Ethical beliefs drive plenty of 21st-century artists but Douglas Gordon is a different sort of moralist. The problems that haunt him are biblical. He is obsessed with the nature of good and evil, seeming to believe in sin and the existence of the human soul.
Confessions of a Justified Sinner, the video work that won him the Turner prize back in 1996, distils his metaphysical concerns perfectly. It’s one of the oldies but goodies, playing on a colossal mound of TV monitors at the Gagosian, part of a portable anthology entitled Pretty Much Every Film and Video Work from About 1992 Until Now, updated since it was shown at the Hayward two decades ago. The face of Fredric March, slowed down, shown split screen in “positive” and “negative”, transforms from Dr Jekyll to Mr Hyde, from the mixture of good and evil that makes up most of us into a creature of pure distilled evil.
