Stan Douglas

Stan Douglas (born October 11, 1960) is an artist based in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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.

Stan Douglas was born in 1960 in Vancouver, where he currently lives and works.

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.".

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.

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."

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."

Educated at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, Douglas has exhibited widely since his first solo show in 1981.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 2021 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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

A survey of his recent work, Stan Douglas: Mise en scène, traveled Europe from 2013 until the end of 2015.