EVERY TIME YOU THINK OF ME, I DIE, A LITTLE(Exhibition View)
THE MEMENTO MORI IN THE WORKS OF ANDY WARHOL AND DOUGLAS GORDON
GEGENWART
28.09.2013–27.04.2014
he exhibition investigated the death motif, memento mori in contemporary art. Revolve around Andy Warhol and Douglas Gordon’s works (along with some younger artist like Wolfgang Tillmans). I couldn’t find too much information on this show but this exhibition view intrigued me, at first I was confused by ‘I’ in the exhibition title and ‘you’ in the text here. This sort of subtle cunning and humour are not rare in his practice. The switch of ‘you’ to ‘I’ indicate the interrelationship between self and other. I immediately recognise the interweaving state this text suggest, as what Freud explained about the tasks of mourning. This is a process of withdrawing, or attaching in some other cases, libido from or to the dead object.
Déjà-Vu, 2000
Video, 3 projections, black and white, and sound
His other works like Déjà-Vu (2000) where the character was trapped in a relentless retelling of his doomed fate reminded me of how Foster commented on Warhol’s ‘I like boring things’ and coined ‘traumatic realism’. However in Douglas’s work, the vast usage of found footage in cinema and his great interest in deconstructing the (fake) magic of cinema made it a ‘traumatic alternative realism’.
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