DOUGLAS GORDON
Born in 1966, Glasgow (UK). Lives in London and New York.
Kissing with Amobarbital, 1995
24 slides
Coleccion Cal Cego, Barcelona
This work is a print of a performance realised by Douglas Gordon, in which, during the inauguration of an exhibition, he kissed acquaintances with lips painted with a certain solution. “It is a kiss between man and woman … and if 98% of those kisses are purely social but always on the mouth, it is difficult, in the negative image, to know how to treat this type of kiss. It was difficult to determine if it was a series of terribly immoral images or if it was only about a social action. By the simple act of passing from positive to negative we immediately find ourselves on the other side of the mirror and we are disorientated in our attempt to determine the truth.”
“The radical step that follows voyeurism is sadism. One doesn’t look through or from behind a glass partition, but one will cross the wall and commence touching it in the metaphorical and physical sense … the distance is a metaphor of voyeurism but as you get closer, you can find yourself in the situation of the sadist. You can pass from one side of the screen and look at it, in a way that is literally “sadistic”. (Extracted from interviews with D. Gordon in Déjà vu, Paris-Musees editions, 2000.)
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