Surreal, pacy and fun: Christian Marclay’s Doors, at White Cube, reviewed

Sliding doors may change your life, but there’s no mystery in their transparency. A hinged wooden door is another matter; you’re never quite sure what’s behind it.

Christian Marclay has a thing about doors; not an obsession, he insists, just a general interest ‘in things we don’t pay much attention to’. For the British launch of his new video montage ‘Doors’ he has filled the ground-floor gallery of White Cube Mason’s Yard with doors picked out of London skips, sawn up and reassembled into what could be taken for minimalist sculptures if the knobs, knockers, locks and hinges weren’t still attached: ‘I don’t want to mess about with their “doorness”,’ he explains. A solid wooden Victorian door is carved into a cross, while modern veneered doors are chopped and stacked in blocks, exposing their filling. ‘In cutting you discover what’s inside the door,’ he says.

In the film downstairs you discover what’s behind it, or you would if Marclay hadn’t messed around with its ‘filmness’.