DOUGLAS GORDON — It Doesn’t Matter Who I Am. I Just Want to Talk to You: The Sociable Art of Douglas Gordon, Generisch / Tramway, Glasgow, 1993

Generisch / Tramway, Glasgow, 1993. Softcover exhibition catalogue, 54 pages, 15 × 20 cm. Colour wrappers; black-and-white and colour reproductions throughout. Designed by Tony Arefin. With original 4-page 24 Hour Psycho: Hitchcock’s Tomb exhibition handout, text by Stuart Morgan.

The useful thing about this copy is that 24 Hour Psycho is still inside it.

Published in 1993, The Sociable Art of Douglas Gordon catches Gordon before the institutional biography had overtaken the work. The catalogue moves through text pieces, telephone interventions, sound and projects built around unstable identity and communication — including the unsolicited call to Liam Gillick from which the title is taken. Ross Sinclair contributed the catalogue text; Tony Arefin gave the publication its extraordinary turquoise cover and oversized typography.

Inserted alongside it is the original Tramway handout for 24 Hour Psycho, shown 24 April–23 May 1993, with Stuart Morgan’s essay Hitchcock’s Tomb. Gordon’s slowing of Hitchcock’s Psycho to a twenty-four-hour duration became the work that announced him internationally; three years later he won the 1996 Turner Prize.

The pairing is unusually exact. One publication describes a practice built around repetition, anonymity, memory and borrowed material. The other records the work in which those strategies suddenly became unavoidable.

Catalogue and handout remain separate objects. Their placement together does the rest.

Condition: good. Visible handling, light edge and corner wear, creasing to lower front wrapper and minor surface marks. Handout with light age toning and handling consistent with use.