Douglas Gordon: Superhumanatural
Until January 14; RSA building & Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh

Hallowe’en proves to be the first really chilly night of the year, and the moon is bright against the pitch-black sky. Crowds gather in the RSA foyer, waiting excitedly for a glimpse of Douglas Gordon’s first Scottish retrospective. Thirteen years after his first solo show in Tramway, the Glasgow-born artist is a superstar of the art world, the darling of his new home-town, New York.

Gordon, true to character, fails to turn up for the opening speeches. His priority is the supercool party to be held in the early hours at the dungeon-like Caves, headlined by trendy electro outfit, Chicks On Speed. It’s left to Director General of the National Galleries, John Leighton, to wish us a “very harrowing” evening.

And harrowing it is. Gordon, I’m told, is a man who tends to get what he wants, and the immaculately refurbished walls of the RSA galleries have been painted black and red, right up to the Victorian cornicing. The whole building is shrouded in darkness, ensuring that the art (mostly video) has our undivided attention.

Until now, Scots have only been able to experience the artist’s work in bits and pieces; a video work here, a piece of text there. Seen on their own, some can be fairly unrewarding, like the prosaic Divided Self videos which depict Gordon’s two hands locked in eternal conflict with each other.

But this major exhibition – spanning the RSA and three buildings at the Botanic Gardens – brings together almost everything Gordon has ever made, including his famed 24 Hour Psycho. Taken together with several new pieces, this is the whole picture, and more. Not only can we observe the fertile themes which run through the artist’s work, but we can fully experience them, in Gordon’s carefully composed arena.

Along with the darkened walls, and the muffling effect of black carpets, Gordon has placed mirrors at the nexus of the RSA galleries. When you become trapped between them, your own reflection fragments and repeats into infinity, while the video installations around you are sliced and reshuffled.

It’s like finding yourself in a classic film noir – your world starts to fragment into a confusion of shards until you don’t know where you are; it all starts to close in on you and you know that eventually you won’t know who you are either. The warders, already, are muttering of their long days trapped inside this darkness and insanity.

But this madness is not, by any means, the cheap result of a few theatrics. It simmers and boils in a potent mixture of Scotland’s darkest psychological investigations. Pumping through the heart of all of Gordon’s works are three classic texts: James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs And Confessions Of A Justified Sinner, RL Stevenson’s The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde, and RD Laing’s The Divided Self.

Put these three together and you have a frightening view of the split personality, where extremes of good and evil struggle in vain, like Gordon’s two hands, to reconcile themselves within the same body.

Though made in New York, and contemporary in look and feel, Gordon’s work takes up a centuries-old baton of Scottish thought. His videos, installations, wall texts and photographs contribute to a long-running philosophical dialogue about the nature of the self, and its relationship with the mind and the body.

The mind body problem is made devastatingly accessible in Gordon’s 10-year old work, 30 Seconds Text. You are given thirty seconds of light in which to read a text describing an experiment on a guillotined criminal. The severed head remained conscious for 30 seconds; then, the lightbulb silently switches off, and you are left in total darkness. In such simple ways, Gordon can turn intangible information into real experience.

Of the new works, Cranach’s Tree is the most complex. An uprooted tree trunk lies smashed against a mirror on the floor. Some feet away hangs a print from the British Museum. Made in the workshop of Lucas Cranach the Elder, it represents the Old and New Testaments, divided in two by a tree.

The left side is full of evil, death and damnation. The New Testament, on the other hand, is represented by images of faith, holiness and salvation. This print was made to promote the 16th century idea of justification by faith alone – the target of James Hogg’s book – which allows some to believe that they are guaranteed a place in heaven no matter how badly they behave.

In Gordon’s felled trunk, the division between the worlds of good and evil – already ambiguous in their designation – has come crashing down. Mirrors on the floor and wall reverse everything we see, further confusing the polarities.

This thin line between religious conceptions of good and evil is broken down even further at the Caledonian Hall, in the Royal Botanic Garden, which houses Gordon’s 1997 video installation, Between Darkness And Light (After William Blake). On a large, double-sided screen, two films are superimposed: one, an old black and white classic about St Bernadette’s vision of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes, and the other, The Exorcist.

The light of one film reveals itself in the shadows of the other, each slipping in and out of grasp, and characters shifting around inside each other like spirits and demons. Faith and terror are difficult to tell apart, and good and evil become uncomfortably interchangeable. Watching the film makes you feel like a ghost yourself, present simultaneously in different times and different places, the all-seeing observer.

Inverleith House’s selection of wall-texts can’t quite compete, particularly given that past works have been taken out of their original contexts to group them together. And Plato’s Cave, a new work also sited at the Royal Botanic Garden, fails to concentrate attention on the shadows rather than the flame, thus missing Plato’s original point. It’s also a cause for disappointment that Gordon’s proposal for Parliament Hall had to be abandonded. But it’s saying something that despite all that, this show is still seriously good, and totally unmissable.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 05.11.06