Curator, interior architect, a source of ideas, art director and exhibiting artist: Douglas Gordon presents and recreates himself and many other artists in “The Vanity of Allegory” at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin.
By Harald Fricke

The rouge is applied just so to the cheek and the lipstick, also worn perfectly, is a saturated red by Chanel. The stylist has done a fine job, and in a few minutes Andy Warhol will present himself before the camera as a professional drag queen. The Polaroids taken during this session will then be signed by Warhol, since even this bit of gay fun in 1981, which provides the motif for the poster for the exhibition in Berlin, “The Vanity of Allegory,” was, for him, entirely a product of his existence as an artist striving for fame and immortality. Had he not written in his 1977 book, From A to B and Back Again, that drag queens remind us “that some stars aren’t just like you and me”?

In the case of Douglas Gordon’s masquerades, now hanging right next to seven Warhols in drag in Berlin’s Deutsche Guggenheim, one can’t be quite sure he’s pulled this off. His face made up palely, with a black wig here and a platinum blonde one there, are hardly fitted as tightly as those on Warhols transvestites – Gordon hasn’t even shaved the hair off his chest for his 2005 photo series “staying home/going out.”  Gordon seems more to be playing at dress-up; his look is a quotation or, as the title of his earlier photographs of 1996 puts it, Self-portrait as Kurt Cobain, as Andy Warhol, as Myra Hindley, as Marilyn Monroe.

Actual similarity to the celebrities has become secondary for Gordon. Instead, he drives references to all the celebrities that have come before him to the absurd. It’s no accident that the rather unimposing and crapulent self-portrait was made in the very year his career took off – after all, Gordon had won the Turner Prize.

Overall, one has to consider the life of the artist, born in 1966 in Glasgow, as one always bordering the line between pop stardom and boy-next-door everyday life. Gordon is a guy quite at home in a soccer stadium but who has nevertheless made it into the Museum of Modern Art, which will soon be staging a retrospective of his work.

His slowed-down, 24-hour version of Hitchcock’s thriller, Psycho, has become one of the icons of video art in the ’90s, and his double projections with scenes from Taxi Driver or The Exorcist could be seen at the Biennale in Venice and Kaspar König’s sculpture garden in Münster. Above all, though, in countless objects, photos, and video works, Gordon has been concerned with the way he sees himself – including distorted images, doppelgangers and other ghosts.

In this vein, his exhibition in Bregenz in 2002 was devoted to the story of Robert Wringhim, the dark character from James Hoggs’s haunted novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, whose split personality is one with which Gordon has long identified. Earlier, in 1994, he’d set up a sound installation in which, in a blue-lit room, one could hear all sorts of hits from the ’60s that his mother – and him, too? – listened to in the months before he was born.

There’s no doubt that Gordon doesn’t shy away from pathos, excess, and the big questions about the meaning of life. That goes, too, for his exhibition in the Guggenheim in Berlin, which is all but bursting with allusions. First, there is the bright and spacious architecture of the museum, its minimalist rooms doubled by a mirror wall Gordon has smartly erected so that the viewer can always view himself viewing the art, which, as Nancy Spector notes in the catalogue, “is visible to them twice.” What comes off as a hearty grab into theory’s box of tricks actually has quite pragmatic reasons: Behind this wall is a cinema, set up specifically for this exhibition, in which a selection of Gordon’s favorite films are running, among them, Godard’s Pierrot le fou, Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a bit of Kubrick, Oshima, Pasolini, and, of course, Walt Disney’s Peter Pan as well; ultimately for Gordon, cinema is beyond the realm of the real world, that is, on the other side of the mirror.

What Gordon’s actually done for “The Vanity of Allegory,” along with the rather camp-besotted film program and half a dozen of his own works, is stage a group show with twelve artists from the last century. The themes are common enough – death and transience – but at some point, they were also crucial to Gordon’s development in their focus on playing with the idea of self-presentation. Several times, one comes across Matthew Barney as a cleft-footed fawn; Damien Hirst is represented by two glass vitrines, works from 1991 foreshadowing his sharks, cows, and sheep in formaldehyde; and in Robert Mapplethorpe’s Self-Portrait of 1988, one sees the emaciated photographer who would die of complications due to AIDS merely one year later. Concretely, vanity here means vainness, the celebration of the uniqueness of all earthly life – even and particularly in the face of death.

Above all, though, there is, once again, Marcel Duchamp, whose female alter ego, Rrose Selavy, smiles in a photo by Man Ray. Gordon plays a practical joke with another famous self-portrait depicting Duchamp with a five-pointed star shaved from the back of his head. Under the title Proposal for a Posthumous Portrait, Gordon has placed a skull on a pedestal bearing the same pattern. So much for the corny joke as a sort of art-historical pat on the shoulder from one colleague to another.

But seriousness and irony can never be separated in Gordon’s case. By referring to famous predecessors, he also reflects on their current status and, parodying them, often points out how far they can fall when the terms of discourse change. It also explains what the inversion in the title of the exhibition Gordon is consciously referring to; in every artist’s pose, The Picture of Dorian Gray seems to live on and one can detect in the selected examples an attempt to manifest their pact with eternity. It’s from this approach to art, consistent as it is with the mythos of everlasting genius, that Gordon ultimately draws much of his energy. In Berlin’s “The VANITY of Allegory,” Douglas Gordon is all in one: curator, interior architect, a source of ideas, art director, and exhibiting artist. He is an equal among no less prominent equals, yet at the same time, their mentor in whose concept everything reflects everything else, from Jeff Koons’ stainless steel baroque through to the textual apotheosis of a Lawrence Weiner, filling an entire wall. In this way, a new and more contemporary allegory arises in the end – in a self-portrait of the artist as a networker. Warhol himself would be astounded by such marketing talent.