Stan Douglas
Encyclopedia
Stan Douglas is an artist
based in Vancouver
, British Columbia
. He has exhibited internationally, including Documenta IX
, 1992, Documenta X, 1997, Documenta XI, 2002 and the Venice Biennale
in 1990, 2001 and 2005. Douglas' film and video installations, photography and work in television frequently touch on the history of literature, cinema and music, while examining the "failed utopia
" of modernism
and obsolete
technologies. Art collector Friedrich Christian Flick, in the foreword to the Stan Douglas monograph
, describes Douglas as "a critical analysis of our social reality. Samuel Beckett
and Marcel Proust
, E.T.A. Hoffmann
and the Brothers Grimm, blues and free jazz
, television and Hollywood, Karl Marx
and Sigmund Freud
haunt the uncanny montages of the Canadian artist."
, the 1995 Whitney Biennial
, the 1997 Skulptur Projekte Münster
and Documenta X
in Kassel
. In 2007, Douglas was the recipient of the inaugural Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award, a $25,000 prize for excellence in Canadian visual arts presented by Gerda Hnatyshyn
president and chair of the board of The Hnatyshyn Foundation. In 2008 he was awarded the Bell Award in Video Art. Douglas is represented by David Zwirner
, New York and Victoria Miro Gallery, London.
Douglas' work reflects the technical and social aspects of mass media
, and since the late 1980s has been influenced by the work of Samuel Beckett
. Also of concern is both modernism
as a theoretical concept and modernity
as it has affected North American urbanism since World War II. In using what art historian Hal Foster
describes as the "outmoded
genre" of cinema, Douglas' interest in "failed utopias and obsolete technologies" allows for the creation of a "new medium out of the remnants of old forms." Douglas' preoccupation with failed utopias and the obsolete is not about a redemption of "these past events, but [a way] to reconsider them: to understand why these utopian moments did not fulfill themselves, what larger forces kept a local moment a minor moment: and what was valuable there — what might still be useful today."
and cultural invisibility. For Coulthard, the lack of mention of race in works that feature only white performers troubles any racial reading of Douglas' work.
In a great deal of Douglas' works, class rather than race is the key element. Having grown up in a largely white middle-class neighbourhood in Vancouver, race was only an issue of invisibility rather than civil rights for Douglas.
and jazz
. In particular, Douglas points to the cultural prejudices which associate the "primitive"
with black music, while the European musical tradition is positioned as "high culture
". This binary between primitive and civilized is further complicated when considering jazz and its position as both "race music" but also highly cultured and in particular the European embracing of jazz as high art
.
An early work, Deux Devises (1983), presents a projection of text, the lyrics of 19th century composer Charles Gounod's
song "O ma belle, ma rebelle." A recording of Robert Johnson's "Preaching Blues" is played, with accompanying images of Douglas phonetically mouthing the words to the song, out of sync
with the recording. The pairing of the safe salon
music of Gounod, and the raw sounds of Johnson, points to the typical prejudice which validates and promotes the supposed seriousness of European music. Where Johnson's words are anguished, Gounod's are safe and comfortable.
Douglas' use of jazz is a more direct response to complex attitudes towards African-American music. Exhibited for the first time at documenta 9
in 1992, Hors-champs (meaning "off-screen") is a video installation that addresses the political context of free jazz
in the 1960s, as an extension of black consciousness and is one of his few works to directly address race.
Four American musicians, George Lewis
(trombone), Douglas Ewart
(saxophone), Kent Carter (bass) and Oliver Johnson (drums) who lived in France during the free jazz
period in the 1960s, improvise Albert Ayler's
1965 composition "Spirits Rejoice.". Free jazz often found a larger audience in Europe and was associated with politics and in particular in France where it was utilized by the French Communist Party
during May 1968.
The music is in four parts, a gospel melody, an attenuated call and response
, a heraldic fanfare
and "La Marseillaise
." Shot in the style of 1960s French television program and using period technology, the work is projected onto a screen, verso and recto
. On one side is the "broadcast" version, a montage taken from two cameras, what would be chosen to be transmitted to the home audience. The other side shows the raw footage, the images not meant for public viewing, what was edited out. The two sides of the screen present a complete document of the performance, one in which the viewer must negotiate, depicting the "authorized" version but also the conditions of its production. What is being emphasized is a contrast between the banality of television and the radical programming that was featured at the time.
.
Douglas has reworked films such as Alfred Hitchcock's
Marnie
(1964), Dario Argento
's Suspiria (1977) and Orson Welles
's Journey into Fear
(1943) exploring "the parameters, functions and limits of cinematic adaptation." His works reference the originals but also distance the newer works through manipulation of the texts, often employing loops and editing techniques to "defamiliarize
" the originals
Subject to a Film: Marnie is a re-creation of the robbery scene from Hitchcock's 1964 film. In his 1995 Art in America
review Tom Eccles describes the work as "creating the effect of a recurring nightmare" as the titular character, rather than escaping is "caught in the film loop, forever trapped within the confines of the office." Douglas updates the office
Inconsolable Memories (2005) is based on Tomas Gutierrez Alea
's film Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment)
from 1968, updated to include references to the Mariel boatlift
of 1980. Douglas's installation consists of a 16mm project with a photographic series of contemporary Havana
, Cuba
. The film is looped and when presented as an installation the film and photographs create a sense of repetition, a common feature of Douglas' work. Rather than strictly working from Alea's film in the manner Douglas worked from Hitchock's Marnie, Inconsolable Memories plays with the layers of its various sources (Cuba in the 1960s, the 1980s and the present). Some of the photographs reference the locations used in the original Alea film tying together the themes of history and memory. At issue is the utopian promise of the Cuban revolution
and its decline, and as well, the parallel Cold War
events of the Cuban Missile Crisis
of 1962 (examined in Alea's film) and the boatlift of 1980.
. In 1988 he curated Samuel Beckett: Teleplays, eight Beckett works for film and television. In 1991, Douglas produced Monodramas a series of short videos for television broadcasting, based on his studies of Beckett's teleplays. Developed for television, these 30- to 60-second video works were broadcast nightly in British Columbia in 1992 for three weeks. The short narratives "mimic television’s editing techniques" and when the videos were aired during the regular commercial breaks, viewers called the station to ask what was being sold. Douglas' first project for television, Television Spots (1987–88) consisted of twelve were broadcast in Saskatoon
and Ottawa
during regular progamming and featured short, banal scenes in open-ended narratives. An early video work, Mime (the second part of Deux Devises, 1983) consisted of a close-up of Douglas' mouth in the shape of phonemes, which are then edited to sync up with the song "Preachin' Blues" by Robert Johnson. Douglas was not aware of Beckett's own work Not I
, a disembodied mouth in a black screen. In a lecture given at YYZ Artists' Outlet
in Toronto, Douglas commented that the choice of a blues song was
Douglas began to study Beckett's works and his next video work Panoramic Rotunda (1985) came from misremembering a line from Beckett's FIzzle No. 7
. The repetition and seemingly endless loops of the same narrative in Win, Place or Show recalls Beckett's use of repetition to point to but also undermine the "sameness" of reality. The absurdity of the forever repeating narrative, of the two protagonists in an endless loop, always the same words but from different points of reference is an allusion to Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot
.
A la recherche de temps perdu. For writer Peter Culley, writing about two of Douglas' works in 1986,
In Onomatopoeia (1985–1986), a screen hangs over spot-lit upright player piano. The piano plays bars from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32, Opus 111
. Triggered by punctuations on the piano scroll, images of an empty textile factory are projected above the piano. The perforated scrolls that were used to programme weaving into fabric patterns, echo the player piano scrolls. The images are of a textile mill near the artist's home and specifically that section of the mill employing the punch cards that determine the different patterns of weave design. The punch cards are part of the same type of technology as the player piano, which to Culley "sets up a simultaneity of subject which the work immediately begins to subvert; image and music constantly move in and out of precise synchronization, keeping the audience at a constant level of anxious anticipation."
Douglas’s Monodramas are ten 30- to 60-second videos from 1991, conceived as interventions into commercial television, broadcast nightly in British Columbia for three weeks in 1992. These short narratives, set in bleak suburban locations, mimic television’s editing techniques, with plots dealing often mundane situations and with a slight twist at the end. The segment "I'm Not Gary" is set in a nondescript industrial strip. A white man passes a second man who is black, calling out to him "Gary?" and is visibly irritated at not being acknowledged. Finally, the second man turns to him, replying, "I'm not Gary." For writer Lisa Coulthard, race is the interpretive framework, because for the white man in the video, "his interlocutor is simply a black man, interchangeable with any other for example and clearly interchangeable with Gary."
1919 essay "The Uncanny", consists of a double projection where the film is literally split down the middle and reassembled so the two sides are slightly out of sync. This creates a "temporal gap", disrupting the sense of unity so crucial to modernism, so that "everything is deferred and delayed."
Douglas' 1998 installation Win, Place or Show is shot in the style of the late-1960s CBC
drama The Client, noted for its gritty style, long takes and lack of establishing shots. Set in 1950s Vancouver in the Strathcona redevelopment, the installation explores the modernist notion of urban renewal with the demolition of existing architecture in favour of grids of apartment blocks. Two men share a dormitory room on a rainy day off from their blue-collar jobs. The conversation flares up during a discussion of the day's horse races and the 6 minute filmed loop is repeated from different angles on a split screen, each cycle presenting ever-changing configurations of point-of-view. The takes are edited together in real time by a computer during the exhibition, generating an almost endless series of montages.
Douglas' use of photography has a different purpose than others in the Vancouver School. He works with not just photography and video, but film and television as well and his photography often addresses the history of the location of one of his installations and as well, the creation of those installations themselves. Installations such as Win, Place or Show are often complemented by large-scale photographs taken of the film set, showing behind-the-scenes. Douglas' works, as installations,
Writer Lisa Coulthard discusses Douglas' concern for this collapsing of boundaries in the essay "Uncanny Memories: Stan Douglas, Subjectivity and Cinema" stating that "although predominantly approached within the purview of fine arts, Douglas's work invites interrogation from film studies insofar as it not only utilizes the medium but also actively modifies and references the canonical texts, orientations and histories of cinema."
Recently, Douglas has moved to photographic works which do not depict the history of the site of the narrative in an installation but rather are used as a contrast to a different work. His photographic series Every Building on 100 West Hastings from 2001 is a depiction of a stretch of a run-down section of Vancouver that is about to be gentrified. The photographs accompanied the installation Journey into Fear (also 2001), which is based on Norman Foster's
1942 war-time thriller of the same name
and its remake
, shot in Vancouver in 1975 and directed by Daniel Mann
. Douglas compares the events of World War II with the oil crisis
of 1973.
In 2009 Douglas completed Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971, a 30 by 50 foot photographic mural depicting the Vancouver Gastown Riots
of 1971, which is the central focus within the atrium of the Woodward's building
redevelopment in Vancouver designed by architect Gregory Henriquez
.
Douglas' reading of Gilles Deleuze's
essay "Humour, Irony and the Law" about the arbitrary nature of law and law enforcement influenced Douglas to reconstruct "forgotten incidents of social confrontation between local Vancouver police and members of the public at various times throughout the last century."
Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971 depicts an event in which the police
Artist
An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...
based in Vancouver
Vancouver
Vancouver is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. It is the hub of Greater Vancouver, which, with over 2.3 million residents, is the third most populous metropolitan area in the country,...
, British Columbia
British Columbia
British Columbia is the westernmost of Canada's provinces and is known for its natural beauty, as reflected in its Latin motto, Splendor sine occasu . Its name was chosen by Queen Victoria in 1858...
. He has exhibited internationally, including Documenta IX
Documenta
documenta is an exhibition of modern and contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. It was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau which took place in Kassel at that time...
, 1992, Documenta X, 1997, Documenta XI, 2002 and the Venice Biennale
Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...
in 1990, 2001 and 2005. Douglas' film and video installations, photography and work in television frequently touch on the history of literature, cinema and music, while examining the "failed utopia
Utopia
Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...
" of modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
and obsolete
Obsolescence
Obsolescence is the state of being which occurs when an object, service or practice is no longer wanted even though it may still be in good working order. Obsolescence frequently occurs because a replacement has become available that is superior in one or more aspects. Obsolete refers to something...
technologies. Art collector Friedrich Christian Flick, in the foreword to the Stan Douglas monograph
Monograph
A monograph is a work of writing upon a single subject, usually by a single author.It is often a scholarly essay or learned treatise, and may be released in the manner of a book or journal article. It is by definition a single document that forms a complete text in itself...
, describes Douglas as "a critical analysis of our social reality. Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
and Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
, E.T.A. Hoffmann
E.T.A. Hoffmann
Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann , better known by his pen name E.T.A. Hoffmann , was a German Romantic author of fantasy and horror, a jurist, composer, music critic, draftsman and caricaturist...
and the Brothers Grimm, blues and free jazz
Free jazz
Free jazz is an approach to jazz music that was first developed in the 1950s and 1960s. Though the music produced by free jazz pioneers varied widely, the common feature was a dissatisfaction with the limitations of bebop, hard bop, and modal jazz, which had developed in the 1940s and 1950s...
, television and Hollywood, Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
and Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
haunt the uncanny montages of the Canadian artist."
Background
Stan Douglas was born in 1960 in Vancouver, where he currently lives and works. Educated at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, Douglas has exhibited widely since his first solo show in 1981. Among numerous group exhibitions, Douglas was included in the 1995 Carnegie InternationalCarnegie International
The Carnegie International is the oldest North American exhibition of contemporary art from around the globe. It was first organized at the behest of industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie on November 5, 1896 in Pittsburgh. Carnegie established the International to educate and inspire the...
, the 1995 Whitney Biennial
Whitney Biennial
The Whitney Biennial is a biennale exhibition of contemporary American art, typically by young and lesser known artists, on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, USA. The event began as an annual exhibition in 1932, the first biennial was in 1973...
, the 1997 Skulptur Projekte Münster
Skulptur Projekte Münster
Skulptur Projekte Münster is an exhibition of sculptures in public places in the town of Münster...
and Documenta X
Documenta
documenta is an exhibition of modern and contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. It was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau which took place in Kassel at that time...
in Kassel
Kassel
Kassel is a town located on the Fulda River in northern Hesse, Germany. It is the administrative seat of the Kassel Regierungsbezirk and the Kreis of the same name and has approximately 195,000 inhabitants.- History :...
. In 2007, Douglas was the recipient of the inaugural Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award, a $25,000 prize for excellence in Canadian visual arts presented by Gerda Hnatyshyn
Gerda Hnatyshyn
Karen Gerda Hnatyshyn, CC was the wife of Ray Hnatyshyn, Governor General of Canada from 1990 to 1995, and served as viceregal consort during Ray Hnatyshyn's term of office....
president and chair of the board of The Hnatyshyn Foundation. In 2008 he was awarded the Bell Award in Video Art. Douglas is represented by David Zwirner
David Zwirner
David Zwirner is a gallerist and art dealer and owner of the David Zwirner Gallery in New York City. In 2010 Zwirner was listed at number four in the ArtReview annual "Power 100" list.-Early Life:...
, New York and Victoria Miro Gallery, London.
Modernism
Mass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
, and since the late 1980s has been influenced by the work of Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
. Also of concern is both modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
as a theoretical concept and modernity
Modernity
Modernity typically refers to a post-traditional, post-medieval historical period, one marked by the move from feudalism toward capitalism, industrialization, secularization, rationalization, the nation-state and its constituent institutions and forms of surveillance...
as it has affected North American urbanism since World War II. In using what art historian Hal Foster
Hal Foster (art critic)
Harold Foss "Hal" Foster is an American art critic and historian. He was educated at Princeton University, Columbia University, and the City University of New York. He taught at Cornell University from 1991 to 1997 and has been on the faculty at Princeton since 1997...
describes as the "outmoded
Obsolescence
Obsolescence is the state of being which occurs when an object, service or practice is no longer wanted even though it may still be in good working order. Obsolescence frequently occurs because a replacement has become available that is superior in one or more aspects. Obsolete refers to something...
genre" of cinema, Douglas' interest in "failed utopias and obsolete technologies" allows for the creation of a "new medium out of the remnants of old forms." Douglas' preoccupation with failed utopias and the obsolete is not about a redemption of "these past events, but [a way] to reconsider them: to understand why these utopian moments did not fulfill themselves, what larger forces kept a local moment a minor moment: and what was valuable there — what might still be useful today."
Politics and race
Douglas' work only touches on race directly in a few instances, such as the short video I'm Not Gary (1991). This interpretation of race is important, as the brief narrative involves a white man mistaking a black man for a different black man named Gary, for writer Lisa Coulthard, this is part of a larger investigation of racism as part of imperialismImperialism
Imperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...
and cultural invisibility. For Coulthard, the lack of mention of race in works that feature only white performers troubles any racial reading of Douglas' work.
In a great deal of Douglas' works, class rather than race is the key element. Having grown up in a largely white middle-class neighbourhood in Vancouver, race was only an issue of invisibility rather than civil rights for Douglas.
Jazz and blues
Although race as a theme is often not a central or obvious concern of Douglas, his own identity as a Black-Canadian is often addressed through his use of music and in particular, musical idioms associated with African-American culture, such as bluesBlues
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads...
and jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
. In particular, Douglas points to the cultural prejudices which associate the "primitive"
Primitive culture
In older anthropology texts and discussions, the term "primitive culture" is used to refer to a society that is believed to lack cultural, technological, or economic sophistication/development...
with black music, while the European musical tradition is positioned as "high culture
High culture
High culture is a term, now used in a number of different ways in academic discourse, whose most common meaning is the set of cultural products, mainly in the arts, held in the highest esteem by a culture...
". This binary between primitive and civilized is further complicated when considering jazz and its position as both "race music" but also highly cultured and in particular the European embracing of jazz as high art
High art
High art may refer to:*High Art, a 1998 feature film*Fine art...
.
An early work, Deux Devises (1983), presents a projection of text, the lyrics of 19th century composer Charles Gounod's
Charles Gounod
Charles-François Gounod was a French composer, known for his Ave Maria as well as his operas Faust and Roméo et Juliette.-Biography:...
song "O ma belle, ma rebelle." A recording of Robert Johnson's "Preaching Blues" is played, with accompanying images of Douglas phonetically mouthing the words to the song, out of sync
Synchronization
Synchronization is timekeeping which requires the coordination of events to operate a system in unison. The familiar conductor of an orchestra serves to keep the orchestra in time....
with the recording. The pairing of the safe salon
Salon (gathering)
A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to...
music of Gounod, and the raw sounds of Johnson, points to the typical prejudice which validates and promotes the supposed seriousness of European music. Where Johnson's words are anguished, Gounod's are safe and comfortable.
Douglas' use of jazz is a more direct response to complex attitudes towards African-American music. Exhibited for the first time at documenta 9
Documenta
documenta is an exhibition of modern and contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. It was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau which took place in Kassel at that time...
in 1992, Hors-champs (meaning "off-screen") is a video installation that addresses the political context of free jazz
Free jazz
Free jazz is an approach to jazz music that was first developed in the 1950s and 1960s. Though the music produced by free jazz pioneers varied widely, the common feature was a dissatisfaction with the limitations of bebop, hard bop, and modal jazz, which had developed in the 1940s and 1950s...
in the 1960s, as an extension of black consciousness and is one of his few works to directly address race.
Four American musicians, George Lewis
George Lewis (trombonist)
George E. Lewis is a trombone player, composer, and scholar in the fields of jazz and experimental music. He has been a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians since 1971, and is a pioneer of computer music.- Biography :Lewis graduated from Yale University with a...
(trombone), Douglas Ewart
Douglas Ewart
Douglas R. Ewart is a multi-instrumentalist and instrument builder. He plays sopranino and alto saxophones, clarinets, bassoon, flute, bamboo flutes , and didgeridoo; as well as Rastafarian hand drums .Ewart emigrated to the United States in June 1963 and became...
(saxophone), Kent Carter (bass) and Oliver Johnson (drums) who lived in France during the free jazz
Free jazz
Free jazz is an approach to jazz music that was first developed in the 1950s and 1960s. Though the music produced by free jazz pioneers varied widely, the common feature was a dissatisfaction with the limitations of bebop, hard bop, and modal jazz, which had developed in the 1940s and 1950s...
period in the 1960s, improvise Albert Ayler's
Albert Ayler
Albert Ayler was an American avant-garde jazz saxophonist, singer and composer.Ayler was among the most primal of the free jazz musicians of the 1960s; critic John Litweiler wrote that "never before or since has there been such naked aggression in jazz" He possessed a deep blistering tone—achieved...
1965 composition "Spirits Rejoice.". Free jazz often found a larger audience in Europe and was associated with politics and in particular in France where it was utilized by the French Communist Party
French Communist Party
The French Communist Party is a political party in France which advocates the principles of communism.Although its electoral support has declined in recent decades, the PCF retains a large membership, behind only that of the Union for a Popular Movement , and considerable influence in French...
during May 1968.
The music is in four parts, a gospel melody, an attenuated call and response
Call and response (music)
In music, a call and response is a succession of two distinct phrases usually played by different musicians, where the second phrase is heard as a direct commentary on or response to the first...
, a heraldic fanfare
Fanfare
A Fanfare is a relatively short piece of music that is typically played by trumpets and other brass instruments often accompanied by percussion...
and "La Marseillaise
La Marseillaise
"La Marseillaise" is the national anthem of France. The song, originally titled "Chant de guerre pour l'Armée du Rhin" was written and composed by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle in 1792. The French National Convention adopted it as the Republic's anthem in 1795...
." Shot in the style of 1960s French television program and using period technology, the work is projected onto a screen, verso and recto
Recto
The recto and verso are respectively the "front" and "back" sides of a leaf of paper in a bound item such as a codex, book, broadsheet, or pamphlet. In languages written from left to right the recto is the right-hand page and the verso the left-hand page...
. On one side is the "broadcast" version, a montage taken from two cameras, what would be chosen to be transmitted to the home audience. The other side shows the raw footage, the images not meant for public viewing, what was edited out. The two sides of the screen present a complete document of the performance, one in which the viewer must negotiate, depicting the "authorized" version but also the conditions of its production. What is being emphasized is a contrast between the banality of television and the radical programming that was featured at the time.
Cinema
As a Vancouver artist getting his start in the 1980s and using lens-based media, Douglas is often associated with the Vancouver School of photoconceptualism. His use of video and film, in addition to photography, as well as his specific interests in cinematic history, forms and spatial concerns set him apart from peers such as Jeff WallJeff Wall
Jeffrey "Jeff" Wall, OC, RSA is a Canadian artist best known for his large-scale back-lit cibachrome photographs and art-historical writing. Wall has been a key figure in Vancouver's art scene since the early-1970s...
.
Douglas has reworked films such as Alfred Hitchcock's
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE was a British film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood...
Marnie
Marnie (film)
Marnie is a 1964 psychological thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock and based on the novel of the same name by Winston Graham. The film stars Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery. The original film score was composed by Bernard Herrmann.-Plot:...
(1964), Dario Argento
Dario Argento
Dario Argento is an Italian film director, producer and screenwriter. He is best known for his work in the horror film genre, particularly in the subgenre known as giallo, and for his influence on modern horror and slasher movies....
's Suspiria (1977) and Orson Welles
Orson Welles
George Orson Welles , best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television and radio...
's Journey into Fear
Journey into Fear (1943 film)
Journey into Fear is an American spy film based on the Eric Ambler novel of the same name. The 1943 film broadly follows the plot of the book, but the protagonist was changed to an American engineer....
(1943) exploring "the parameters, functions and limits of cinematic adaptation." His works reference the originals but also distance the newer works through manipulation of the texts, often employing loops and editing techniques to "defamiliarize
Defamiliarization
Defamiliarization or ostranenie is the artistic technique of forcing the audience to see common things in an unfamiliar or strange way, in order to enhance perception of the familiar...
" the originals
Subject to a Film: Marnie is a re-creation of the robbery scene from Hitchcock's 1964 film. In his 1995 Art in America
Art in America
Art in America is an illustrated monthly, international magazine concentrating on the contemporary art world, including profiles of artists and genres, updates about art movements, show reviews and event schedules. It is designed for collectors, artists, dealers, art professionals and other...
review Tom Eccles describes the work as "creating the effect of a recurring nightmare" as the titular character, rather than escaping is "caught in the film loop, forever trapped within the confines of the office." Douglas updates the office
with computers replacing typewriters and carpet for '50s linoleum. This version is shot in black and white, which gives it the feel of a recollected experience, and Douglas has slowed the action, bringing Marnie's inherent voyeurism into focus. One can almost sense the craning neck of the filmmaker. Marnie's well-rehearsed actions of walking to the washroom, returning to the desk and turning the safe's combination dial are carefully played out – but as her gloved hand runs through the combination, the film cuts back to the opening shot, panning out to a general view of the office where the workers once again prepare to leave for the day.
Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
Tomás Gutiérrez Alea was a Cuban filmmaker. He wrote and directed more than 20 features, documentaries, and short films, which are known for his sharp insight into post-Revolutionary Cuba, and possess a delicate balance between dedication to the revolution and criticism of the social, economic,...
's film Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment)
Memorias del Subdesarrollo
Memories of Underdevelopment is a seminal 1968 Latin American film from Cuba. Directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, the story is based on a novel by Edmundo Desnoes. It was Alea's fifth film, and probably his most famous worldwide...
from 1968, updated to include references to the Mariel boatlift
Mariel boatlift
The Mariel boatlift was a mass emigration of Cubans who departed from Cuba's Mariel Harbor for the United States between April 15 and October 31, 1980....
of 1980. Douglas's installation consists of a 16mm project with a photographic series of contemporary Havana
Havana
Havana is the capital city, province, major port, and leading commercial centre of Cuba. The city proper has a population of 2.1 million inhabitants, and it spans a total of — making it the largest city in the Caribbean region, and the most populous...
, Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
. The film is looped and when presented as an installation the film and photographs create a sense of repetition, a common feature of Douglas' work. Rather than strictly working from Alea's film in the manner Douglas worked from Hitchock's Marnie, Inconsolable Memories plays with the layers of its various sources (Cuba in the 1960s, the 1980s and the present). Some of the photographs reference the locations used in the original Alea film tying together the themes of history and memory. At issue is the utopian promise of the Cuban revolution
Cuban Revolution
The Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement against the regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista between 1953 and 1959. Batista was finally ousted on 1 January 1959, and was replaced by a revolutionary government led by Castro...
and its decline, and as well, the parallel Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
events of the Cuban Missile Crisis
Cuban Missile Crisis
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a confrontation among the Soviet Union, Cuba and the United States in October 1962, during the Cold War...
of 1962 (examined in Alea's film) and the boatlift of 1980.
Samuel Beckett
Douglas has long been interested in the work of Samuel BeckettSamuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
. In 1988 he curated Samuel Beckett: Teleplays, eight Beckett works for film and television. In 1991, Douglas produced Monodramas a series of short videos for television broadcasting, based on his studies of Beckett's teleplays. Developed for television, these 30- to 60-second video works were broadcast nightly in British Columbia in 1992 for three weeks. The short narratives "mimic television’s editing techniques" and when the videos were aired during the regular commercial breaks, viewers called the station to ask what was being sold. Douglas' first project for television, Television Spots (1987–88) consisted of twelve were broadcast in Saskatoon
Saskatoon
Saskatoon is a city in central Saskatchewan, Canada, on the South Saskatchewan River. Residents of the city of Saskatoon are called Saskatonians. The city is surrounded by the Rural Municipality of Corman Park No. 344....
and Ottawa
Ottawa
Ottawa is the capital of Canada, the second largest city in the Province of Ontario, and the fourth largest city in the country. The city is located on the south bank of the Ottawa River in the eastern portion of Southern Ontario...
during regular progamming and featured short, banal scenes in open-ended narratives. An early video work, Mime (the second part of Deux Devises, 1983) consisted of a close-up of Douglas' mouth in the shape of phonemes, which are then edited to sync up with the song "Preachin' Blues" by Robert Johnson. Douglas was not aware of Beckett's own work Not I
Not I
Not I is a twenty-minute dramatic monologue written in 1972 by Samuel Beckett, translated as Pas Moi; premiere at the “Samuel Beckett Festival” by the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center, New York , directed by Alan Schneider, with Jessica Tandy and Henderson Forsythe .-Synopsis:Not I takes place...
, a disembodied mouth in a black screen. In a lecture given at YYZ Artists' Outlet
YYZ Artists' Outlet
YYZ Artists' Outlet is a gallery in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It displays visual art as well as artists’ film and video. It also publishes works on Canadian art and culture.-External links:*...
in Toronto, Douglas commented that the choice of a blues song was
a fairly personal one, derived in a way from my experience of being black in a predominantly white culture, having very little contact with black American culture, but at the same time being expected to represent that to people-both to people who were antagonistically racist and to liberal types. So what you have is my image not quite synching up or relating to a very archetypal black figure, Robert Johnson.
Douglas began to study Beckett's works and his next video work Panoramic Rotunda (1985) came from misremembering a line from Beckett's FIzzle No. 7
Fizzles
Samuel Beckett used the word "fizzles" to describe eight short prose pieces written between 1973-1975.Most fizzles are unnamed, and identified by their numbers or first few words:* Fizzle 1 [He is barehead]* Fizzle 2 [Horn came always]* Fizzle 3 Afar a Bird...
. The repetition and seemingly endless loops of the same narrative in Win, Place or Show recalls Beckett's use of repetition to point to but also undermine the "sameness" of reality. The absurdity of the forever repeating narrative, of the two protagonists in an endless loop, always the same words but from different points of reference is an allusion to Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot
Waiting for Godot
Waiting for Godot is an absurdist play by Samuel Beckett, in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly and in vain for someone named Godot to arrive. Godot's absence, as well as numerous other aspects of the play, have led to many different interpretations since the play's...
.
Early works 1983–1991
Stan Douglas' works from the 1980s are concerned with obsolete media and their aesthetics. Lost time is a continuous element in his works. The installation Overture (1986) uses footage of a train journey through the Rocky Mountains shot between 1899 and 1901. The soundtrack consists of Vancouver writer Gerald Creede reading Douglas's reworking of various sentences taken from the opening section of Marcel Proust'sMarcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
A la recherche de temps perdu. For writer Peter Culley, writing about two of Douglas' works in 1986,
Douglas situates Overture in the historical moment that the beginnings of film share with the end of the novel, when Proust's faith in the tantalizing structures of his great predecessors, Balzac and Wagner, was being undermined by the perceptive discontinuities that film helped to bring about.
In Onomatopoeia (1985–1986), a screen hangs over spot-lit upright player piano. The piano plays bars from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32, Opus 111
Piano Sonata No. 32 (Beethoven)
The Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111, is the last of Ludwig van Beethoven's piano sonatas. Along with Beethoven's 33 Variations on a waltz by Anton Diabelli, op. 120 and his two collections of bagatelles—Opus 119 and Opus 126 —this was one of Beethoven's last compositions for piano. The...
. Triggered by punctuations on the piano scroll, images of an empty textile factory are projected above the piano. The perforated scrolls that were used to programme weaving into fabric patterns, echo the player piano scrolls. The images are of a textile mill near the artist's home and specifically that section of the mill employing the punch cards that determine the different patterns of weave design. The punch cards are part of the same type of technology as the player piano, which to Culley "sets up a simultaneity of subject which the work immediately begins to subvert; image and music constantly move in and out of precise synchronization, keeping the audience at a constant level of anxious anticipation."
Douglas’s Monodramas are ten 30- to 60-second videos from 1991, conceived as interventions into commercial television, broadcast nightly in British Columbia for three weeks in 1992. These short narratives, set in bleak suburban locations, mimic television’s editing techniques, with plots dealing often mundane situations and with a slight twist at the end. The segment "I'm Not Gary" is set in a nondescript industrial strip. A white man passes a second man who is black, calling out to him "Gary?" and is visibly irritated at not being acknowledged. Finally, the second man turns to him, replying, "I'm not Gary." For writer Lisa Coulthard, race is the interpretive framework, because for the white man in the video, "his interlocutor is simply a black man, interchangeable with any other for example and clearly interchangeable with Gary."
Installations
A key element in a number of Douglas' installations is the use of time and in particular, an investigation into slowed-down time or stillness. His 1995 installation Der Sandmann, based on E.T.A. Hoffman's original 1816 short story and Sigmund Freud'sSigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
1919 essay "The Uncanny", consists of a double projection where the film is literally split down the middle and reassembled so the two sides are slightly out of sync. This creates a "temporal gap", disrupting the sense of unity so crucial to modernism, so that "everything is deferred and delayed."
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, commonly known as CBC and officially as CBC/Radio-Canada, is a Canadian crown corporation that serves as the national public radio and television broadcaster...
drama The Client, noted for its gritty style, long takes and lack of establishing shots. Set in 1950s Vancouver in the Strathcona redevelopment, the installation explores the modernist notion of urban renewal with the demolition of existing architecture in favour of grids of apartment blocks. Two men share a dormitory room on a rainy day off from their blue-collar jobs. The conversation flares up during a discussion of the day's horse races and the 6 minute filmed loop is repeated from different angles on a split screen, each cycle presenting ever-changing configurations of point-of-view. The takes are edited together in real time by a computer during the exhibition, generating an almost endless series of montages.
Photography
trouble the material and spatial boundaries of the cinema and museum (for instance, his recent Klatsassin premiered at the 2006 Vancouver International Film Festival and then in 2007 played at the Secession Gallery in Vienna) and, perhaps more importantly, thematically disturb these distinctions as his art occupies a transitional zone that interrogates perception, narrative comprehension and modes of visual and aural storytelling.
Writer Lisa Coulthard discusses Douglas' concern for this collapsing of boundaries in the essay "Uncanny Memories: Stan Douglas, Subjectivity and Cinema" stating that "although predominantly approached within the purview of fine arts, Douglas's work invites interrogation from film studies insofar as it not only utilizes the medium but also actively modifies and references the canonical texts, orientations and histories of cinema."
Recently, Douglas has moved to photographic works which do not depict the history of the site of the narrative in an installation but rather are used as a contrast to a different work. His photographic series Every Building on 100 West Hastings from 2001 is a depiction of a stretch of a run-down section of Vancouver that is about to be gentrified. The photographs accompanied the installation Journey into Fear (also 2001), which is based on Norman Foster's
Norman Foster (director)
Norman Foster was an American film director and actor.Born John Hoeffer in Richmond, Indiana, Foster originally became a cub reporter on a local newspaper in Indiana before going to New York in the hopes of getting a better newspaper job but there were no vacancies...
1942 war-time thriller of the same name
Journey into Fear (1943 film)
Journey into Fear is an American spy film based on the Eric Ambler novel of the same name. The 1943 film broadly follows the plot of the book, but the protagonist was changed to an American engineer....
and its remake
Journey into Fear (1975 film)
Journey into Fear is a 1975 Canadian thriller film directed by Daniel Mann, and based on the novel Journey into Fear by Eric Ambler. It starred Sam Waterston, Zero Mostel, Yvette Mimieux, Vincent Price, Donald Pleasence, Shelley Winters, Stanley Holloway, Joseph Wiseman and Ian McShane....
, shot in Vancouver in 1975 and directed by Daniel Mann
Daniel Mann
Daniel Mann, also known as Daniel Chugerman , was an American film and television director.Daniel Mann was born in Brooklyn, New York. He was a stage actor since childhood, and attended Erasmus Hall High School, New York's Professional Children's School and the Neighborhood Playhouse...
. Douglas compares the events of World War II with the oil crisis
1973 oil crisis
The 1973 oil crisis started in October 1973, when the members of Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries or the OAPEC proclaimed an oil embargo. This was "in response to the U.S. decision to re-supply the Israeli military" during the Yom Kippur war. It lasted until March 1974. With the...
of 1973.
In 2009 Douglas completed Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971, a 30 by 50 foot photographic mural depicting the Vancouver Gastown Riots
Gastown Riots
The Gastown Riot, also known as "The Battle of Maple TreeSquare," occurred in Vancouver, Canada, on August 7, 1971.Following weeks of arrests by undercover drug squad members in...
of 1971, which is the central focus within the atrium of the Woodward's building
Woodward's building
The Woodward's building was a historic building in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The original portion of the building was constructed in 1903 for the Woodward's Department Store when that area of Cordova Street was the heart of Vancouver's retail shopping district. ...
redevelopment in Vancouver designed by architect Gregory Henriquez
Gregory Henriquez
Gregory Henriquez is a Canadian architect, best known for the design of community-based mixed-use, institutional and social housing projects in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, Canada...
.
Douglas' reading of Gilles Deleuze's
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...
essay "Humour, Irony and the Law" about the arbitrary nature of law and law enforcement influenced Douglas to reconstruct "forgotten incidents of social confrontation between local Vancouver police and members of the public at various times throughout the last century."
Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971 depicts an event in which the police
violently intervened in a public protest against undercover police tactics and in favour of the legalization of marijuana. The composition was realized using cinematic staging and digital compositing techniques to assemble 50 different images taken with the camera in the same position. Striving for historical accuracy, Douglas undertook extensive research, collecting archival photographs and conducting interviews with witnesses and participants to recreate the scene in painstaking detail. Using complex production methods similar to those of the film industry, the details of local businesses, commercial signage and period clothing were carefully replicated to represent the past. The combined use of theatrical and digital processes enabled a heightened form of realism. A focus on individuals in the crowd reveals the reactions on their faces.
Catalogues
- Douglas, Stan and Philip Monk. Stan Douglas. Cologne: Friedrich Christian Flick Collection and DuMont, 2006. ISBN 3832177302
- Douglas, Stan and Michael Turner. Journey into fear. London: Serpentine Gallery, 2002. ISBN 3883755540
- Douglas, Stan and Reid Shier, ed. Stan Douglas: Every Building on 100 West Hastings. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, Contemporary Art Gallery, 2002. ISBN 9781551521350
- Douglas, Stan, Boris Groys, Isabel Zürcher, Peter Pakesch and Terence Dick. Stan Douglas: Le Détroit. Basel: Kunsthalle Basel, 2001. ISBN 3796517102
- Douglas, Stan. Stan Douglas. Toronto: Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 1994. ISBN 092081056X
- Douglas, Stan and Christine VanAssche. Stan Douglas. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1993. ISBN 2858507473
- Fischer, Barbara and Stan Douglas. Perspective 87: Stan Douglas. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1987. ISBN 091977752X
Primary sources
- Beckett, Samuel, Stan Douglas, Linda Ben-Zvi and Clark Coolidge. Samuel Beckett: Teleplays, Vancouver Art Gallery, October 1 to December 3, 1988. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1988. ISBN 0920095704
- Douglas, Stan and Ariane (CON) Beyn. Secession: Secession. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2008. ISBN 3865602746
Secondary sources
- Bizzocchi, Jim. "The Aesthetics of the Ambient Video Experience." fibreculture: internet, theory, criticism and research. Issue 11.
- Brockington, Horace. "Logical Anonymity: Lorna SimpsonLorna SimpsonLorna Simpson is an African American artist and photographer who made her name in the 1980s and 1990s with artworks such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal. Her work often portrays black women combined with text to express contemporary society's relationship with race, ethnicity and sex...
, Steve McQueenSteve McQueen (artist)Steve Rodney McQueen CBE is a British artist and filmmaker. He is a winner of the Golden Camera at the Cannes Film Festival, a Turner Prize and BAFTA.-Early years:...
, Stan Douglas." International Review of African American Art 15 No. 3 (1998): 20-29. - Birnbaum, Daniel. "Time and Trauma." Lier en Boog Volume 17 (2002): 155-192.
- Crichlow, Warren. "Stan Douglas and the Aesthetic Critique of Urban Decline." Cultural Studies ←→ Critical Methodologies Volume 3, Number 1 (2003): 8-21.
- Dercon, Chris. "Gleaning the Future from the Gallery Floor." Senses of Cinema. Issue No. 28 (Sept-Oct 2003).
- Eagleton, TerryTerry EagletonTerence Francis Eagleton FBA is a British literary theorist and critic, who is regarded as one of Britain's most influential living literary critics...
and Séamus Kealy. 18: Beckett. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. ISBN 0772782083 - Foster, Hal. Design and Crime and other Diatribes. London: Verso: 2002. ISBN 1859844537
- Gale, Peggy. "Stan Douglas: Evening and others." VIDEO Re/VIEW: The (best) Source for Critical Writings on Canadian Artists' Video. Eds. Peggy Gale and Lisa SteeleLisa SteeleLisa Steele is a Canadian artist, a pioneer in video art, educator, curator and co-founder of V tape in Toronto. Born in the United States, Steele moved to Canada in 1968 and is now a Canadian citizen...
. Toronto: Art Metropole, 1996. ISBN 0920956378 - Jäger, Joachim, Gabriele Knapstein, Stan Douglas and Anette Husch. Beyond Cinema: The Art of Projection: Films, Videos And Installations From 1963 to 2005. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2007. ISBN 3775718745
- Krajewsk, Michael. "Stan Douglas, 15 September 2007 — 6 January 2008, Staatsgalerie & Wurttembergischer". Map Magazine. Issue 12 (Winter 2007).
- Milroy, Sarah. "These artists know how to rock." Globe & Mail (Nov 6, 2003): p. R5-7.
- Walls, Rachel. "Stan Douglas's performance of contested space in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside." Space, Place and Landscape: a Postgraduate Workshop 13 July 2007. Edited by Hannah Neate and Joanna Pready. Landscape, Space, Place, Research Group, University of Nottingham.
- Watson, Scott, Diana Thater, Stan Douglas and Carol J. Clover. Stan Douglas. London: Phaidon, 1998. ISBN 978071483796
General
- Lee, John and Karla Zimmerman. Vancouver: City Guide. Lonely Planet, 2008. ISBN 1740598369
External links
- Stan Douglas - David Zwirner
- Tate Collection
- the-artists.org
- Stan Douglas and Douglas Gordon: Double Vision
- Stan Douglas and Douglas Gordon: Double Vision, essay by Lynne Cooke
- Stan Douglas at Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany
- Stan Douglas: Every Building on 100 West Hastings
- "My Work Reflects These Dark Times We Live In" Interview with Stan Douglas
- Works by Stan Douglas in Cal Cego. Contemporary Art Collection
- Works by Stan Douglas in Cal Cego. Contemporary Art Collection
- Works by Stan Douglas in Cal Cego. Contemporary Art Collection