DOUGLAS GORDON — 24 Hour Psycho, Spellbound: Art and Film, Hayward Gallery / BFI, London, 1996

Produced for Spellbound: Art and Film, Hayward Gallery, London, 22 February–6 May 1996, an ambitious collaboration with the British Film Institute marking the centenary of cinema. Curated by Ian Christie and Philip Dodd, the exhibition brought together Fiona Banner, Terry Gilliam, Douglas Gordon, Peter Greenaway, Damien Hirst, Steve McQueen, Eduardo Paolozzi, Paula Rego, Ridley Scott and Boyd Webb at a moment when the boundary between contemporary art and moving image was becoming increasingly unstable.

The recto is given entirely to a blue installation photograph of Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993) — Hitchcock’s Psycho slowed to approximately three frames per second until the original film takes a full twenty-four hours to unfold. Reduced here from monumental gallery projection to a postcard image, one of the defining video works of the 1990s becomes portable.

The timing is particularly good. Gordon showed 24 Hour Psycho at the Hayward in February 1996; later that same year he won the Turner Prize. Damien Hirst appears on the same card immediately following his 1995 Turner Prize win, while Steve McQueen — then still primarily encountered within contemporary art — would receive the prize in 1999. What now reads like an improbable roll call of established names was still a live configuration of careers in motion.

Film → appropriation → gallery installation → installation photograph → exhibition postcard.

Gordon takes Hitchcock out of normal cinematic time; Christie and Dodd place that altered cinema inside an exhibition concerned with the changing relationship between art and film; the Hayward then returns the installation to circulation as printed matter.

On the reverse, the image becomes administration again: dates, institutions, logos, curatorially assembled names and an unused postal field.

Not quite catalogue. Not quite artwork. Not simply publicity.

A printed object circulating at the exact moment 24 Hour Psycho was moving from an already acclaimed installation into the canon of contemporary art — while Gordon himself was moving toward the institutional recognition that would define 1996.

The postcard survives that movement.

10.5 × 15 cm · Offset-printed card on uncoated stock · Hayward Gallery / British Film Institute, London, 1996

Condition: Very good. Light age toning and minor spotting consistent with period ephemera.