Stan Douglas’s Powerful Bard Survey Reclaims the Magic of His Art

On the middle of Stan Douglas’s present survey at Bard College’s Hessel Museum of Artwork in Upstate New York is a brand new video set up with pictures so appalling and so hypnotic that I watched the work by 3 times.

That video set up shares its title with, and remakes a portion of, D. W. Griffith’s three-hour silent film Beginning of a Nation (1915), a troubling cornerstone of movie historical past that popularized editorial strategies nonetheless in use in the present day whereas additionally providing racist pictures and white nationalist tropes which have additionally sadly lingered on. Douglas’s Beginning of a Nation appropriates a very egregious sequence from Griffith’s epic, then explodes it and weaves a brand new tapestry from its fragments.

Within the Griffith movie, a rich white girl named Flora receives a wedding proposal from Gus, a Black freedman who gained’t take no for a solution. Apparently viewing that proposal as a menace, she retreats from him so swiftly that she falls off a cliff and dies. Her brother Ben, a Klansman, lynches Gus in a horrifying second that Griffith presents as justice served.

Douglas somberly re-presents the Griffith sequence with few alterations, casting it alongside 4 new movies of the artist’s making that tackle the views of different characters within the unique movie. Like Griffith’s footage, Douglas’s pictures are shot in black and white and performed with out sound, however Douglas has not faithfully re-created Griffith’s movie. Variations abound: Flora’s channel reveals her admiring a squirrel, not a fowl, and one other channel displaying a brand new model of the lynching includes a burning cross that Griffith by no means depicted. There are additionally a variety of freshly made characters thought up by Douglas, together with a ghost—additionally named Gus—that by no means seems within the 1915 Beginning of a Nation.

Ultimately, following the lynching, one in all Douglas’s channels turns to paint because the artist’s actors and their horse march off the set. Left behind is a blue display screen, onto which Douglas might composite recent imagery in post-production. However he has left the backdrop naked, with none photos rather than its blue subject, suggesting that Douglas feels his pictures are topic to alter.

This new Beginning of a Nation, which was initially commissioned for a blockbuster present in Los Angeles about monuments this fall, portrays the previous as being each unsettling and unsettled—and it reveals that artists can create new pictures that revisit the historic report and amend it as they see match. Paradoxically, Douglas’s set up appears more likely to endure as one of many nice artworks made this 12 months.

Re-editing and remaking historical past have been core to Douglas’s creative undertaking ever since he shot to worldwide fame with works comparable to Hors-Champs (1992), one of many terrific early works being proven at Bard. This video set up options black-and-white footage of 4 musicians performing a free jazz composition primarily based on Albert Ayler’s Spirits Rejoice (1965). Two projections seem on both facet of a dangling display screen within the middle of a room. One facet reveals the musicians at work—a drummer drumming away, a saxophonist blowing into his brass—and purports to have been broadcast on tv within the mid-Sixties. The opposite facet has pictures that supposedly weren’t aired.

As a result of the hanging display screen divides the room, it’s not possible to see all of Douglas’s footage concurrently. His level is that the “good” footage—the stuff introduced to audiences as worthy of coming into the report—tends to go away out loads of data. However the “dangerous” footage is equally tempting to look at. Regardless of, as a result of Douglas’s set up is itself centered round a lie: not one of the materials in Hors-Champs was ever proven on TV, although it appears prefer it was.

When it was proven on the 1992 version of Documenta, Hors-Champs made Douglas a sensation. He’s since appeared in two extra editions of Documenta and represented his dwelling nation of Canada on the 2022 Venice Biennale. As Douglas’s star has ascended, his budgets have risen, leading to greater installations that appear and feel extra like movies made for theatrical launch. Some even flirt with genres acquainted to multiplex guests, like science fiction.

These cinematic works should not in his Bard present, which is astonishingly his first US survey in additional than 20 years—and that may be a credit score to curator Lauren Cornell, whose exhibition typically spotlights the facet of Douglas’s oeuvre that I discover extra conceptually wealthy. It’s a present that led me to comprehend I used to be improper about this artist, whom I started to write down off as a result of I discovered lots of his latest works too shiny to go away a mark. In contrast, many of the works at Bard are rougher across the edges and subsequently—to me, no less than—extra fascinating.

The present brings to the fore hardly ever seen early works such because the outstanding video Nu•tka• (1996), wherein Douglas’s digicam takes within the lapping waves and placid seashores of Vancouver Island. The work derives its title from Nootka Sound, which separates that island from Douglas’s birthplace of Vancouver. It’s, partially, an try to disturb the vistas seen right here, that are a part of unceded Mowachahat-Muchalaht land. As Douglas’s digicam drifts alongside the shore, his pictures cut up aside, such that two totally different pictures displaying solely totally different places will merge, their bits and items mashing collectively alongside alternating raster strains. In the meantime, on the soundtrack, two males’s voices—one representing a Spanish explorer, the opposite a British naval captain—overlap, making a soup of phrases that mirrors all of the colonial squabbling over land that by no means rightfully belonged to Europeans.

Watching Nu•tka• for too lengthy—which is one thing you may need to do as a result of this six-minute video is so entrancing—could cause dizziness. That appears intentional. Douglas is desirous about creating pictures that hassle what we predict we all know, inflicting historical past to fray or blur. Within the Bard exhibition’s catalog, a number of contributors invoke a 1998 comment by Douglas wherein he described a fascination with “moments when historical past might have gone a method or one other.” The comment greatest describes why there may be such a way of uncertainty in his early work, which, through the ’90s, was austere and opaque.

Since then, Douglas has made extra simply legible works comparable to Luanda-Kinshasa (2013), which can be his most generally acclaimed video. It options six hours of musicians jamming out in what seems to be a Seventies recording studio. To get pleasure from this work, you don’t must know that the video isn’t truly a documentary, although it seems that approach, or that Douglas’s set is a devoted re-creation of the famed New York studio the place Charles Mingus, Pink Floyd, Miles Davis, and plenty of others recorded a few of their most beloved music. You don’t even want to know that, by its title, the work’s title implies a bond between liberation actions in America through the Seventies and the contemporaneous push for Angola’s independence from Portugal. I think that the folks I noticed dancing to the video’s funky sounds weren’t conscious of any of that, anyway.

Does that imply some resonance has been misplaced in translation? Maybe, though that could be the purpose, as Douglas’s photographic work makes clear. Some examples, like these from his 2022 Canadian Pavilion for the Venice Biennale, signify moments of strife, like one displaying Occupy Wall Avenue demonstrators going toe to toe with law enforcement officials on the Brooklyn Bridge. They’re beautiful pictures whose enticing surfaces comprise barbs.

Regardless of that picture trying like a documentary {photograph}, Douglas’s image consists of staged parts which have been elaborately stitched collectively. (The work’s title, New York Metropolis, 1 October 2011, additionally follows a documentary images naming conference supposed to point immediacy and facticity, however Douglas made this piece in 2021, a few decade after the occasions pictured.) One begins to marvel which individuals proven right here, if any in any respect, have been actually there on October 1, 2011—the person with a “MOOSE IS LOOSE” shirt who raises a center finger to the cops; the stone-faced police chiefs who look on with out have an effect on at arrests being made; the photographers who take their photos from excessive up among the many bridge’s girders, adopting the angle that Douglas himself mimics.

After I first encountered this {photograph} in Venice, I paid it little thoughts, discovering it alluring however empty. However seeing it at Bard, the {photograph} obtained me occupied with how historical past is cobbled collectively piece by piece, similar to Douglas’s picture, and the way new truths consequence when its parts are reenacted and remade. Inaccuracies inherently consequence: Google the precise photos of the demonstration, and spot what number of choices Douglas has made throughout his restaging of them, together with his option to foreground the heavy presence of regulation enforcement, which is one thing another images didn’t handle to try this day—whilst 700 folks have been arrested. However these inaccuracies result in truths of their very own that we will solely see in hindsight.

Within the Douglas image, I’m drawn to 1 protester—one I couldn’t discover in any actual photos from that day—who holds a cardboard signal studying “UNFUCK THE WORLD.” Throughout his oeuvre, Douglas’s work makes an attempt to do exactly that, and accomplishes it fantastically, hauntingly, and soberly, revising the previous so as to lead us into the longer term.