August 2023
Stan Douglas
Stan Douglas, ISDN (2022), still from two-channel video installation, © Stan Douglas, courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner
Sascha Behrendt speaks with the revered artist about his work at the intersection of theater, photography, and technology—and his recent solo exhibition at David Zwirner in Los Angeles.
Stan Douglas is a Canadian artist working with and testing the mediums of film, photography, and installation. His recent exhibition at David Zwirner, Los Angeles, features re-created photographic images of uprisings that took place around the world in 2011. These include the Arab Spring, London riots, Occupy Wall Street, and the Stanley Cup riots. Alongside these are a two-channel video installation ISDN. The works were shown at the Canadian Pavilion for the 59th Venice Biennale, 2022. Deeply interested in past history, Douglas seeks to disrupt and open up new considerations of received narratives and news. A recipient of the 2016 Hasselblad Award and the 2019 Audain Prize for the Visual Arts, his work is held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Pérez Art Museum Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, UK; Vancouver Art Gallery; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Sascha Behrendt: Congratulations on your new show. I would love to know what initially inspired you to create these works for this exhibition.
Stan Douglas: So when 2011 happened, and everything was going on around the world, it just occurred to me that it seemed to be very similar to what was happening during the revolts of 1848. I’d been kind of curious about it ever since reading Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducational Sentimentale (1869), which has that event as a pivotal scene at the end of the novel. Then, of course, Marx’s 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) features the aftermath of that, which is a great piece of writing. So, with 2011, I recognized something, but then later, I had the idea to depict it using aerial footage from newscasts.
In the case of London, I was able to get licensed images from Sky News. I had footage of about six hours which you can see distilled into that one image of the riots in Hackney. All the people you view on the street, the police, and the demonstrators were the people who were there, more or less in the same location you see them in. It took a while to figure out where it was and what was happening, but little by little, I figured out the location around this estate in Hackney. And then, I had hoped to take from the video footage information that could be added to a background photographic plate, but it was not good enough quality. Luckily Google Maps gives you GPS coordinates, so I could find exactly where to go. You just dialed it in, and a helicopter can take you there. So, in the end, I did exactly that. I created the plate shots and then spent a long time pasting things in and then later de-gentrifying it because there has been a lot of changes since 2011. Google Maps is actually historical, so you can dial back the time in mapping information.
Installation view, Stan Douglas, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, May 23—July 29, 2023, courtesy of David Zwirner
SB: Your career has spanned over 35 years, with you working across different mediums at a time of enormous changes with regard to accessibility to information, technology, and surveillance. I am very interested in your take on that.
SD: Yes, at a certain point, there were things you would not do because you technically couldn’t. The task would just be too much for one person. So you would just make things up. But yeah, there are technological changes too, like going from analog to digital photography, which I already made that shift in 2008, and realizing that the lenses were so good that it really didn’t make any sense to work with photochemical processes anymore—and then doing digital photographs with Photoshop.
SB: In the recent exhibition, you show five large photographic images that are reimagined but faithful to past protests in 2011. They have a panoramic feel to them and have been compared to epic historical paintings. Was it a conscious intention to do that, or was it to do with the available technology?
SD: People have used the phrase history painting, but I kind of find it annoying. It’s not exactly like history painting, but the mode I try to adopt is that of Bruegel, actually. It’s this idea of a large scene with a big sweep and human scope in which you can present different micro scenes and events all simultaneously in the same space. That was really more my model than anything else. But they are photographs.
Installation view, Stan Douglas, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, May 23—July 29, 2023, courtesy of David Zwirner
Stan Douglas, New York City, 1 October 2011, 2021, digital chromogenic print mounted on dibond aluminum, © Stan Douglas, courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner
SB: They are often seen as if from a bird’s eye viewpoint from above, which gives a kind of authority over what’s depicted, in terms of not being the subjective human scale. It’s using the same tools as the overwhelming news cycles and images that we’re bombarded with that are given to us as factual. I am curious about your thoughts on scale and distance as a way to affect the viewer.
SD: Well, the photograph of the Hackney, London riot is clearly from a surveillance point of view from a news camera. And you do see a couple of helicopters in that shot as well. So clearly there, this idea of London being such a heavily photographed, scrutinized, and surveilled place is coming into play with them, and that’s why it looks the way it does. In the case of the New York picture, you clearly have a point of view from the promenade looking down. So it’s not really that superior. And in the case of the Tunis riot, it’s based on real video footage done by journalists who were curfewed in a hotel, photographing the street outside. The hotel is condemned right now, so we couldn’t get down there, but we were able to be in the building right next door to that hotel.
But another thing is that the more you look toward the horizon, the more you have to build it in CG. However, if you look downward, you can build and stage less, so there’s a practical aspect to it as well. They all depict actual points of view. There is someone on the ground in Vancouver, someone in a hotel in Tunis, and, yeah, in a helicopter.
Installation view, Stan Douglas, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, May 23—July 29, 2023, courtesy of David Zwirner
SB: They also have an impossible amount of detail, which in the analog film era would not have been the case. Clearly, in your work, you play all the time with ideas of fiction, between what’s real and what’s fabricated. So where do your passion and drive come from to achieve all these technically complex mammoth projects? What parts of them do you enjoy the most?
SD: Sometimes it’s just seeing them complete is the most enjoyable thing. I do these projects in order to put something in front of myself, to be able to experience this other kind of huge scope, or distance in time. But to understand it, I can condense these events into these photographs and then share my understanding of that with audiences. I do think that any artist makes their art because they want to see it. There’s something that does not exist, and they want to bring it into the world and experience it themselves.
SB: Was this series the most complicated one you’ve ever done, and if not, which was?
SD: I guess it would be the Penn Station photographs, which share some of these same technical devices, were bigger in scope and included way more CG. I thought I was going to be done with that kind of process with that series. But when the Venice Biennale 2022 commission came along, I thought, just one last time, do one last crowd project. I’ve been doing crowds since 2008.
Installation view, Stan Douglas, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, May 23—July 29, 2023, courtesy of David Zwirner
“I do think that any artist makes their art because they want to see it. There’s something that does not exist, and they want to bring it into the world and experience it themselves.”
SB: I mean, that’s a skill in itself, just choreographing lots and lots of people and pulling off, making it believable. Another thing that I am very interested in is your use of juxtapositions of images. It’s a way that you nudge a new looking and thinking about events. I was thinking about Disco Angola (2012) in particular, but there are other projects as well. Can you talk a bit about the power of contextualization as a tool and your use of it?
SD: Well, it’s kind of like doing a montage in space. There’s a great line from Godard that says, “An image isn’t a picture; an image is what happens when you get a picture beside a picture.” So really, it’s the imagination of how these two things connect. Which isn’t really present, but it happens conceptually. And that’s very much what I was trying to do with Disco Angola, to look at how these juxtaposed images, even though they’re in a very different context, do have visual rhymes, but also to depict in different ways, the appropriation of a local scene by a bigger force that in a way perverts its original intention or enjoyment or autonomy.
Installation view, Stan Douglas, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, May 23—July 29, 2023, photo by Elon Schoenholz, courtesy of David Zwirner
SB: There’s a lot of disruption with your work. It’s always about disruption, isn’t it?
SD: Thematically and often in its manifestation as well.
SB: You create a lot of scenes with vast interiors that feel theatrical or operatic in scale. I was thinking of your Penn Station series, but were there early cinematic or theatrical experiences that were key or foundational for you? I know you’ve returned recently to the theater again.
SD: So, one of my first jobs was as an usher in the theater in Vancouver.
SB: How old were you?
SD: It was a little place. I was just in my late teens. I’d see plays multiple times, and I saw maybe six performances of Endgame by Samuel Beckett. I understood it was a terrible production, but I realized there was something really interesting in the text and that maybe I should seek out Beckett. He became quite an influence on me ever since. Even in the theater, the play I did previously, Helen Lawrence, is all about that disruption between the actual and the virtual, the present and the cinematic. And I’m doing a new one right now. We’re doing technical tests this summer that will be hopefully presented next year.
SB: So, in a way, Beckett was someone who triggered very early inspiration, but it was not through university or school. It was a personal discovery.
SD: Yes, and then a few years later, I was in a bookstore, and I saw a new book by Beckett. I didn’t realize he was still alive. And then that kind of inspired me to read everything by him. I did do an exhibition in 1987 of his teleplays.
SB: Which is quite ambitious. It’s clear quite early on that you were unafraid of doing work like that.
SD: Yes, and in many cases, I was kind of unprepared. Later in Stuttgart, I got to see everything, and also luckily had a great time with James Knowlson at the Beckett Archive in Reading, in the UK.
Installation view, Stan Douglas, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, May 23—July 29, 2023, photo by Elon Schoenholz, courtesy of David Zwirner
SB: In the last few years, there have been calls for more pluralistic and diverse readings of historical narratives, whether in museums, schools, or academic settings. You conceptually have been provoking questions like these in your career over many years. I was curious what your thoughts are on these today and how things have changed in your eyes.
SD: It’s good to see those things happening more generally. But yes, as you say, my interest has always been in minor histories, things which are to one side of the great events, or as quote-unquote “great events,” because whatever is happening historically is manifest on a very local scale as well. And I’m more interested in seeing how that plays itself out because that’s where we live, you know, in that location. In terms of the changes academically, I can’t really talk to that so much because, yes, I’ve always had this attitude about not dealing with master narratives exclusively.
SB: Okay. Instead, you’re getting on with it by doing the work, no?
SD: Yeah.
“My interest has always been in minor histories, things which are to one side of the great events, or as quote-unquote “great events,” because whatever is happening historically is manifest on a very local scale as well.”
SB: What are your thoughts on the future of photography and film? You were ahead and approached the role of image-making conceptually, so you are okay. But we are in a time where the context and how we experience imagery have changed dramatically. I am curious what you think about that because it is a bit of a dilemma now, isn’t it, for some practitioners?
SD: Yes, well, photography has always been a distortion of reality. You know, reducing four dimensions to two. And it really doesn’t present human vision the way we see, and even though people sort of identify with it, we don’t see a world like that. We see mostly with our minds and not with our eyes. So getting back to that would be a valuable thing, and maybe this sort of disruption would allow that to take place. But the main thing that happened with the emergence of Photoshop, which had been a condition for a long time, is that photographs are easily manipulatable because of their certain obstacle rules. With Photoshop, clearly, this idea of there being a kernel of truth in photographs is not really present anymore. And if that becomes the case, then a photographer has to take responsibility for the image they make. I can’t say this is the way it is just because it was there. They have to say that this is the image that I want to use to represent the world in this particular way because it could be anything you want it to be.
The issue with cinema these days is that it’s slowly becoming less and less a group experience. There’s been a few disruptions that happened, through TV, home video, and streaming now, so most people experience cinema through devices and TV screens as opposed to having that collective experience, which was the old condition. And somehow, ironically, that collective embodied experience of cinema happens in the art world more than it does in the industrial storytelling one because, in an art gallery installation, you are experiencing the work with your body and other people.
SB: Yes, I’ve been thinking recently about the sacred space aspect of attention and focus when people go into art film large screen environments. There’s a willingness to give oneself over, to opening up to something different that used to be the cinematic experience. As you say, we don’t do that anymore so much. What are your thoughts then on theater?
SD: I don’t see enough. Someone I always try to see productions by is Ivo van Hove, a Belgian director, who I’m quite impressed with. I was lucky enough also to see The Ring Cycle by Frank Carstorf in 2013. And he’s one of the original people to use video in theater, so experiencing that was quite a treat as well. Apparently, Katie Mitchell is another practitioner who’s been involved with using media in theater, so I’m trying to find that. She’s a British director who works at the Schaubühne, Berlin, I believe.
Stan Douglas, ISDN (2022), still from two-channel video installation, © Stan Douglas, courtesy of the artist, the National Gallery of Canada, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner
SB: And what are you working on next?
SD: A theater production called Locus standi, which is a legal phrase defined in the first two pages of the script. It is a banned play based on the 1976 extradition hearing of Leonard Peltier. He was a native activist who was accused of killing FBI agents and was then tried and jailed with false evidence. He’s still in jail today. His lawyers in Vancouver made their argument that he would receive cruel, unusual punishment in the US because of the historical relations between settlers and indigenous people, which they laid out quite explicitly in the trial. Plus, the witnesses were very vivid characters, and it’s kind of amazing. I boiled down 2,000 pages of testimony into a two-hour, 200-page script.
SB: Do you enjoy the writing process?
SD: Yeah, for the longest time I couldn’t start that. I had all kinds of procrastination. I got a very vague indication that somebody at the Royal Opera or British National Opera might be interested in me doing The Threepenny Opera. So I wrote a new translation of that because I know the play quite well. And that was really just procrastinating from getting down to the Peltier text because I couldn’t get in contact with him. Finally, I wrote to him through his defense fund, sending it by FedEx. The next day I got a callback, and when I was finally in touch with Peltier, and he gave his approval, I basically went down to work and got the first draft in two weeks. So that was quite a furious process but also quite enjoyable too.
SB: Wow, it’s quite incredible what you’ve achieved. Is theater going to become more of a big thing for you, or do you like always juggling between different mediums?
SD: Juggling. If I have a specific idea, I’ll do it.
SB: So it’s always the concept and the idea behind it, really, rather than the action.
SD: Yes, exactly. It’s not like I’m a theater director, therefore directing theater. It’s like, ‘What idea do I have that would be better for it?’ For instance, with this new project, I originally conceived it as a video installation, but then I realized this is about presence, it’s about speaking, it’s about people in a room. It should just be a play, and that’s what it is.
SB: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Stan. It’s been fascinating hearing your thoughts on your work and your process.
Stan Douglas
David Zwirner
Los Angeles
May 23—July 29, 2023
David Zwirner
@davidzwirner
Sascha Behrendt
@sascha.behrendt
Since the late 1980s, Stan Douglas (b. 1960) has created films and photographs—and more recently, theater productions and other multidisciplinary projects—that investigate the parameters of their medium. His ongoing inquiry into technology's role in image-making and how those mediations infiltrate and shape collective memory has resulted in works that are at once specific in their historical and cultural references and broadly accessible.
Douglas lives and works in Vancouver and Los Angeles, where he is the Chair of the Graduate Art program at ArtCenter College of Design. He studied at Emily Carr College of Art in Vancouver in the early 1980s. Douglas was one of the first artists to be represented by David Zwirner, where he had his first American solo exhibition in 1993. The artist has since had sixteen solo exhibitions with the gallery, and at present, Stan Douglas is on view at David Zwirner, Los Angeles.
Stan Douglas portrait by Daniel Dorsa, courtesy of David Zwirner.
Sascha Behrendt
Contributor, London and New York
A writer and former Associate Publisher for artcritical.com, Sascha has lived in Paris, Berlin, London, and New York. Before focusing on art, she worked with Stella McCartney and graphic designer Peter Saville. She has written about and interviewed artists such as Arthur Jafa, Dana Hoey, Nicola Tyson, Arlene Shechet, and Francesca Woodman for artcritical, BOMB, and Reflektor magazine.