The Brooklyn Rail

If one had spent the morning looking at the Roman Forum, then Douglas Gordon’s ziggurat of screens presenting his video practice spanning more than thirty years, installed on the top floor of MAXXI, would not appear unfamiliar. The Roman Forum is a jumble: massive Corinthian columns, human-sized Doric pillars, and quietly dissolving mounds of brick. Gordon’s pile is also composed of multiple scales, and he scrambles them too, placing small screens below large and juxtaposing thin and delicate with heavy and voluminous. There are boxy, museum-grade, vintage Hantarex monitors and similarly now-anachronistic LG, Daewoo, Thompson, and Hitachi consoles, with an occasional narrow Samsung flat-screen, and the last contemporary touch of iPhones draped on almost any horizontal surface available. Full-length mirrors are placed periodically around the assemblage to magnify the teeming excess and include the viewer in the flickering menagerie of humans, insects, pachyderms, felines, and reptiles that constitute a large portion of Gordon’s imagery.

While I’ve started this review with an overwhelming architectural metaphor, the presence that looms over Pretty much every film… is that of Nam June Paik’s The More the Better (1988), certainly in this iteration of Gordon’s piece. Paik’s construction of figure, symbol, and architecture from massed screens is an unavoidable referent, and Gordon’s installation serves as a harmonious counterpoint to his progenitor, suggesting that amid all this chaos, the focus is, after all, time and how we perceive it.

Pretty much every film… has appeared periodically in a variety of forms at venues such as the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2014, the National Gallery of Canada in 2011, and the Hayward Gallery in 2002. This newest Roman version is one of the “messiest” to date and to my mind, best captures that mad control of time that marks Gordon’s work. By interacting with the viewer on numerous viewing platforms, save film screens, Gordon intrudes on all levels of visual consciousness from the intimate, almost diaristic, privacy of the iPhone to the didactic banality of the institutional monitor or domestic flat screen. Each work is distributed amongst several screens of differing sizes. A video such as 24 Hour Psycho (1993). which is already an investigation into the flow of time and its interaction with the nuance and detail of the noir/horror genre, is further fractured into five or six separate segments running simultaneously. Does this affect the interpretation of the work? We watch Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) murdered for a very long time in the shower juxtaposed with Detective Milton Arbogast (Martin Balsam) frozen in his fall down the stairway. Flickering cinematic death that was meticulously rendered in Gordon’s original is now multiplied, its gruesomeness and absurdity picked apart even further. Faces we recognize, such as Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver—in Gordon’s piece Don’t Think About It (2000)—gaze out at us next to the artist’s own face disfigured with tape in The Making of Monster (1996), a pairing that further questions Gordon’s fascination with familiarity, character, and types.

This was the first installation of Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now’ish … that I have experienced in the flesh, but it seems that while the three-level pile of monitors in Paris may have been disorienting, the current Roman version offers sensory overload an order-of-magnitude greater. The idea was always to confront the viewers with too many images and compel them to make decisions on their own—again much like Paik’s koanic approach of building a meta-figure or symbol of screens of contrasting images—asking which image is the image. Gordon’s version is far less zen and more like the brainwashing scene in A Clockwork Orange, except that we have willingly chosen this experience. In Pretty much every film… Gordon—always an artist who demands a lot from the viewer, whether it was time or concentration—asks us not just to look through his eyes once, at aspects of an elephant or a grainy black and white movie, but repeatedly through decades of his practice. He embraces the very contemporary breakdown of the hierarchy of images, that anything is available anytime and anywhere in any size, and he doesn’t slap our wrist for accepting this world. In both content and presentation, he makes it clear that we have chosen this path forward, and he is a more than willing enabler.