A man whispers Velvet Underground while you hallucinate the music he alone can hear.
In the present work, the artists appears lying on his back, his eyes mostly closed, dreamingly listening to a walkman that plays, a recording of 'The Best of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground'. The artist can hear the music through his earphones, but as viewers we are only privy to the sound of his voice that whispers the melody. As we listen to the hypnotic interpretion of the familiar songs - as emblematic for pop music history as 'Psycho' is for film - we are forced to mentally 'reconstruct' the remaining orchestration, instrumentation and vocals. We must attempt to reassemble something we already know to be a fact by negotiating the sticky mess of interpretation, meaning, and memory.
Direction
Gordon weaponizes boredom until it becomes transcendence.
Sound
Your brain does all the work. Cruel and brilliant.
Director
Douglas Gordon
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Bas Jan Ader famously disappeared at sea in 1975 attempting to sail across the Atlantic; Gordon's horizontal, eyes-closed performance echoes Ader's own explorations of falling, failing, and vanishing.
The work premiered the same year as Gordon's breakout '24 Hour Psycho,' cementing his obsession with stretching time until familiar culture becomes uncomfortably strange.
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