On 1st November, Newsnight Review discussed Douglas Gordon's first major solo show at the Hayward Gallery.

The former Turner Prize winner is famous for making the film Psycho a 24-hour experience.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

Watch the whole programme - 01 November 2002

KIRSTY WARK:
Germaine, when you walked through it, were you intrigued?

GERMAINE GREER:
I thought it was an amazing exhibition. Wonderful in many ways. But I hated it. That's neither here nor there, because the important thing is not whether you like it or not but whether it gets to you. It got to me in all kinds of ways.

First of all, you enter this chambered black space, where half the time you are groping. I was really interested to see how many people clung to the stairs! We kept sort of making for the stairs as a piece of hard masonry and then back into the darkness.

I was fascinated by things like the fetishisation of bits of the body. I realised that as the owner of a body you only understand it in bits. You don't know what it's like as a whole thing.

The three inches, that room full of painted black fingers with the nails showing almost like the glans penis peeping through a foreskin. So strange and so pornographic in a way, without being erotic.

The extraordinary moments of passage, like the dying of the fly. And the fly trying to right itself. And on the other side, a man, who was apparently hysterically paralysed, who can't get to his feet in a piece of video. It was like being inside the mind of someone, looking at his movie that runs all the time in his head.

It's all over the place. All kind of things come up out of sequence, but it just wasn't my head. I am claustrophobic, so by the time I got to the room with light rods in, I was really dizzy. There were so many things that were really hard to handle.

KIRSTY WARK:
Mark, as the acknowledged expert on the Exorcist, how did you feel about the juxtaposition of the Exorcist and the Song of Bernadette.

MARK KERMODE:
This is the closest I have come to attacking a screen in a long time. I thought the pairing of the Exorcist with the Song of Bernadette was infantile, puerile, showed a complete contempt and total ignorance of the film.

He took a text which he imagines to be one-dimensional, a portrait of evil, and showed you the Song of Bernadette, which is a syrupy, fluffy film. You will notice that within the Exorcist there are elements of good. This is completely moronic.

The Exorcist is famous for the fact it's a divided film, it's a film at war with itself. It's a film written by a Catholic, directed by an agnostic Jew which is constantly tearing between religious symbolism and blasphemy. Between transcendence and the stench of human - it does not need to have the Song of Bernadette projected over it. I thought it was offensive.

KIRSTY WARK:
Tom, it's random in the sense one film is shorter than the other, so each time it plays it's out of sequence with the other, if you see it twice. The juxtaposition seems uncanny?

TOM PAULIN:
I thought that this was somebody saying, "Here is the background I have got. Calvinism and Catholicism. Oh, yes." The boredom of James Hog's Confessions of a Justified Sinner, a fine enough novel, famous because it's almost the only novel before you get to William Golding that tries to portray evil.

KIRSTY WARK:
And it does.

TOM PAULIN:
Yes, but tedious, I have to say, Scottish Calvinist narcissism. I am not interested in the bits and pieces that make up this man's attempt at imagination. It's self-regarding. It's pathetic. Even as a bloody book you have to get a paper knife too.

MARK KERMODE:
It relies on ignorance.

TOM PAULIN:
I totally agree with you. It's an ignoramus. It's post-modern antiquarianism of the most trivial sort.

GERMAINE GREER:
One of the aspects of the way Gordon works is that he is actually attacking, or tacitly attacking, a kind of art that makes real things happen, so he can have artefacts as fall-outs.

It's much more about art than about life. I fell for it in a way. By the way, the whole point about the Song of Bernadette and the Exorcist is that they are the same film.

MARK KERMODE:
They are not the same film!

GERMAINE GREER:
There are both about possessed women.

KIRSTY WARK:
I have to stop you both there.