"Narcissus sends his greetings"
The press
on Douglas Gordon’s "The Vanity of Allegory" at the Deutsche Guggenheim
For
The VANITY of Allegory, artist curator
Douglas Gordon transformed the
Deutsche Guggenheim into a chamber of mirrors that he filled with an array
of very different works of art ranging from
Perugino’s Saint Sebastian to
Walt Disney’s
Peter Pan. His personal and fantastic equation for transience and
vanity met with some controversial reactions among the press, running the
gamut from enthusiasm to rather sharp criticism. Sabine Vogel in the
Berliner Zeitung, for instance, found Gordon’s exhibition idea far too
transparent: "Narcissus sends his greetings. Gazing at his reflection,
even the least sharp-witted of visitors eventually figures out that it’s a
matter of looking at oneself here." Also, to her mind, the fact that the
artist has slipped into the roles of
Marilyn Monroe and Kurt Cobain
in his self-portraits amounts to nothing more than hogwash: "For children,
it’s a simple game of role playing and Mardi gras, but when the artist
does it, it’s suddenly called ‘performative transvestitism.’" On the other
hand, the works of the artists Gordon has chosen somewhat reconciles her
to the "idiotically obvious conceptual blah blah of curator’s art."
Because at the same time, the exhibition contains "some really exciting
works from
Matthew Barney,
Robert Mapplethorpe, or
Damien Hirst, and the film program featuring
Kenneth Anger, Francis Ford
Coppola, Stanley Kubrick,
Andrei Tarkovsky,
Pier Paolo Pasolini, and
Luchino Visconti can compete with the best of them."
Actually,
Klaus Lüber, critic at the Süddeutsche Zeitung,
immediately felt at home in Gordon’s show. To his mind, "relaxation and
comfort are usually the last things one expects to feel upon entering the
narrow white exhibition space at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. Here,
it’s usually the cool atmosphere of an art laboratory that prevails." Even
while Lüber warms up to the artistic self-portraits in the show, such as
the "diva-like, dolled-up Andy Warhol
," he’s nonetheless puzzled by the "artist’s aggressive and tacky
self-advertisement." In particular Perugino’s painting of St. Sebastian,
according to Lüber one of the most important stations in this "cryptic
self-representation," presents problems: "Should the artist’s urge to
immortalize himself in the work find expression in, of all things, a
portrait of a dying boy?" Yet while the exhibition offers no clear
answers, at least the film program holds a possible key to the show:
"Gordon’s search to express the creative and sometimes monstrous
development of human identity in the face of death."
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Christina Tillmann from the Tagesspiegel allows herself to be
considerably more enchanted by Gordon’s concept. "Yet the moment he
declares the entire exhibition he’s curated to be his own work of art, the
mirrors suddenly cast very different reflections." For her, the exhibition
is a "looking glass land" that lives from an "eternal play on references…
this is already alluded to spatially, by the multiply mirrored, dizzying
architecture. The works themselves are nothing more than a door to an
enchanted land. And even Alice had a hard time finding her way back." Yet
in order to follow the white rabbit as Alice did, Ralf Hanselle from the
Berlin city magazine Zitty would have required a bit more food for
thought. In his opinion, Gordon is once again serving up one of his
"favorite philosophical ready-to-eat dishes… what the visitor to the
Guggenheim actually gets to see is a kind of check list for a
philosophical lexicon. Visitors entering the exhibition space, which has
been divided by a large mirror, without first familiarizing themselves
with the basic vocabulary of 30 years of trendy French philosophy will
quickly lose their aesthetic grip." True symptoms of bewilderment do not,
however, set in with Christiane Meixner from the Berliner Morgenpost
. On the contrary: "Anyone who’d like to turn their back on the way new
questions are posed and additional planes of meaning are generated here is
met by a shining Exit sign by
Cerith Wyn Evans. Unfortunately in reverse! A paradox, but highly
interesting."
For Vera Görgen from the Welt am Sonntag
, Gordon is even "one of the few contemporary artists who dares to address
the larger themes of religious art: good and evil, virtue and vice,
innocence and guilt, salvation and damnation." Yet he could just as well
be a "British working-class soccer fan,”"with his "short-cropped hair,"
his tattoos, and the "shiny gold inlays in his front teeth." In his
extensive essay in the taz, Harald Fricke also investigates
Gordon’s role playing in this vein: "Gordon is a real guy, he feels at
home in the soccer stadium – and he made it to the
Museum of Modern Art anyway, which will be showing a retrospective of his
work shortly." The author finds the relationship between the Briton and
the art stars he has exhibited at the Deutsche Guggenheim particularly
interesting: to his mind, Gordon in Berlin is everything wrapped into one:
curator, interior designer, provider of ideas, art director, and
exhibiting artist: "He is an equal among equals no less prominent, and at
the same time their pre-thinker according to whose concept everything
becomes reflected by everything else, from
Jeff Koons’ stainless steel block to the wall-sized text apotheosis of a
Lawrence Weiner." According to Fricke, in the end, a "new, considerably
more contemporary allegory arises – in the self-portrait of the artist as
a network provider." His conclusion: "Even
Warhol would have marveled at all the marketing savvy."
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