Transition, in any language, sounds like a word attributed to ease. It slides across the page. It cascades around the mouth. It is a visual word, an image of fluidity. Yet, it is never that simple; movement must still be considered. Obstacles remain in the way. Old thoughts and muscles are used, some discarded as new ones present themselves, with the promise of availing hope.
Over the course of more than 30 years, African-Canadian multidisciplinary artist Stan Douglas has become one of Canada’s most celebrated artists, propelling his artistic engagement and image-making practice to cull historical moments and the critical issues of our time. He fixes his keen eye upon culture, industrialism, and technology, exploring fissures and absence, often cloaked in the guise of progress.
As we settle into what some deem ‘the new normal,’ it feels an opportune moment to examine the work of the Vancouver-based 61-year-old. With Douglas representing Canada at this year’s Venice Biennale, as well as participating in Art Basel’s Unlimited sector in Basel in June, multitudes of international viewers will have ample opportunity to do just that.
In two venues in Venice, the National Gallery of Canada presents ‘Stan Douglas: 2011 ≠ 1848’, featuring a new video and new photographic work marking the 10th anniversary of the global civil and political unrest of 2011. ‘This work is about the importance of 2008 (the global economic crisis), reverberating over time as the first echoes of what happened in 2011, in different ways, around the world, for different reasons; the common cause being the great recession,’ says Douglas, speaking from Venice. ‘The rise of demagogues in the United States and Brexit are echoes of the same thing. The fact that they could have bailed out the people and the people could have paid back the banks, but they bailed out the banks and left the human deficit in place. That is the source of all these things.’
In the Canadian pavilion, Douglas presents four large-scale photographs of meticulously restaged protests and riots from four geographic locations, all in 2011. First, the unrest along Avenue Habib Bourguiba in Tunis on January 12, ignited by the police confiscating the fruit cart of a vendor who later appeared at the police station and set himself ablaze. This dramatic event sparked the Jasmine Revolution, whose embers drifted on the tides of the Mediterranean to other locations, becoming known as the Arab Spring. Second, the aftermath of the Stanley Cup riots in Vancouver on June 15, where the ice hockey team, the Boston Bruins, triumphed in game seven over the local Canucks, spurring a riot injuring 140 people with more than 100 arrests. Then the clash in Hackney, London between youths and the police in the days after August 4, when the police shot and killed Mark Duggan, an unarmed 29-year-old Black man, after stopping the car in which he was travelling. And lastly, the police corralling Occupy Wall Street protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York on October 1.
Each of these events served as a groundswell for the fight for representation against the status quo and what that looks like when the immediacy of social media comes into play, galvanizing individuals and communities to organize and ‘resist;’ as well as the pushback of the counterresponse.
At another site in a 16th-century salt warehouse in Venice’s Dorsoduro district, Douglas returns to the moving image, with a two-channel video installation ISDN. Though Douglas acknowledges the power of social media, he doesn’t use it. ‘Why would I?’ he asks, with a laugh. ‘All day I’m in front of the computer.’ Instead, he turns to music as a springboard and how, through technology, it has elevated cross-cultural resistance. This meeting of minds centers hip-hop and the musical genres of mid-2000s grime and its dubstep origins with the same time frame as mahraganat music based on sha’abi, a popular Egyptian musical genre, thousands of miles away in Cairo. Though seeded by different roots, both of Douglas’s works reveal similarities. ‘This is about dialogue,’ he says. ‘These people are separated by language, space, and culture. We have Egyptian brothers who were able to notice the commonality between Cairo and the UK and thought there could be a dialogue, which happens over the ISDN internet connection,’ says Douglas. ‘They found commonality through using, in many cases, the exact same software, accessing the same samples, the same references of hip-hop and used that. Instead of being obedient and abiding by the genre’s codes, they apply their own local musical language to it.’
Not readily available pre-internet – which in many places remains a luxury – this use of technology allows voices to coincide and coexist, building and adding upon the soundtrack of revolution; a form of movement that can also be steeped in creation and dance – for even within revolution there can be joy, the process of exchange.
Curated by Reid Shier, Executive Director of The Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver, ‘Stan Douglas: 2011 ≠ 1848’, contrasts these eras/errors of discord in a quest for change. The upheavals of 1848, in which middle- and working-class Europeans expressed their desire for comfort in equity beyond aristocratic confines, remained confined to one continent, while the demonstrations of 2011, through technology, became global stories, eventually centered around policing and suppression. Thus the current return to populist nationalism and civil unrest, make us investigate the notions of not greater than or less than, but rather, not equal to. This brings to mind a quote from the author Toni Cade Bambara: ‘What are we pretending not to know today?’
Past as present, present as past is often at play when dealing with visual images, as is ownership of narratives. Yes, Douglas is representing Canada, but his practice is unyielding to geographical or racial barriers, while challenging the systemic and familiar stop signs that remain in place, globally. For Dr. Kenneth Montague, owner of the Toronto-based Wedge Collection, which includes Douglas’s work, the artist’s ‘examination of “failed utopias” and his nonlinear storytelling combine to create an alternative view of history. Close enough to the truth to be believed, but always received with the suspicion that something isn’t quite right. To me, this mirrors the state of Blackness in Canada, complicated and still in flux. We are rising yet moving with caution towards our future.’
Later this year at Art Basel in Basel, Douglas will show his seminal early work Onomatopoeia (1985–1986). The work debuted at his 1986 solo exhibition at Western Front, Vancouver, and has not been seen publicly in almost 20 years. Fragments of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32 in C Minor, Op. 111, heard from a player piano in a ragtime lilt familiar from the silent movie era, sets the tone for looped, projected black-and-white photographs of automatic looms from a 19th-century textile mill dangling overhead. What is considered advancement and progress exposes a barren landscape. There is no jazz pianist tickling the ivories. There are no textile artisans, pushing and pulling at a loom. Traditions and culture are replaced by mass, though not in the form of bodies. The denoted wheels roll on. It is the cyclical nature of every ‘age,’ evidence of motion at play, and how the familiarity of repetition is, simultaneously, comforting and disconcerting.
Though Onomatopoeia is a work devoid of the presence of life and touch, one can’t help but feel the delicate imprints of Douglas’s craft. Like everything in history, it leaves an indelible mark, with only its details unveiling the story. After more than two years of navigating the global pandemic, we long for the return of touch found in art – gestures that resonate within, wake us, reminding us that we are alive. Douglas is inviting us to transition into his world, to take refuge as well as respite. We are, again, like sage tortoises, slowly peeking out our heads, with the promise of roughage to nourish us. Hope, imagined or otherwise, is enduring like a motion picture, its captured frames longing to be seen, trying not to end up on the cutting-room floor of our shared histories.
Brian Keith Jackson is an American novelist (The View From Here. Walking Through Mirrors, and The Queen of Harlem), essayist, and art and culture writer. He was a contributor to the Art Basel Miami Beach magazine 2021 edition, guest-edited by Xaviera Simmons.
Stan Douglas is represented by David Zwirner (New York, Hong Kong, London, and Paris) and Victoria Miro (London and Venice). In June, he presents Onomatopoeia (1985-1986) in the Unlimited sector of Art Basel in Basel.
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Captions for full-bleed images: 1. Stan Douglas, Helen Lawrence, 2014. Performance photograph. © Stan Douglas. 2. Stan Douglas, ISDN (film still), 2022. Courtesy of the artist; Victoria Miro, London and Venice; and David Zwirner, New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong. © Stan Douglas. 3. Stan Douglas, Helen Lawrence, 2014. Performance photograph. © Stan Douglas. 4. Stan Douglas, Moynihan Tain Hall, installation shot of 1 March 1914, 2021, and 2 March 1941, 2021. Detail view.