Douglas Gordon's The Vanity of Allegory

Douglas Gordon is an inveterate storyteller. The fictions that he weaves extends outward from the objects of his art--film, video, sound installations, photographs and text works--to encompass his own artistic persona. Douglas Gordon's Vanity of Allegory, an exhibition conceived specifically for the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, explores the notion of the veiled self-portrait as an art-historical trope, a literary device and a cinematic strategy while it examines the intersection of vanitas as a meditation on the ephemeral nature of life itself, and a ploy to remain immortal. For Douglas Gordon's Vanity of Allegory, Gordon turned to the history of art for source material. His installation includes loans from the Guggenheim and private collections, as well as examples of his own work and that of his peers. By combining historical and contemporary art and film, Gordon has created a visual collage that narrates issues of self-representation and double identity. This catalogue illustrates each object in the show along with Gordon's rationale for its inclusion.