Stan Douglas (born October 11, 1960) is a Canadian artist based in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Since the late 1980s, he has created works in film and photography as well as theatre productions and other multidisciplinary projects that investigate the parameters of their respective mediums. His ongoing inquiry into technology's role in image making, and how those mediations infiltrate and shape collective memory, has resulted in works that are at once specific in their historical and cultural references and broadly accessible.
He has exhibited internationally, including Documenta IX, 1992, Documenta X, 1997, Documenta XI, 2002 and the Venice Biennale in 1990, 2001, 2005 and 2019. Douglas was chosen to represent Canada in the 2022 Venice Biennale.
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."Stan Douglas and Philip Monk, Stan Douglas, p. 7
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 International, 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.[s.n.] (March 18, 2008). . Canada Council for the Arts - Conseil des arts du Canada. Accessed September 2013. Douglas is represented by David Zwirner, New York and Victoria Miro Gallery, London. A survey of his recent work, Stan Douglas: Mise en scène, traveled Europe from 2013 until the end of 2015. Between 2004 and 2006, he was a professor at Universität der Künste Berlin and since 2009 has been a member of the Core Faculty in the Graduate Art Department of Art Center College of Design.
Themes Modernism
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.Beckett, Douglas, Ben-Zvi and Coolidge, Samuel Beckett: Teleplays, Vancouver Art Gallery, October 1 to December 3, 1988Kealy, "10 Texts for 18:Beckett", 18:Beckett, pp. 63-63 Also of concern is both modernism as a theoretical conceptKealy, "10 Texts for 18:Beckett", 18:Beckett, p. 62 and modernity as it has affected North American urbanism since World War II.Lynne Cooke, Stan Douglas and Douglas Gordon: Double Vision 2000
Politics and race Douglas' work only touches on race directly in a few instances,Milroy, "These artists know how to rock", p. R5 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 imperialism 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.Douglas and Monk, Stan Douglas, p. 31 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.Watson, et al, Stan Douglas, p. 37
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 blues and jazz.Milroy, "These artists know how to rock", p. R6 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.Brockington, "Logical Anonymity: Lorna Simpson, Steve Mcqueen, Stan Douglas"
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 consciousnessKrajewsk, "Stan Douglas, 15 September 2007 — 6 January 2008, Staatsgalerie & Wurttembergischer" and is one of his few works to directly address race.Milroy, "These artists know how to rock", p. R7
Four American musicians, George E. 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.".Gale, "Stan Douglas: Evening and others", p. 363 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.
Luanda-Kinshasa runs for more than six hours. Its title points directly to the origins and history of jazz in Africa.Holland Cotter (February 13, 2014), Stan Douglas: ‘Luanda-Kinshasa’ New York Times. Marking the first time the artist has filmed on location in New York,Stan Douglas, Luanda-Kinshasa, January 9 – February 22, 2014 David Zwirner Gallery, New York. however, the setting is a reimagined Manhattan milieu in the 1970s, namely the CBS 30th Street Studio. Featuring a band of professional musicians improvising together, Luanda-Kinshasa is the documentation of a fictitious recording at the famed studio. Although Douglas plants subtle period details in clothes, wall posters and cigarette brands, all attention is on the band — which includes among its 10 instrumentalists the Senegalese drummer Abdou Mboup, the Indian tabla player Nitin Mitta, and the American drummer Kimberly Thompson — and on the music being made.
Cinema As a Vancouver artist getting his start in the 1980s and using lens-based media, Stan Douglas is often associated with the Vancouver School of photoconceptualism.Monk, Stan Douglas, p. 10Lee and Zimmerman, Vancouver: City Guide, p. 26 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 Wall.
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."Eccles, "Stan Douglas at David Zwirner, New York, New York" 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.
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 projection 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 Hitchcock'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.
Samuel Beckett