ARTISTS TALKING

Douglas Gordon is a very, very difficult man to track down. But with a retrospective coming up at the Hayward Gallery I persisted and finally traced him to his 'studio' in New York – in fact his baby's bedroom – and found that, for a man so elusive, Gordon has retained an admirable grasp of his roots in Glasgow and an enduring memory of his years struggling to make it happen.

Born in Glasgow in 1966, he first trained at the city's School of Art. Following that, he went to the Slade with the intention of studying performance under Stuart Brisley, Bruce MacLean and Susan Hiller; not an easy decision for a Glaswegian to take. "When I finished my undergraduate degree here, it was almost like a moral ethical problem to decide whether to go to London or not – It was considered a sell-out to go there. None of my peers went; they would go to Belfast or stay in Glasgow."

But when Gordon arrived at the Slade in 1988, he felt, in some sense, that he had come to the "wrong place at the wrong time" – this was the period when Goldsmith's star was in the ascendant. Moreover, as soon as he arrived, he gave up performance. "I just stopped because the climate in London didn't seem to be interested enough in that kind of thing. So I put myself in the darkroom and learnt how to print a photograph. I went to the cinema, to the British Library and I actually got threatened with expulsion for not turning up enough."

If those two years were mixed, the next two were more fruitful. He returned to Glasgow and took up a position on the committee of Transmission Gallery. "Getting involved with Transmission was probably more important than doing a postgraduate degree," he says, "I think a lot of artists coming out of art school don't really understand what it's like to be on the other side of the fence. You see, Transmission was very egalitarian, you would never organise yourself a solo show, so you spent time mopping floors, painting walls and doing the administration, applying for grants and so on."

Things started to take off for Gordon when he was included in the Barclays' Young Artist Award in 1991. His wall piece, Above all else, emblazoned the words 'We are evil' on the cupola of the Serpentine. Then in 1993 he had his first solo exhibition at Transmission Gallery, and showed 24 hour Psycho. On the strength of these shows, Lisson Gallery awarded Gordon a solo exhibition in London in 1994.

Not long after, in 1996, he won the Turner Prize, but far from exulting in his triumph, Gordon was soon looking forward to escaping on the DAAD-Stipendium, awarded to him in 1997. "I won the Turner Prize with the knowledge that I was going to get this DAAD thing and could get out of the country," he says. "It felt a wee bit hostile, to be frank. A lot of people felt it was Gary Hume's year. It's all ancient history now, but at the time it was just nice not to be in the UK."

Gordon's escape to Germany also proved very beneficial for his work. "I went to Hanover for six months and then Berlin for six. My German wasn't that good, but the fact of not having immediate access to everything, the estrangement, was fantastic. I had been working a lot with text, so I think it made me more aware of the differences of inflexion in language."

For all the acclaim and awards Gordon has won throughout his career, contrary to what one might expect, success and financial security haven't led him to produce a great deal more work. He says he made more as a student and doesn't exhibit as frequently as he used to. However, one shouldn't take the fact that his New York studio has been converted into his baby's bedroom as a sign of idleness; Gordon's background never infused him with any zest for getting into the studio. "Most of us in Glasgow would only make work when there was something to be made... when you had something to make it for. It was something that came out of the Environmental Art Department, I suppose. There wasn't this idea of going into the studio and mulling things over and waiting for divine inspiration... If people stopped asking me to have shows, I don't know how much work I would make."

Studio practice for him is something more – how shall we put it – contemplative. "I spend the day watching a lot of television, going to the cinema, and reading books. Some of that is directly to do with research, but the other reason is that, as I've always said, great film, TV, books, are all really an alibi to be able to use time doing what you're not supposed to be doing."

And if that isn't the fruit of success, I don't know what is.

UPDATE 2006:
Douglas Gordon’s work was included in the Tate Triennial 2006, and recent solo exhibitions include ‘What you want me to say... I am already dead’, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Spain and ‘Douglas Gordon: Timeline’, Museum of Modern Art, New York; USA. He lives in Glasgow and New York and is represented by Gagosian Gallery.