How the West Slows Down

If you plan to watch The Searchers with Douglas Gordon, you'll want to clear your calendar: in 1995, the Scottish artist proposed an installation version of John Ford's famous Western that he hoped to realize as a site-specific screening of the film temporally stretched out and distended so that its running time would coincide with the duration of the events it narrates (Figure 1). As Gordon writes in the original proposal for his "5-year drive-by," which he presented at the Biennale de Lyon in 1995, "the narrative here is pretty straightforward":

John Wayne returns home from the Civil War, eventually, and rolls back to his brother and kin like a bad penny. It's all going swell until the Injun's turn up and do the dirty; killing the menfolks, raping the women, and stealing one of the kids to take back to their camp. Of course, all the pillage and plunder is taking place while John Wayne has conveniently disappeared from the storyline for a few moments to allow the Commanche to finish off what they started and disappear with the stolen child (Wayne's niece.)

So what's to be done; well, old Uncle Ethan (Wayne's character) simply embarks on an epic search for the missing child.

This is the essence of the story; nothing less, and nothing more.

The search lasts five long years.¹

Gordon's hokey racist language is supposed to get across just how preposterous he finds The Searcher's plot, which works with archetypes and mythologies so broad and predetermined that it is hard to see them still at work in 1956 or after. "The story seemed too simple," notes Gordon in the proposal, but as with many of the "endless westerns" he remembers watching as a child of six or seven, it "made a big impression" on him—"in retrospect," he adds, invoking yet another way that The Searchers and its genre have managed, against the ravages of cinematic history, to endure.² For Gordon, the problem of The Searchers is "quite simply a question of time," and the impossibility of "anyone even [trying] to sum up 5 miserable years in only 113 minutes."³ Gordon says that he will "[reconstitute] the narrative, as it were" by effectively undoing the compression of information that makes for narrative itself.⁴ "This need not be so difficult, on a technical level," he adds, and then he runs the numbers as if to show that his own thinking is hardly more self-conscious than the movie's own.⁵ Thus 113 minutes of "cinema time" equals "5 years in real time," or "5 x 365 [days] + 1 [day for a leap year]"; these 1,826 days equal 43,824 hours and so on until he has 2,629,440 minutes in "real time" from which he then works backwards to discover that his version of The Searchers will need to render just under six and a half hours of its "fabula," to borrow a term from Russian formalism, per second of the film's original duration.⁶ And there is no "story" at one frame per 1,015 seconds.

Figure 1.

Douglas Gordon, "5-Year Drive-By," 1995. © Studio lost but found / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2018.

Gordon's "5-year drive-by" was conceived as something of a sequel to what remains his most visible and crucial work, 24-hour Psycho, the time-dilated screening of Hitchcock's masterpiece that helped make Gordon prominent enough to win the Turner Prize in 1996, and then go on to represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1997. For all his stature in the world of contemporary art, however, Gordon has yet to mount a full-scale installation of "5-year drive-by." Perhaps, as he concludes in his original proposal—in the deadpan that is de rigeur for a conceptual artist's prose—he is "still working on it."⁷ But since I am going to be perversely fast-and-loose in much of what will follow...