Last week I sat in a darkened room watching doors open and close. It was a doubly familiar experience: we’re all familiar with the feel, the sound, the shape of a door, but this was still more familiar, since it consists of hundreds of clips gleaned from films, with glimpses of Hollywood stars and scenes we half-remember.
Christian Marclay’s new artwork “Doors” at White Cube Mason’s Yard in London is a follow-up to “The Clock”, an epic 24-hour video piece consisting of glimpses of clocks and watches from movie clips collaged in a real-time 24-hour cycle, all compiled from a single Shoreditch video rental store. That remarkable work was an angsty reflection of the modern obsession with time, the image as mediated through the screen and the fragmented nature of our engagement with media and everyday life.
But “Doors” is more unsettling. If “The Clock” dealt with time, “Doors” deals with space, with the interior and most obviously with the home. Each time a door is opened, a cut leads us into another film, so that every entrance is a transition. It soon becomes clear how emotionally charged those entrances are: people are barging in, tentatively opening, running out, backing away.
While we might think of doors in the movies in terms of farce — bathrobed-lovers frantically running in and out of hotel rooms and hiding (and there is plenty of that here) — there is also an insistent undertone of sex and violence. Those hands slowly gripping a handle, the fingers tightening around it; frightened women watching knobs turn from the inside, or running through door after door in flight from some unseen threat. Keys being slowly inserted into keyholes or, even worse, locks being picked, images which foreshadow violation. And there is the seedy voyeurism, the peering through keyholes and partially open doors, putting ears up against doors to listen, crouching nervously.
There is a universe of psychodrama in this simplest of architectural devices. But doors are also, of course, metaphors for the movies themselves.
One of the most striking things here is the motif of transformation. In the language of film, those fearful, slow door openings, those creaking doors in dark houses, those hefty kicks delivered by noirish heavies in fedoras all point towards doors as agents of change. In “Doors”, each time someone passes through a doorway, they exit as another person, one actor becomes another. Occasionally Marclay toys with it: a white actor enters, a black actor exists; a man turns the knob, a woman emerges; a figure in full 18th-century garb and powdered wig opens the door, a 20th-century figure appears on the other side. It underlines how our brains are conditioned to think spatially, each room associated with a different set of ideas or memories.
Mostly the editing is wonderfully sly, melding soundscapes in what must have been an unbelievably laborious process. Certain faces become stock gags, Brigitte Bardot popping her head around the door only to mutter “Oh, pardon!”, Sidney Poitier storming angrily out of a door through a school, John Wayne standing uncertainly in a doorway and glancing back. Some of these tropes become a little tiresome but they make a point — that we use doorways without seeing them, that life is a series of repetitive acts, the entries and exits marking out time. Our lives in buildings are, in a way, spatial edits, cuts between scenes.
What comes across so powerfully is context. A door in a haunted house means one thing, an anonymous hotel corridor with identical doors on either side another. I was surprised not to see Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel from The Shining with its chilling Room 237, though perhaps I just didn’t stay long enough. Worst of all perhaps is the prison door, one whose closing confines your entire existence.
Marclay’s work might have been a Bluebeard’s castle, a succession of dark dredgings from the past behind closed doors, but it is far more alive than that. It is an exercise in understanding the meaning of space, how we take transitions for granted. There are so many signs, from the creak of a rusty hinge to the sound of a key in a lock. There are no windows here, only doors: all these lives are lived in the interior: it is claustrophobic and, after a while, dreamlike in its repetition. A bit like everyday life, only it takes an artist to show us how extraordinary the idea of a door actually is and how much potential it contains behind it.
— Edwin Heathcote