‘Croque Mort’ is an installation by Douglas Gordon, which consists of a series of seven colour photographs. The images feature a baby holding and biting its toes. The scenes are captured in extreme close-up, focusing on the baby’s mouth, hand and toes which fill up the entire frame of each picture. The photographs are larger than life-size and showcased in an exhibition room with red walls, ceiling and carpet. They are hung on the walls in groups, at a low eye level.
In making the work, Gordon used his sister’s newborn baby as model and carried out various photographic post-production procedures. He photographed her, cropped the images to bring the body parts into sharp focus, enlarged the images and printed them with digital C-print – exposing the pictures onto light-sensitive photographic paper by laser or LED printer. In the series, each of the seven prints has 13 editions, all of which are in the same size. Some of the prints are landscape and some are portrait.
The work associates everyday acts with medieval medical practices. In its title, the French words ‘croque’ and ‘mort’ mean, respectively, ‘bite’ and ‘dead person’. When put together, the term refers to undertakers in France during the medieval period, who would bite recent corpses’ feet to ensure they were deceased. Likewise, in ‘Croque Mort’ the biting action seems to be a kind of verification of life, provoking thoughts of the emptiness and consciousness of being. As curator Katrina M. Brown has pointed out, ‘Gordon’s images depict what may be the first signs of the intuitive search for a sense of embodiment, the body turning on itself to verify its existence, to achieve sure physical awareness of real presence in time and space, the “pinch-me” reality check’ (Brown 2004, p.100). Through referencing the historical context, the ordinary biting action of a baby turns into an unsettling move, triggering the fundamental questions about existence.
‘Croque Mort’ demonstrates a dualism of connotation which is a recurring feature in Douglas Gordon’s practice. Curator Keith Hartley writes, ‘Gordon’s work is characterized by a frequent juxtaposition of (supposed) opposites: good and evil, light and dark, positive and negative, right and left’ (Hartley 2006, p.41). In this piece, the new born baby is aligned with a dead body through the reference to the medieval practice of ‘croque mort’, bringing together life and death. Gordon’s video work, ‘Film Noir (Fly)’ 1995 also embodies this kind of juxtaposition. The work captures a fly in close-up, attached to a table surface by its wings. It jerks and struggles until it eventually passes away. Through juxtaposing life and death, both the two works reflect the uncertainty and fragility of life.
It has been suggested that Gordon’s use of opposites has a particularly Scottish flavour, reflecting the culture in which the artist was born and raised. As curators John Leighton and Richard Calvocoressi have commented:
[Gordon’s approach has] a long history in Scottish culture from James Hogg’s ground-breaking ‘The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner’ to Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic tale, ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’; and from the troubled history of religious conflict to the way a city like Edinburgh is physically divided into Old Town and New Town. (Calvocoressi and Leighton 2006, p.16)
Split personality as narrated in Scottish literature, conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism in the sixteenth century, as well as new urban development in the eighteenth century in Scotland, are likely to be part of the inspiration for Gordon’s artistic practice, and for this work in particular.
Further reading
Katrina M. Brown, DG = Douglas Gordon, Tate Publishing, London 2004, p.100.
Keith Hartley, ‘Plato’s Cave and Cranach’s Tree: Idea and Context in the Work of Douglas Gordon’ in Douglas Gordon: superhumanatural, exhibition catalogue, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh 2006, pp.33–59.
Richard Calvocoressi, John Leighton, ‘Foreword’ in Douglas Gordon: superhumanatural, exhibition catalogue, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh 2006, pp.15–17.
Grace, Lam Pui Shan
The University of Edinburgh
December 2016
