Douglas Gordon: Timeline

Throughout his career, Douglas Gordon has engaged in an ongoing reflection on the motion picture, examining the relationship between the movies and our common knowledge and perception of them. In altering, monumentalizing, and alienating our collective understanding of film, he visualizes, pictures, and "sculpts" time. Douglas Gordon, which was organized by MoMA curator Klaus Biesenbach, collects images and texts from the past 40 years (a nod to Gordon's birth date of 1966), all of which deal with ideas of visual memory, shared visual knowledge, and the interwoven texture of imagined and remembered sounds and images. It explores the relationship between film and psychoanalysis, and the way in which these systems of thought have affected the idea of individual biography: Gordon is acutely attuned to the relation of such deep experiences as love, longing, loss, and trauma to what one feels while watching film. He understands how films refer to other films, how they superimpose themselves upon each other and upon their viewers' memories, and how, through their ubiquity and accessibility, films express and represent the ideals and fears of their times. Essay by Klaus Biesenbach.