Product Description
A companion guide to the retrospective now on view at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), this catalog is intended as the first comprehensive monograph on Gordon. Exhibition curator Ferguson (In Memory of My Feelings) opens with an essay that requires some prior knowledge of Gordon’s themes. His interpretive journey can be dizzying and labyrinthine and often leads to lengthy, initially inexplicable sojourns into literary analysis. Essays by MOCA assistant curator Michael Darling and Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector provide a more solid rationale for their interpretations, while Scottish writer Francis McKee (Luminous) stitches together a Frankenstein-like fabric of textual snippets by other writers that tell the tale of a good man who struggles against his inherently evil side and loses. The late critic David Sylvester closes with an interview of Gordon that reveals the motives behind his use of the film medium. The catalog’s graphics, which include white text that seemingly hovers over dark-toned film stills, is a visual manifestation of Gordon’s conceptual preoccupation: dualism and battling opposites. A valuable, comprehensive bibliography follows the essays.
