Stan Douglas

Dancing the here-and-now in empire’s ruins.

by

Acclaimed Vancouver artist Stan Douglas, soon to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale, presents two photographic series at Montreal’s PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art, on view until May 22. The first, Disco Angola, a series of works from the mid-1970s, links American disco culture with Angola’s war to gain independence from Portugal. The second, last year’s Penn Station’s Half Century, enacts a suite of staged cinema-style tableaus amidst a digital simulation of the palatial, though now-demolished, train station in New York City. The exhibition, titled Revealing Narratives, invites us to inhabit Douglas’s photojournalistic and cinematic compositions – to rely on their reliability, even as we sense we probably can’t.

The visitor’s immediate challenge in Disco Angola – discerning how its two themes might relate – seems opaque at first, but begins to unpack itself via visual cues. Here, youthful men and women, Black and white, dance and socialize in opulent ballrooms. The ornamental panels and gilded mouldings, once the markers of empire, shelter and enclose them even as they recline on cheap modern furniture amidst empty beer bottles and ashtrays filled with butts. Today, we are ready to draw political messages wherever Black and white identities are juxtaposed, but that’s not Douglas’s game. The people depicted here are not in service to ideas or politics. They are their own masters and fully committed to action – to dancing, watching the dancers or conversing. 

The Angolan images likewise present ordinary folks in ordinary situations against a backdrop of faded imperialism. In one image, people, mostly white, linger in the open air, sitting among cases and crates piled in a dusty square, looking ready to ship out. In another, a woman poses against a cinderblock wall painted in the colours of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola. She is dressed not for revolution, in helmet or fatigues, but as she pleases, in a hip, mint-green outfit with a white belt.  In yet another photo, a group of male soldiers – some of the movement’s guerrillas, perhaps – stand in a semicircle, clapping, focused intently on two colleagues dancing together.

The images here seem photojournalistic, as though Douglas is depicting history being written anew by ordinary people doing ordinary things, amidst the fading imperial markers of the past. In contrast, Penn Station’s Half Century is more cinematic, a photographic period piece. Douglas engaged a researcher to dig through old newspaper reports in search of historical moments from the life of the station, which operated from 1910 to 1963. Selected episodes are presented here, each resultant image peopled with figures shot in Vancouver and superimposed digitally against the monumental backdrop.

Though impeccably composed, even illusionistic, the effect is dubious, suppositious, a little chilly. The sheer size of the building, supported by massive steel arches, suggests its own unlikelihood, reminiscent of Piranesi’s classical drawings of Rome. It seems less a real building than a heavenly vault in the cosmology of American industrial capitalism. Recalling the disco images, the ghosts of older, pre-industrial imperialisms, articulated in ornate, carven stone, quietly live on in the shadows.

Below, on the vast, open floor, the affairs of humankind are carried out in force. A gigantic war bonds advertisement delineates prominently a racialized, male-centred hierarchy illustrated by a series of faces: at the top, a stern white soldier in a helmet, then a white conductor, a pudgy white engineer and, at bottom, a cheery Black porter. Squads of porters in the various tableaus remind us of the limited job options available to Black people. 

Yet Douglas’s approach is subtle and multivalent. In one image, we see a small cluster of white prisoners. We also see many Black people in seemingly consequential or, at least, enfranchised situations. In another image, a small group, Black and white, ascends a staircase from the platform below, as though emerging heroically from an American Hades. They are greeted by a crowd, with reporters and a photographer, as well as a man holding a red banner with gold fringes, the sort once used by unions, suffragettes and Communists.

We cannot see the banner’s message – but that is the allure of Douglas’s effects. The structures of power are prominent here, but to delineate them is not the point. Rather, he brings us into the image, makes us desire not only to see the future, but to live it, with only passing glances back to yesterday’s powers and princedoms. ■

Stan Douglas: Revealing Narratives, PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art in Montreal from Feb. 19 to May 22, 2022.

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PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art

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