Douglas Gordon’s not making a whole lot of sense. Things aren’t neatly delineated or comprehensible in the Scottish Turner Prize-winner’s latest show.
The walls are covered in text in countless languages, half-remembered aphorisms gouged into the plaster, fractured sentences in neon, semi-palindromic rhymes in vinyl. ‘I’m the architect of my own addictions’ is carved into the wall as you walk in, surrounded by phrases like ‘where does it hurt’, ‘rotting from the outside in’, ‘how much can I take’. Memory comes up again and again, there’s a whole wall of ‘I have forgotten everything’ in English and French, ‘forget names and faces’ is scrawled near the ceiling. It feels like watching a mind fall apart, seeing someone descend into amnesia as all their mistakes, addictions and actions catch up with them.
In one room, a hundred screens show every film he’s ever made: a finger beckoning, flies dying, snakes dancing. It’s a whole career happening at once, none of the parts distinguishable, just a single frenetic mass representing a whole life. It’s actually incredibly moving, sad. This is his legacy, this is all that remains, and it’s just this jumbled unfollowable mess.
A new film installation focuses on Gordon’s eyeball as it reflects neon signs that recall the seedy past of Soho: boys, girls, naked, nonstop. He blinks and the words disappear, new ones emerge in their place.
None of this is pretty, approachable or cohesive. But it’s so emotional that it doesn’t matter. It feels like a man grasping at a past he can’t get a grip on, trying desperately to grab a steady hold as life slips through his fingers.
