{"id":3765,"date":"2017-09-20T23:58:39","date_gmt":"2017-09-20T22:58:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lantb.net\/figure\/?p=3765"},"modified":"2017-10-08T13:28:05","modified_gmt":"2017-10-08T12:28:05","slug":"documenta-14-douglas-gordon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/lantb.net\/figure\/?p=3765","title":{"rendered":"Documenta14. Douglas Gordon\/ Jonas Mekas. I Had Nowhere to Go (2016). 2\/4"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nDouglas Gordon, I had nowhere to go<\/em> (2016), Super 8 film and video transferred to digital video, color and black, sound, 97 min., \u00a9 Studio lost but found\/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017, courtesy Douglas Gordon<\/p>\n

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\u00abDouglas Gordon\u2019s I had nowhere to go<\/em> (2016) is a ninety-seven minute film\/projected image installation, in which experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas is heard via voice-over reading passages from his 1991 autobiography of the same title, while his image intermittently appears out of the dark blankness that the black screen of the work is governed by. The work shows<\/em> almost nothing. Yet in doing so, the film brings Gordon\u2019s previous interventions in cinematic history and materiality to a new point.
\nGordon is known for redefining expectations for the moving image and the relationship between sound, text, image, and the human portrait; consider, for example, 24 Hour Psycho<\/em> (1993), his video installation that stretched the duration of Hitchcock\u2019s Psycho <\/em>(1960) from 109 minutes to twenty-four hours by projecting two frames per second instead of twenty-four. By contrast, telling the story of Mekas, the founder of Anthology Film Archives, in New York, means to reflect on the history of avant-garde cinema in which Mekas is a key figure, and introduce Gordon\u2019s own aesthetic decisions to its imperatives\u2014the rejection of linear narrative, persistent sound\/image correspondence, suppressing the darkness that lies between the frames. As such, the work reflects the historical position of Gordon\u2019s own oeuvre.
\nIn historical terms, the diaristic passages read in the film describe Mekas\u2019s life as a teenager in occupied Lithuania during World War II. Focusing on the memory of the war as told by a bodiless voice enables Gordon\u2019s work to raise the question regarding the (un)representability of the catastrophe of the war, and furthermore, to participate in the cinematic discussion initiated by Claude Lanzmann\u2019s 1985 film Shoah<\/em>, which avoided using archival images of World War II in favor of spoken testimonies. Gordon, born in 1966 in Glasgow, and now living in Berlin and Glasgow, indeed turns spoken testimony into a definitive nonimage, while the few visual sequences that the work includes demonstrates its disobedience of the distinction between information and aesthetics.
\nFollowing Gordon\u2019s (and Philippe Parreno\u2019s) Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait<\/em> (2006), I had nowhere to go<\/em> also continues the artist\u2019s practice as an innovative, and to some extent iconoclastic, portraitist. Yet, while Zidane<\/em> dismantled the persona by means of over-visibility, Gordon\u2019s current film portrait does so by means of under-visibility, which not only obscures appearance on the screen but also questions the viewer\u2019s sense of self and integrity, rendering the differences between history and phenomenology, selfhood and otherness, indiscernible.\u00bb
\n\u2014Ory Dessau. Posted in Public Exhibition<\/a>. Excerpted from the documenta 14: Daybook<\/em><\/a>http:\/\/www.documenta14.de\/en\/artists\/13592\/douglas-gordon<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u00abAt documenta 14 in Athens, Douglas Gordon chose the open-air movie theater Stella for the presentation of I had nowhere to go <\/em>(2016), his cinematic portrait of the avant-garde filmer Jonas Mekas, thus integrating the public space of the surrounding apartment buildings and neighborhood into his presentation. In contrast, the atmosphere of the CineStar auditorium in Kassel, where Gordon\u2019s film is also be screened, is distinguished by a sense of intimacy. The film title I had nowhere to go<\/em> quotes the autobiography of Mekas, published in 1991. In the film Mekas is heard reading his diary that tells of war and displacement and art making, while the image of the artist and writer only rarely surfaces from the darkness of the screen.\u00bb
\nhttp:\/\/www.documenta14.de\/en\/venues\/21709\/cinestar<\/a><\/p>\n