English
The Rodin Museum in Paris will exhibit the interesting Douglas Gordon’s work Predictable incident in Unfamiliar Surroundings until the 4th of September. The work was made in 1995 and it analyzes the influence of the media on people’s behavior. It has been considered as a key element to understand Gordon’s aesthetic proposal.
Douglas Gordon is considered one of the more prominent contemporary creators of conceptual art. Before turning 30 years old, he had already attracted tremendous critical attention with his visual works pervaded with groundbreaking ideas about the domination of media on our society.
For Gordon, we all have behaviors created by the influence of the media on our society. A few months after we are born, we are sitting in front of a computer. Then we grow up and the computer captures our attention with thousands of images. All of that has generated a society and a civilization dominated by images.
This aspect, among others, is what Gordon is trying to make us understand in his installations, where he deconstructs the well-known TV or movie and he subverts and alters them, surprising the spectators and changing those preconceived images in their imaginary.
This is the case of Predictable incident in Unfamiliar Surroundings, in which he took a series of sexual images of Captain Kirk and some actresses starring in the famous American television series Star Trek. Gordon projects those images from a device installed on several piled-up Budweiser beer cans. This muted work is divided in five images in slides with different projection times.
The segmentation of images and the series that created the imaginary of the American Society of 1960’s and the beer cans represent an American way of life that begun with the inclusion of television in domestic spaces. This would transform the social relationships as a prelude of Postmodernity, where romantic relationships are constantly becoming weaker because of the ephemeral pleasure of consumption.
Descontextualized images, where erotic content prevails, are the representation of repressed memory, which is unable of making emotional sense of sexuality. So, emotions are repressed as images pass by and silence freezes them.
Gordon deepened in the American sociology when analyzing how an average citizen creates meanings in his mind by means of certain type of images that reflected the values and anti-values. For instance, in his work 24 hours Psycho, he took excerpts from Alfred Hitchcok’s famous movie Psychosis, deepening in the reaction of the spectator through the endless repetition, like the images shown in a TV set.
For more information visit: http://www.musee-rodin.fr/expogordone.html
Nancy Guzman
We are all slaves of media. We grew up with the TV and the cinema; for that reason, our imaginary is pervaded with characters that have marked our behaviors and relationships. So, if you are staying at apartments in Paris we suggest you to go to the Rodin Museum and contemplate the works of this spectacular artist who was born in 1966.
