One foot in the sultry heat of New York clubs, the other in a country beset by the sun and civil war, Stan Douglas seems to have the gift of ubiquity. He also seems to know the formula for time travel. Because the photos of his project Disco Angolaat the heart of a new exhibition in Montreal, depict the 1970s with a healthy dose of realism.
That’s not all. The Vancouver artist is currently finalizing a work that has literally taken him, in the midst of a pandemic, to London and Cairo. A revolutionary journey: in these photos and videos that he will unveil during the imminent 59and Venice Biennale, it brings together the years 1848 and 2011 under the prism of the planetary revolts that shook them.
The PHI Foundation did not obtain the privilege of offering a pre-Venice. His exhibition Narrative Unveilings no less attractive. Series Disco Angola (2012), which had never landed in Quebec, elegantly occupies the four floors of one of the PHI buildings. Its second address is home to an exclusive: the printed images of Penn Station’s Half Century(2021), a work of integration into architecture hitherto only visible at the New York station.
Taken with the final settings of the project for the Canadian pavilion of the Venice Biennale, Stan Douglas did not move to Montreal. It was also because of his academic responsibilities that he gave interviews from his Los Angeles quarters. “I used to come to Pasadena for a few days and then leave,” says the man who has taught since 2009 at the Art Center College of Design. Since 2021, I lead the graduate program, which forced me to relocate. »
It was the PHI Foundation that contacted him to set up an exhibition. “It gave me the opportunity to print high resolution images of Penn Station “, he acknowledges. Those at the Moynihan Train Hall in Manhattan were printed on glass, the result of which did not entirely satisfy him.
With these photos digging up historic Penn Station, a station demolished in 1963 to make way for Madison Square Garden, Stan Douglas fabricates half a century of facts — precisely those between 1er March 1914 and June 20, 1957. Each of the nine panels has a date as a title and represents, in a panoramic display, the simple daily life of travelers or surprising scenes (farewells to soldiers, circus acts, etc.).
Utopian spaces
Stan Douglas is the artist of history revisited. His projects draw on the past, mix known and unknown (or invented), pointing out injustice as much as the grandiose. The artist allows himself to scrape away all the layers of truth applied to the photograph, like varnish. There are other truths, he believes.
The pictures of Disco Angola were made by a fictional photojournalist. They merge real shots and digital creations. Douglas has never set foot in Angola and what we see, he claims, was photographed in a California hotel.
On each floor devoted to Disco Angola, only two images are side by side. In a series of oppositions—interiors versus exteriors, active crowds, others passive, combat dances, followed by dancing soldiers—Douglas brings together disco, a “utopian space” reclaimed by industry, and Angola, whose the dream of independence was stifled during the Cold War. “We exploited the intimacy [de ces deux univers] “, he says, and capsizes their future.
The realism so deceptive in Stan Douglas takes on its full meaning in the image Checkpoint and its line formed by the carcass of a truck, a tree and… a refrigerator. For this scene, he was not inspired by a press photograph, but From one war to another (2011), an essay by the equally ambivalent Polish writer and journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski. “According to him, life and death merge in an Angolan checkpoint,” sums up the Canadian artist. The soldiers all had the same uniform, you couldn’t tell who they were fighting for, even saying ‘Hi comrade!’”
A 1982 graduate of the Emily Carr College of Art in Vancouver, Stan Douglas became known for making his images, like his predecessors in the movement called the “Vancouver School”, including Jeff Wall. He himself does not hide this filiation, even if he also likes to recall his pictorial ambitions, nourished by the paintings of Pieter Brueghel. “I like his multiple temporalities, their simultaneity. »
But above all, it is the cinema that he mimes. He works with “film crews”, uses filming equipment, calls on crowds of extras, accumulates accessories. Huge photographs of Penn Station’s Half Century benefited from the collection of the Montreal organization Le grand costumier.
Like a film cycle, Narrative Unveilings brings together multiple stories. In Penn Station’s…the grandiose rubs shoulders with the ban and the architectural heritage, the little stories.
Stan Douglas gives credit to his team of researchers, who scoured “mountains of newspapers” to retrieve from oblivion such cases as the triumphant arrival at the station of Angelo Herndon, a black trade unionist unjustly imprisoned. “In 1914, the snow nailed the trains. I don’t know what the mood was, it’s pure fantasy”, says the artist about the images where he stages, in a carefully lit hall, a brass band, jugglers, trapeze artists and even sleepers.
About his work for Venice, which will open on April 23, he could not say much, the essential being under the blow of an embargo, except that he had the idea during the 10and anniversary of a year 2011 tinged with popular revolts that occurred in Egypt, England and elsewhere. This will be his fifth appearance, nothing less, at the Biennale, which remains the most prestigious among the major international art exhibitions.