Stan Douglas

Vancouver Canada 1960
lives and works in Vancouver

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In 1994 Stan Douglas drew attention with Evening, a video work in which he ridicules news coverage. On three video screens three different newscasters can be seen at work. It looks very real, but the ‘broadcasts’ are actually construed by Douglas with the help of actors and on the basis of archive material, whereby the reliability of news is brought into question. One of the newscasters conveys the ‘current events’ as happy talk – a form of news broadcasting that became popular in the United States during the late sixties. The motto was: ‘No matter how bad the news, present it with a happy face!’ Though this extreme form of presentation was later abandoned, its influence was crucial to the way in which news has been conveyed ever since.

Douglas has scrutinized the medium of television in an earlier work as well. The series Monodramas (1991) is comprised of ten short video stories, each of which lasts as long as an American commercial. The clips provide commentary on but also an alternative to the unsolicited ‘commercial breaks’ with which the viewer is confronted. They show daily occurrences without any climax whatsoever. A car passes other cars on the highway – that’s it. A man thinks he hears someone outside, goes to look, sees no one and goes back inside again. With such images Douglas attempts to break through established visual habits and to make the viewer aware of the way in which images on television are used and manipulated.

Since the late eighties Douglas has been exploring audiovisual media, from photography, panorama and silent film to television and video. Film is a particular fascination of his. In Overture, from 1986, a train goes in and out of tunnels in the Rocky Mountains. At least that is the way it looks: actually Douglas took some fragments of silent film from the archives of the Edison Company and edited them together as a loop. Another exciting aspect is that, because the camera was placed on the locomotive, the viewer has the sensation of being the train’s engineer and becomes engrossed in the rhythm of the film. In the background one can hear bits of text based on Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, a narrative in which past and present mingle just as in the work by Douglas. With respect to the blending of reality and imagination, Overture can, in a certain sense, be compared to Evening, though it gives rise to a hypnotic effect that reveals the borderline between fact and fiction rather than denouncing it.

Canadian art has acquired, in the meantime, a considerable reputation where the analysis of media images is concerned. Among the first artists to delve into this realm were Dan Graham, who examined perception’s relationship to the media, art and society, and Jeff Wall, who fused advertising, film, photography and painting in his staged and monumental images. Stan Douglas, however, is clearly part of a younger generation. His work is definitely just as related to that of James Coleman, for instance, an Irish artist who allows the techniques of painting, film and theater to merge into a single narrative in his slide projections.

Over the years, Douglas’s work has become increasingly complex. With the aid of a computer, the various media, past and present, image and sound, become more and more blended. Take Der Sandmann (1995), based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’ story, which takes place in a Potsdam allotment garden. The images of the garden are accompanied by a reading from correspondence between a certain Nathael and his childhood friend Lothar. The boys used to regard a certain older man as the ‘Sandman’ – to them, a malicious man who threw sand in the eyes of children if they would lie awake at night. In the studio Douglas created a replica of the garden two times: one time as being before and another as being after the reunification of Germany. As such, the memories of Nathael and Lothar are evoked against the background of two Germanies. In this work Douglas creates a network of histories, not only of past and present but also of fiction and reality, of personal remembrance and historical survey.

In another recent work by Douglas, Nu-tka (1996), two 35-millimeter films with images of apparently unspoiled nature are projected on top of each other. Nu-tka was filmed on Nootka Sound, an island on the West coast of Canada, over which a conflict arose between the English and the Spanish during the eighteenth century; both parties professed to be entitled to this territory. As the images are projected, one hears monologues (based on historical documents such as letters and journals) of commanders involved in the dispute and literary fragments. The texts and images are interwoven, set still and doubled into an indistinct mass of blurred nature scenes and sound.