Anthony Downey
Stan Douglas was at the Serpentine Gallery, London,
27 February – 7 April 2002.
www.serpentinegallery.org
Nathaniel, the protagonist in ETA Hoffmann’s
inspiring tale Der Sandmann is afflicted by a number of things, not least
the belief that he is being pursued by the malevolent figure of Coppelius,
also known as the Sandman. One of the more subtle aspects of Hoffmann’s tale
is its insight into Nathaniel’s latent rather than manifest fear: whilst
aghast at the return into his life of Coppelius/the Sandman, Nathaniel is
equally, if not more, terrified by the return to a way of thinking he
assumed he had left behind. It is this dread of the real being usurped by
the imaginary that most horrifies Nathaniel and that inexorably propels him
towards his fatal demise.
Throughout Stan Douglas’s film installations there is a similar concern with
ways of thinking being supplanted by others. In his 1995 work Der Sandmann,
which takes its premise and title from Hoffmann’s text, Douglas focuses on
the Schrebergarten that once dominated East Germany. Under Communism, these
gardens were the primary source of subsidised food supplies; after the fall
of the Berlin Wall, however, the Schrebergarten were to become the focus of
capitalist real-estate speculation.
That an old way of thinking is being contested by a new ideal is evident in
the fissure that demarcates the middle of the screen. On the left, images of
the newly built-upon Schrebergarten, complete with the flotsam of modern
living, slowly eclipse all signs of subsistence farming, only to be in turn
eclipsed by images of uniform rows of winter cabbages. The past may have
been superseded, but this has not negated its ability to re-emerge in the
present.
The paradigmatic adjustment from, in the above instance, Communism to
Capitalism, has its counterpart in Le Détroit (2000), which follows a woman
returning to a once industrially powerful but now run-down part of
inner-city Detroit. Systems and ways of thinking – industrialism in this
case – have not yielded the allegory of utopian living once promised to the
city’s residents; on the contrary, post-industrialism has produced a
landscape of fear and alienation. This suspicion and estrangement is
accentuated by the mechanics of the film’s installation: suspended in the
middle of the gallery, the positive print of the film has been projected
onto the front of the screen and the negative print onto the back. The two
film projections, running slightly out of sync, give the figure portrayed a
slightly tenebrous and ghost-like quality, as if the empty but idealistic
promises of the past have come back to haunt her present.
In Journey into Fear (2001) we move from a post-industrial, late-capitalist
landscape to a netherworld defined by largely unaccountable global finance
markets. Based on two separate films, one made by Norman Foster in 1942, the
other by Daniel Mann in 1975, the film reflects upon the way in which the
period in-between saw a politically inflected internationalism being
eviscerated by the demands of global capitalism. Aboard a cargo vessel in
the middle of the ocean, the abstractions of global finance are articulated
through the often tautological arguments that occur between the two
protagonists. The film, with the aid of computers, runs for six-and-a-half
days in total and presents a seemingly infinite number of variations in the
narrative, each one undermining and yet advancing the other in a manner that
mirrors ongoing debates about the local effects of globalised institutions.
The present moment, for Douglas, is an agonistic instant, an ongoing contest
between past, present and future that ultimately lacks resolution. And
herein lies much of Douglas’s appeal: the use of film to promote narrational
and conceptual apprehension rather than ideological and interpretive
certainty – a method, moreover, that is consistently at odds with the
closure usually associated with the medium.
Stan Douglas, Le Détroit, 2000, still from synchronised two-track 16mm black-and-white film installation. Goetz Collection. © Stan Douglas. Courtesy: the artist and David Zwirner, New York