Thirty days of chasing Douglas Gordon

Douglas Gordon is an artist whom we’ve admired for a long time. He’s one of those artists that has transcended into cult status. Somewhere between the work, his look and the myths that he has created, Douglas has this very mythical feeling around him. The writing that follows is mostly all true. It’s an attempt to allow form to follow function, somewhere amidst the chaotic indeterminacy of walking into DG’s life.

I.
Embankment, Raspail, Kreuzberg
28 March 2022

It’s late March in London. A friend who knows Douglas very kindly accepts my request to put the two of us in touch. I jump into the text thread with the usual spiel about the magazine and what an issue could look like, how the process has usually worked in the past, etcetera. Within five minutes Douglas replies with a live location: Berlin. After explaining that I couldn’t make it there right now the line goes dead.

I’m not reading between the lines. I am not playing the Douglas game.

A day goes by, and we arrange a time to speak. I’m nervous. On the other end of the phone, in a thick Glaswegian accent, Douglas picks up the phone.

I’m just in the middle of pulling a tooth out while eating sashimi.

I laugh and hang up. He’s going to call me back in an hour. The hour goes by. I text – I text – he’s editing something now and won’t be free for a while.

We text back and forth; we talk a little more about the magazine and he agrees to do it. ACE!

Douglas is away for about three weeks so we will shoot in late April.

The weeks go by and my litany of texts to lock in the date aren’t getting us anywhere. No replies. Strained and a little edgy, I decide to call. The Glaswegian voice picks up the phone. He is in his Berlin studio. We talk a little and discuss a time for the magazine. Saturday the 30th of April into Sunday the 1st of May. Douglas only likes to work at night these days. He also finds beauty in the idea of working into Maifeiertag, or May Day, in Kreuzberg.

Right, it’s on. Flights booked, accommodation sorted. Everything looks good.

Friday 29 April 2022
6:40AM LONDON GATWICK
9:00AM BERLIN BRANDENBURG

Douglas hasn’t replied for a week, and I am beginning to feel a little nervous. This is compounded by having recently watched the 1993 BBC documentary, the aptly named ‘24 Hour Psycho: Douglas Gordon’ in which an unwitting journalist is sent on a wild goose chase to track Douglas down. Glasgow to London, Berlin to Paris. There are some horrifying moments: art world figures talk about the letters they used to receive from Douglas. ‘I know what you did,’ one reads, like a serial killer or morbid clairvoyant. Sadie Coles talks about how the piece is really about the reader’s emotional reaction. That’s the art. I begin to wonder… am I being given the run around right now? Is the dull pain in my shoulder art? Am I the piece? I call Douglas to confirm our timings and location for tomorrow’s shoot. Rings and rings and rings. No pickup.

An hour or so later I attend an art opening. It’s a good time. I’m surrounded by friends and the Berlin spring evening is warm. My phone goes off……DG.

Douglas! How are you?

Finn, dear……… I’m in Paris.

My heart sinks. Turns out that I am the art. Trying to keep it cool, I continue the conversation and we go off into the whole world. We talk about football, the current Liverpool team; Douglas compares them to Renaissance masters in their balletic grace and contrapposto build-up play. We talk about his new show at Fondation Giacometti in Paris, where he is currently plastering hands around Giacometti sculptures, and about how he is sitting in a graveyard now; talking to me ‘from the grave.’ Then the conversation comes back down to the reality of the situation. He is in Paris and needs to go to Glasgow. Right, no shoot, no magazine.

I understand, Douglas.

I’m sorry, Finn.

We hang up. It’s not happening. Downbeat – all I can think of is the journalist from that documentary. I head off into the Berlin night. No better place.

2:00am. My phone dings. I put down my drink to wipe the rain off the screen.

What’s your favourite note?

D Minor

A couple of moments pass.

Love everything and anything in minor

Are we back on? Maybe? Maybe not. Only time will tell. I try not to be too positive, I try to keep a level head. Fast forward and it’s 4 pm on Saturday. I’m sat by the river with my colleague David, drinking lemonade Radlers, trying to enjoy ourselves. Trying to ignore the unknown. DING!

My flight gets in at 10:40 pm – come to the studio for midnight. I have music, food. Any dietary requirements?

II.
Collar Popped Like Cantona

It’s 11.30PM on a Berlin Saturday. David and I drink beer to pass the time in a lovely little bar down the road from our digs. We wait. It’s a good scene – we talk football with the local drinking crew and make a couple of friends. DING! – my phone goes. Thick smoke hangs in the air.

The Eagle has landed.

Joy!

Douglas sends the address and tells us the area is dangerous so try and get in as quick as possible. We end up waiting outside for fifteen minutes. As we arrive, sparklers cascade down from a fourth-floor window like liberation ticker tape. Black Sabbath plays from the stereo.

Has he lost his mind?
Can he see or is he blind?
Can he walk at all?
Or if he moves, will he fall?

Sit down, have a glass of wine, I have red for everyone, I have white. There’s apple juice on the counter. Organic wine. I have to piss.

DG is wearing a France ’98 shirt. His hair is shaved; he half looks like Vincent Cassel at four o’clock in the afternoon. He has a tattoo on the upside of his wrist: it’s either the number ten in Roman numerals, that of his beloved Zidane; or ‘or’, that cursed conjunction that we spend our lives operating in. This or that. Either/or. Friends come in and out. A Belorussian drummer who lives in Stockholm. Lighter + candle + France shirt starts burning. Framed mirror + plastic + white spray paint + extension cable. Burning. There’s sweat on the walls. DG is on his knees.

III.
An Argyle Jumper in Vienna

DG spins this piece about the Pogues meeting the Dubliners at a Viennese festival in the eighties

What do you think Shane thought?
What d’ya reckon? Probably what Dylan thought of Donovan

[They were never apologists for the IRA, but Shane was persuaded by his mother not to join; they just hated the indiscriminate bombing, the stupid bombing, the punishment squads. They came out of King’s Cross, not Ireland. Think about it: growing up close to those little plastic coverings for the bins so you’re half reassured there’s no bomb –– it was in Austria, in Vienna, that the Pogues met the Dubliners, although probably not for the first time. But you can imagine what this might have meant for them both, these ambassadors for a pure vision and a sound of Ireland, the old country, the mists and the gorges; set to the shrieking strings laid down near Cork. Republican and working-class. Whiskey and rye. I sit there for a moment. I think of all the encounters on foggy eastern European bridges and in Belgravia drawing rooms and in the backroom of converted warehouses on Kurfürstenstraße in which some kind of master meets some kind of novice, some kind of bastard of a culture meets another.]

I look at DG as he holds his arms at right angles and splays his fingers like a bat; he’s elsewhere, like an El Greco saint. He’s wearing a brown leather butcher’s apron: white paint and flecks of red document the traces of creating anything––an artwork, a rolled cigarette, a child––out of nothing, out of the force that turns on its heel and charges back at us, making sure we remember all the work that went into making whatever it was that we set out to make in the first place. The call of the artist. The look of the novice. A thin shaft of morning’s spring light sidles its way through the blinds which look out onto the street. It skips across the studio’s cavernous doorways and makeshift shelving to repose on the far wall. It’s a remarkable white-gold colour. I take another photograph.

I fucking lost my jumper that summer in Vienna. I was Interrailing with friends and I was wearing this Argyll jumper. I remember the pattern: this kind of grey and white and another kind of grey but then the arms were this majestic kind of blue like fucking International Klein Blue. It’s etched into my retina. I’m a cosmopolitan man. The argyll pattern. Glasgow.

Do you ever wonder what happens after the ticker tape falls? Ticker tape ticker tape

I need a minute. I am lonely, I am afraid of loneliness, I long for loneliness. I look in the bathroom mirror:

für
die
gute
sache
sterben

IV.
La Cugina

I stand there for a moment, alone, and think. It’s 1974 in Sicily. It’s sometime in the fifties. A woman, Agata, wants a palazzo. She’s lit in red, like lust, like love, like blood. Enzo, her cousin, fucks around: servants, whores, married women. It’s a film and a score that operates between what mathematicians call ‘normal time’ and what anyone who has read Aldous Huxley on acid knows to be ‘slow motion’. Tick, tick, tock. They fuck at last. There’s nothing more of an aphrodisiac than being made to wait for something, as Aldo Lado knew all too well. ‘What I wanted to convey’, he says of this film of cousins who fall deeply in love, ‘was that for them at that moment time as we know it had ceased to exist.’ DG holds up Morricone’s purple and red record sleeve, precariously touching only the plastic sleeve between his thumb and forefinger. I photograph it. Love Will Tear Us Apart plays on the sound system.

V.
Lamb for Dinner, 8am

On the tenth floor, down the back stairs
It’s a no man’s land

DG is trying to find Peter Saville a flat in Berlin. He shows us the place. I think of the cover of Unknown Pleasures that he made using a data plot of signals from a radio pulsar. DG jacks the sound system and saunters into the far end of the studio, which he has used all evening as an arena in which to act: by the iMac, next to the photocopier and a purring fan, all illuminated from the ground up like a theatre stage. He takes a small sculpture in his hand: a showman in jodhpurs and a top hat with the expression of a marionette, his fingers pursed as though to thread a rope through a mooring line. DG is transfixed now as small embers of glitter begin to encircle the room, waved on by the whirring of the fan. It’s dark now.

It was an extraordinary night of creativity and hospitality. In a haze of glitter, smoke, and ash we say our goodbyes, before ending the night with a game of ‘golfball’. It’s pretty simple really: bounce a golf ball in front of you once and try and hit it out of mid-air. We all fail. And so, to bed.

For
the
quality
thing
die