ENTREVISTA CON DOUGLAS GORDON

 

 

 

What got you started?

Growing up as a Jehovah's Witness. I was surrounded by all these crazy images of the end of the world: who could resist that?

What was your big breakthrough?

Landing in a certain department at Glasgow School of Art in 1985. It had been the environmental art department, but when I got there no one was looking after us. So it was as if a bunch of kids had been given an empty house for four years – we had to define ourselves.

What's the greatest threat to art today?

Smug answers.

Is the art world too money-oriented?

If you attach the word "world" to anything, it sounds like money – the word has become a cipher for industry. It's not essentially to do with money: if you're a kid who goes to a museum and tries to draw a peregrine falcon, that's your art world. But people who buy art should buy it like they buy vegetables – they should do it every day, and they should love what they buy.

Is there an art form you don't relate to?

My girlfriend is a soprano, so I'm trying really hard to relate to classical music. I grew up with my mum and dad's old 78s by Enrico Caruso and Mario Lanza, but composers like Stockhausen are still new territory for me.

What's the biggest myth about artists?

That we're sauvage and unintelligent.

What's the worst thing anyone ever said about you?

Some terrible things have been said, but I think the worst is still to come. Don't you wake up in the mornings thinking that your life is good, but that it's all going to end some day?

Which living artist do you most admire?

Anyone who's still alive and still making art. I don't necessarily admire the art, but the artist I always admire.

What one song would work as the soundtrack to your life?

Bernard Herrmann's soundtrack to Hitchcock's Vertigo.

What's your favourite film?

At the moment I'm obsessed with The Third Man by Carol Reed, and F for Fake by Orson Welles. It's interesting for a British person to live in Berlin, as I do, and to think about ghosts and disappearance.

What advice would you give a young artist?

Don't stop, don't stop, don't stop.

In short

Born: Glasgow, 1966.

Career: Work encompasses video, photography and sculpture. Won the Turner prize in 1996. Made 24 Hour Psycho, Zidane, and this spring installed a new work at Tate Britain, London.

High point: "Having the serendipity to meet a peer group of people I admire, and who stimulate and provoke me."

Low point: "I hope it's yet to come."

Saludos, C