Chapter 12 Douglas Gordon and Cory Arcangel Breaking the toy 1 Robert Burgoyne Christian Metz writes that cinephilia represents, in part, the impulse to preserve and protect the good object, to save it from obliteration — not the film itself, the celluloid, nor the institution, but rather the social memory embodied in the cinema- object. Two well-known art installations, The Five Year Drive-By (1995) by Douglas Gordon and Super Mario Clouds (2003) by Cory Arcangel, would seem to make this point explicitly. In both, the impulse to save and protect — the desire to retain the affective inflections of the past — is linked to the artists’ childhoods, and thematised in the texts that provide the artists with their source material — The Searchers (1956) by John Ford and the video game, Super Mario Brothers — both of which have plots that revolve around rescue. The two installations can be read as a way of maintaining these objects in what Metz calls an ‘imaginary enclosure of pure love’ (1986: 13). The Five Year Drive-By, a five-year-long projection of The Searchers on a drive-in-size movie screen installed, among other places, in the California desert, draws from the artist’s memory of the film’s powerful effect when he first saw it as a boy. By slowing it down to the point that each frame is held for 45 minutes, it becomes a kind of Deleuzian time-image, a work that is centrally concerned with duration, the passing and arresting of time and self, the near-capture of a moment that is ‘frozen in time’. It also suggests the disappearing social memory of the western, a genre that is increasingly fading from cultural memory. The installation in effect amplifies the theme and the plot of the film, which is centred on loss, memory and the ‘saving’ of a memory of the past. Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds seems to draw from a different cultural encyclopaedia, but the sense of affect surrounding the work is similar. Isolating the moving cloudscape that serves as background to the early video game Super Mario Brothers, the artist eliminates the buildings, barriers and the figure of Mario himself to concentrate simply on the clouds drifting by in a serene blue sky. Projected on a large screen in a museum space, the installation suggests the earliest moments of video game culture, the primal scene of an emergent technology linked to the generational memory of the artist. Stripped of the linear forward momentum of the game, the screen becomes an image of transience, of fleeting impermanence, a loop centred on memory, duration and loss. Like The Searchers, Embodied Encounters.indb 159 Embodied Encounters.indb 159 6/24/2014 8:53:36 AM 6/24/2014 8:53:36 AM