In a similar gesture, Douglas Gordon’s Under Darkness, Between Shadows (2000), hovered over the city. I first heard rumours of this work in the 1990s, and included it in Justified Sinners (co-edited with Ross Birrell, 2002), an anthology surveying the archaeology of Scottish counter-culture, of which Gordon’s darkness marked an endpoint.
‘Under Darkness, Between Shadows’ is a proposal to cut off all light in an area of Glasgow for one hour, at a time and date to be specified. The area of darkness should be one square mile. When viewed from above, this would be seen as a perfect black square cutting into the ‘fabric’ of the city.
This unrealisable artwork is a Malevich-Reinhardt black square laid over the living city. But the black is laden with local colour: Bible black and the minister’s gown, Blind Pew’s black spot, the power cuts of our childhood and the black of extinguished political hopes. Where it once read as potential social breakdown, now it suggests the rewilded romance of dark skies – the better to see the stars against. Gordon’s masterpiece of the era in which Scotland’s parliamentary void was contested is fitting, because the work seems not to exist.
ALEC FINLAY ‘A YEAR OR MORE OF DARKNESS, A FEW HUNDRED YEARS WITHOUT DAY’, AFTERALL 45, SPRING/SUMMER 2018
