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Stan Douglas: Inconsolable Memories
By Clint Burnham
In a talk he gave last fall in Vancouver, Stan Douglas divided his work into four periods: his early work, his analytic work, his synthetic work, and his recombinant work. These last three periods were divided according to how he treated narrative.
Thus 1992's Hors-champ (which projected two views of a jazz session in Paris onto the two sides of a movie screen) belongs to the analytic period for how it broke apart the presentation of a "free jazz" performance so that we could see the musicians "resting," or "waiting" for their turn to play.
Similarly, Nut·ka· (1996), shot on the West Coast of Vancouver Island, and counterposing British/Spanish imperial adventures with First Nations people's "first contact" with Europeans, belongs to the synthetic period. In Nut·ka·, a camera turns around in Nootka sound, and two sets of images interlace via video "raster lines," occasionally meshing for a glorious view of the natural sublime; too, the voices of actors playing Spanish and British naval commanders play off each other, coming into a chorus at the same time the images do. Thus, unlike the separation of Hors-champ, Nut·ka·'s effect is to synthesize, momentarily, the historical and visual accounts of colonialism.
Inconsolable Memories (2005), which travelled to UBC's Belkin after premiering at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, belongs to Douglas's latest period, then, the recombinant, along with his Journey into Fear (2002), and Suspiria (2003).
Inconsolable Memories combines large photographs of "repurposed" buildings in Havana and Cuba with a filmwork based upon the 1968 Cuban film Memories of Underdevelopment by Tomás Guitérrez Alea. The photographs are what we have come to expect of Douglas's practice; gorgeous and massive, they depict a crumbling revolution in an image-repertoire that is at once vertiginous in detail and awesome in its grandeur.
These "repurposed" buildings have lived perhaps three lives: pre-revolutionary capitalism, the communist period of 1959-89, and the "Special Period" after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Thus we have a Royal Bank of Canada building turned into a parking lot for scooters, or a cinema that has been turned into a carpentry shop.
The visual/architectural affect here is similar to some of his photographs from the Détroit project a few years ago, where a movie theatre had become a parking lot, and "Rooftops, Habana Vieja" recall his photographs of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside that complemented Journey Into Fear.
Rooftops, Habana Vieja © Stan Douglas 2004
Courtesy the Artist and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC
But the different logics of capital are also evident. Whereas the Detroit example is due to white flight and the abandonment of inner cities, the Cuban pictures are due also to a form of capital flight, with the decayed architecture of the colonial period continuing long after its ideologies have apparently been replaced by the glitter of late capitalism.
Similarly, the vegetation and rooftops of Havana may meet their match in the Edwardian architecture of Vancouver's skid row, but again we have a dialectical shifting of gears here, as if the ghosts of both cities' pasts are present not merely in their buildings, but also in their early 21st century fates.
This is to say, Douglas's interests in failed Utopias is not the postmodernist's glib "I told you so," but rather, perhaps, the modernist's melancholy, "I only wish I were wrong."
A clue to the historiographic rupture at work in Douglas' show, then, may lie in the odd pairing of emotion and reflection in its title: Inconsolable Memories. What does it mean to say not that we are inconsolable—this is a recognizable emotion, to not be able to take solace after a loved one's death or on viewing the carnage of a political atrocity—but that a memory is? Here Freud's remarks on melancholy and mourning seem apropos when he notes the similarity between depression, for which we often find no "logical" cause, and mourning, which leaves us numb, like depression, but comforts us, perhaps, because it is rational.
The inconsolable memories of Douglas' art, then, are located not merely in the photographs of bewildered buildings, but in its filmwork. And, again, we have a case of an artwork being "repurposed"; this time, not a building, but a film.
Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment—one of the first features made in post-revolutionary Cuba—depicts an architect who remains in Havana even while his family and girlfriend abscond to Miami. Sergio, the protagonist, moons around his apartment and Havana, interrupted by television footage of the 1962 Bay of Pigs incident (wherein Cuban exiles attempted, disastrously, to invade Cuba) and still photos of his memories.
Inconsolable Memories Production Still © Stan Douglas 2005
Courtesy the Artist and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC
The film makes an analogy between the conflictual forms of representation—the film's black and white fluidity, the TV's staticky dissonance, and the stills' rupture of the narrative (Jameson has remarked that the purpose of other visual forms appearing in film is to demonstrate the superiority of the latter)—and the economic underdevelopment that plagued Cuba's past. The acting was wooden, and the shots made Cuba seem like a cardboard set. It was all very Brechtian for the Third World '60s.
In Douglas's film, he updates the action to center around the Mariel boatlift of 1980—so we now have footage of Bush Sr. politicking in Florida—and adds some snipes at Pierre Elliot Trudeau, our 1970s Prime Minister who had a liking for Third World guerrillas.
But most profoundly, the film itself is, as Douglas's talk noted, "recombinant," or (according to my Oxford dictionary), rearranged on a genetic level by way of crossing over chromosomes to form a combination different from that of its parents. In the film's case, Douglas has accomplished two forms of recombination, one via the historical updating I just mentioned, and another via the film's re-imagined narrative structure.
Two reels play (like his homeboy Rodney Graham, Douglas is into bizarre technologies of projection), while a computer "randomly" decides how much of each reel will play. Thus the narrative, in looping fashion (metaphors are only sketchy here—like recombinance itself), disorients the audience like, Douglas has said, Sergio's own personality.
Inconsolable Memories Production Still © Stan Douglas 2005
Courtesy the Artist and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC
A further level of this narrative trickery was added by the Belkin's unique presentation of Inconsolable Memories, for the gallery also had a continuous showing of Alea's film. Thus, in memory, the two films begin to become confused, and the gallery becomes a mock cranium for the viewer's memories which are, if not inconsolable, perhaps incoherent.
But this incoherence is, if not intentional, then at least of a piece with Stan Douglas's work over the past ten years, which has tended to feature both suites of stunning photography (often including a set or two from the accompanying filmwork), and a discordant or disjunctive essay in film or video.
The harsh dialectics of these works—which marry a marketable commodity to an anti-market critique—stand up under the venerable remarks of Adorno: "A successful work, according to immanent criticism, is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure."
