marshall forces and do something. You can’t just say: ‘I don’t like this.’ Even the head of the board leaving has nothing to do with what the protest was about. People are still being ferried to Papua New Guinea. Nothing significant has changed there.”

He is aware of the expectations resting on him ahead of the speech, and may consider inviting any protesters to join him on the stage afterwards to continue the debate, though he admits that he is “fucking terrified” of the event.

Is it harder for an artists not to be political now than when it was when he first became successful in the ’90s? “I think we are political, but we’re not politicians. If you believe in what you’re doing as an artist, that’s as democratic as it gets for me.”

What’s the most politically charged artwork we know, Gordon asks, triggering the detour into the Thatcher’s sending-off at Hampden Park. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t beat Pablo Picasso’s Guernica for him. “Guernica might even not have seemed that relevant at the time when it was made, but it grows and grows and grows. Politicians are meant to act now, but art takes time to mature.”