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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
A video installation at the Gagosian Gallery features a performance by an Indian elephant. The video, which is the work of the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon, who shot it last year in the gallery, is entitled "Play Dead; Real Time."The elephant's name is Minnie. Viewers enter a vast, darkened room to watch Minnie "playing dead"on two standing screens and a TV monitor. Brightly lit in pristine, empty surroundings, the immense animal lies on one side, perfectly still except for an open, blinking eye that is as soulful as anything the size of a bowling ball can be. Getting up is tough for her. She rocks on her back to build momentum, then heaves herself over. One leg is caught under her flabby mass. She pauses wearily, surges to her forefeet and hind knees, then hauls herself erect. Being an elephant is hard work.
Like most installations by Gordon, who is a thirty-seven-year-old fixture on the circuit of grand international exhibitions of contemporary art, "Play Dead; Real Time"is visually elegant and conceptually nuanced. In sequences that slip into and out of synch with one another on the different screens, the camera glides around Minnie, scrutinizing her baggy, wrinkly, bristly mountainousness--her pachydermity. I felt that I had never looked...
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