A New Path

Douglas Gordon’s Empire (1998)

Caoimhin MacGiolla Leith, 2010

Douglas Gordon’s Empire (1998), a public art work, was always hard to locate and the wrong way around.  Andy Warhol’s Empire, a movie, stayed still, as movies are not supposed to do, for quite some time. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s ‘Empire’, an idea posited by a pair of political philosophers, is elusive but, it would appear, more or less everywhere. Gordon’s reversed neon sign, which can only be read ‘the right way around’ in the mirrored surface behind it, is the artist’s only public art work in his native Glasgow. A classic and characteristic exercise in borrowing, mirroring and condensation, it was installed in 1998 on the side of a non-descript building down a sidestreet in Glasgow’s city centre. For many years it haunted Brunswick Lane, a few yards down from the Mitre Bar, a pub frequented by a mix of old locals and young artists.  Empire was originally intended to be one of a series of public art works forming part of the ‘Urban Icons’ programme, initiated by Visual Arts Project (VAP) and supported  by the ‘Artworks for Glasgow’ scheme, a short-lived programme designed to revitalise the Merchant City area.  The Mitre Bar is now history, having closed some years ago.  Gordon’s Empire, too, has vanished and reappeared, having been relocated in similar surroundings in nearby Tontine Lane.

Like his best-known gallery-based work, 24-Hour Psycho (1993), which continues to reverberate, most lately in Don deLillo’s novel Point Omega, Gordon’s Empire was derived from a movie by Alfred Hitchcock.   It is a mirror-image of the neon sign outside the down-at-heel hotel in Vertigo (1958) where the obsessed Scottie, played by James Stewart, tracks down the enigmatic object of his desire, played by Kim Novak.  A fictional object, glimpsed only momentarily in the original film, was thus given three-dimensional form by Gordon, though its text remains properly legible only in the equally fictive depths of a mirrored surface.  The work is therefore, in one sense at least, anything but ‘empirical’, though it continues to speaks obliquely, from its site in the heart of Glasgow’s once-thriving Merchant City, to the ramifying concept of Empire at the beginning of the twenty-first century.  Since its initial conception Empire has also become increasingly enmeshed in the expanding web of appropriated material that constitutes Gordon’s oeuvre.  Related works include Bootleg Empire, a surreptitously and shakily filmed and abridged ‘version’ of Andy Warhol’s avant-garde classic, Empire, a deadpan, 24-hour long filmed ‘portrait’ of New York’s Empire State Building, as well as Gordon’s Feature Film, made in 1999, which comprises filmed footage of the conductor James Conlon leading an orchestra rehearsal of Bernard Hermann’s memorably overwrought score for Hitchcock’s Vertigo.