Douglas Gordon’s series ‘100 Blind Stars’ is an installation consisting of 100 publicity headshots of 1940s and 1950s film stars, including Bette Davis, Cary Grant, Kim Novak, and Elizabeth Taylor, to name a few. The stills are either in colour or monochrome, and each star’s eyes are cut out, and appear as black, white or mirrored empty sockets. The photographs are framed in black and hung densely in a wall-to-wall layout, filling up the whole black wall of the exhibition space.
The genesis of the work dates back to the period from 1991 to 1992. At this time, the artist had several posters of celebrities in his flat, and when he found their stares disturbing he ripped out their eyes. This sparked the idea of ‘100 Blind Stars’, and ten years later, the artist started creating the work. Gordon sources the stills from photograph stores, film posters and the internet. He cuts out the stars’ eyes from the stills and mounts the remaining defaced portraits on a black or white museum board or a mirrored surface. The series consists of 100 prints, all of which are unique pieces and the same size.
The series examines the celebrity culture promoted in contemporary media, questioning the screen image and collective memory of the icons mediated through publicity. Curator Katrina M. Brown has commented on Gordon’s practice: ‘In co-opting [existent materials], Gordon’s works seek not a Pop confusion of high and low, but rather to explore the operation of memory in the process of recognition’ (Brown 2004, p.7). In the stills, the hollow eye sockets of the portraits imply that their image is simply a mask. This reveals the artificial nature of their public image and triggers viewers to rethink the hidden and unknowable ego of the celebrities behind the screen. The work resonates with Gordon’s other series of work, ‘Self-Portrait, You + Me’ 2002/2003, in which the artist burns the eyes, mouths or the whole faces of the icons adopted by Pop artist, Andy Warhol. Both the two works show an affinity to Warhol’s practice of appropriating and accumulating celebrities’ images but suggest a critical attitude towards the worship of icons.
The utilization of ready-made objects from daily life in the series is characteristic of Gordon’s artistic practice. As curators John Leighton and Richard Calvocoressi point out: ’Douglas Gordon is typical of many artists today in that his work ranges over several media – film, video, photograph, installation of objects and text…what they have in common, at least in principle, is that they lend themselves to being used as ready-mades, as found objects’ (Calvocoressi and Leighton 2006, p.15). As demonstrated in ‘100 Blind Stars’, this approach allows Gordon’s works to comment upon phenomena in everyday life, giving a layer of cultural significance to his work.
Gordon’s preference for adopting ready-made materials can be traced back to his undergraduate and postgraduate studies at Glasgow School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art in London, in the second half of the 1980s. At that time, the new generation of art students gave critical responses to the prevailing art trend of neo-expressionism – the trend of depicting figurative objects with a painterly style and bold colour, and expressing intense emotions – as well as affinity to a conceptual approach. Leighton and Calvocoressi indicate that:
…the art students especially in Glasgow and London reacted against what they saw as the arbitrary and subjective nature of this approach to art and turned for their inspiration to the cool and measured art of conceptualism and, beyond, to that champion of an art of the mind, Marcel Duchamp’ (Calvocoressi, Leighton 2006, p.15).
The influence of conceptualism and the use of everyday objects are both visible throughout Douglas Gordon’s practice from his early education until today.
Further reading
Katrina M. Brown, DG = Douglas Gordon, Tate Publishing, London 2004, p.7.
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
