Stan Douglas and the Double Life of Images

New York Times

a day ago

I knew Vancouver before I ever saw it. I knew it from late-night movies and second-string TV shows, from '80s and '90s American productions — '21 Jump Street,' 'The X-Files' and the like — that were filmed in the discounted climes north of the border. 'Hollywood North,' as they used to call it, almost never got to play itself onscreen: The streets around Vancouver's False Creek were recast as San Francisco or New York, and the victims of American horror movies fled through British Columbian forests. The cinema was born in Lyon, it was industrialized in Los Angeles, but Vancouver is the city made of moving pictures.
Vancouver's role as Hollywood's secret twin has always seemed suitable to Stan Douglas, the Canadian artist gripped by images and their doubles. Since the 1980s, working in still photography, broadcast television, room-filling video installation and even theater, he has reimagined the widest currents of history as mirror images and not-quite-clones. 'Ghostlight,' an ambitious retrospective that opened recently at Bard College here in the Hudson Valley, includes some of his most important works in video and photography, built out of 18th-century archives and 21st-century tech. (Given recent presidential designs on a new state north of the 49th parallel, the show also offers an opportune reminder of the distinct dimensions of Canadian art and history: where it dovetails with America's, and where it diverges.)
The show at Bard — organized and cunningly paced by Lauren Cornell, the artistic director of the college's Center for Curatorial Studies — captures Douglas's commitment to art as a practice of reconstitution: of putting the past in the service of the present, restaging turning points and letting the strings show. To make 'Luanda-Kinshasa' (2013), he invited the pianist Jason Moran to lead a fictitious 1970s jam session, which Douglas filmed in the manner of Jean-Luc Godard's Rolling Stones doc 'Sympathy for the Devil.' For a permanent commission of mural-size photos at New York's Moynihan Train Hall, he commandeered a Vancouver hockey arena for tableaus vivants of hundreds of actors — each performing a real episode of war heroes, labor activists and tabloid murderers who really passed through the old Penn Station. For 'Birth of a Nation,' his intricate and shocking new five-screen video work at Bard, he wrote an entire screenplay adapting D.W. Griffith's noxious epic — which we never hear, as the video is silent.
All of which is to say that if you like your history at name-check depth, you can stick with the Guggenheim this summer. This is serious art for serious people, and Douglas's imposing videos and photos have bibliographies to match: Brush up on your Beckett and Freud.
Douglas was born in Vancouver in 1960, and his early work (regrettably absent here) paid close attention to the psychological underside of Hollywood cinema. His interests grew more historical in the 1990s, and his greatest hits of that decade are at Bard — the first being 'Hors-Champs' (1992), his very first multi-projector installation. For 'Hors-Champs' Douglas gathered four American musicians (three Black, one white) who had lived in Paris during the late 1960s, and invited them to perform Albert Ayler's 1965 'Spirits Rejoice': a quicksilver composition of free jazz, associated as much with Black nationalism in the United States as with left-wing agitation in France. The black-and-white image looks like an old videotape, with its soft edges and noisy backgrounds. In fact, Douglas shot this himself on a Paris soundstage, using old cathode ray tube cameras, mimicking the shot-countershot editing and monochrome stages of 1960s European TV.
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