The installation projects a silent version Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho , slowed down so that its runtime is exactly twenty-four hours. What seems to enrapture the nameless man is the distortion that Gordon has introduced into Hitchcock's film: "He approached the screen and stood about a foot away, seeing snatches and staticky fragments, flurries of trembling light.
The more he stares, the more the man becomes convinced that the film's distorted quality, its being stretched out to the point of breaking down, brings him closer to some primal source of authenticity: "For this film, in this cold dark space, it was completely necessary, black-and-white, one more neutralizing element, a way in which the action becomes something near to elemental life, a thing receding into its drugged parts.
Stripped of sound and narrative cohesion — and already having the benefit of being stripped of color — the film apparently leaves us, finally, with pure, glitchy, staticky things "receding into [their] drugged parts. Isn't there something familiar about all of this? For a certain strain of literary and artistic production, isn't the gritty thing — the dirty or damaged thing, the thing that's falling apart — the paradigm case of the real thing?
It's not a coincidence that Bill Brown's field-defining essay on "Thing Theory" begins with the scene from A. Byatt's The Biographer's Tale where a disaffected graduate student is lured away from a seminar on deconstruction by a "real, very dirty window, shutting out the sun. A thing. Thanks to dirt and damage, what at first seems like a case of failed mediation — a window obscuring the sun; a film collapsing in on itself — becomes an occasion for direct contact with something deeply real.
Indeed, for what we could call the metaphysics of grit that underpins these works, either the idea of mediation is beside the point, or it is the enemy.
