At the center of Stan Douglas’s current survey at Bard College’s Hessel Museum of Art in Upstate New York is a new video installation with images so appalling and so hypnotic that I watched the work through three times.
That video installation shares its name with, and remakes a portion of, D. W. Griffith’s three-hour silent movie Birth of a Nation (1915), a troubling cornerstone of film history that popularized editorial techniques still in use today while also offering racist images and white nationalist tropes that have also unfortunately lingered on. Douglas’s Birth of a Nation appropriates a particularly egregious sequence from Griffith’s epic, then explodes it and weaves a new tapestry from its fragments.
In the Griffith film, a wealthy white woman named Flora receives a marriage proposal from Gus, a Black freedman who won’t take no for an answer. Apparently viewing that proposal as a threat, she retreats from him so hastily that she falls off a cliff and dies. Her brother Ben, a Klansman, lynches Gus in a horrifying moment that Griffith presents as justice served.
Douglas somberly re-presents the Griffith sequence with few alterations, casting it alongside four new videos of the artist’s making that take on the perspectives of other characters in the original film. Like Griffith’s footage, Douglas’s images are shot in black and white and played without sound, but Douglas has not faithfully re-created Griffith’s film. Differences abound: Flora’s channel shows her admiring a squirrel, not a bird, and another channel showing a new version of the lynching features a burning cross that Griffith never depicted. There are also a range of freshly made characters thought up by Douglas, including a ghost—also named Gus—that never appears in the 1915 Birth of a Nation.
In the end, following the lynching, one of Douglas’s channels turns to color as the artist’s actors and their horse march off the set. Left behind is a blue screen, onto which Douglas could composite fresh imagery in post-production. But he has left the backdrop bare, without any pictures in place of its blue field, suggesting that Douglas feels his images are subject to change.
This new Birth of a Nation, which was originally commissioned for a blockbuster show in Los Angeles about monuments this fall, portrays the past as being both unsettling and unsettled—and it shows that artists can create new images that revisit the historical record and amend it as they see fit. Ironically, Douglas’s installation seems likely to endure as one of the great artworks made this year.
Re-editing and remaking history have been core to Douglas’s artistic project ever since he shot to international fame with works such as Hors-Champs (1992), one of the terrific early works being shown at Bard. This video installation features black-and-white footage of four musicians performing a free jazz composition based on Albert Ayler’s Spirits Rejoice (1965). Two projections appear on either side of a hanging screen in the center of a room. One side shows the musicians at work—a drummer drumming away, a saxophonist blowing into his brass—and purports to have been broadcast on television in the mid-1960s. The other side has shots that supposedly weren’t aired.
Because the hanging screen divides the room, it’s impossible to see all of Douglas’s footage simultaneously. His point is that the “good” footage—the stuff presented to audiences as worthy of entering the record—tends to leave out a lot of information. But the “bad” footage is equally tempting to watch. No matter, because Douglas’s installation is itself centered around a lie: none of the material in Hors-Champs was ever shown on TV, even though it looks like it was.
When it was shown at the 1992 edition of Documenta, Hors-Champs made Douglas a sensation. He’s since appeared in two more editions of Documenta and represented his home country of Canada at the 2022 Venice Biennale. As Douglas’s star has ascended, his budgets have risen, resulting in bigger installations that look and feel more like films made for theatrical release. Some even flirt with genres familiar to multiplex visitors, like science fiction.
Those cinematic works are not in his Bard show, which is astonishingly his first US survey in more than 20 years—and that is a credit to curator Lauren Cornell, whose exhibition generally spotlights the side of Douglas’s oeuvre that I find more conceptually rich. It’s a show that led me to realize I was wrong about this artist, whom I began to write off because I found many of his recent works too glossy to leave a mark. By contrast, most of the works at Bard are rougher around the edges and therefore—to me, at least—more interesting.
The show brings to the fore rarely seen early works such as the remarkable video Nu•tka• (1996), in which Douglas’s camera takes in the lapping waves and placid beaches of Vancouver Island. The work derives its name from Nootka Sound, which separates that island from Douglas’s birthplace of Vancouver. It is, in part, an attempt to disturb the vistas seen here, which are part of unceded Mowachahat-Muchalaht land. As Douglas’s camera drifts along the shore, his images split apart, such that two different shots showing entirely different locations will merge, their bits and pieces mashing together along alternating raster lines. Meanwhile, on the soundtrack, two men’s voices—one representing a Spanish explorer, the other a British naval captain—overlap, creating a soup of words that mirrors all the colonial squabbling over land that never rightfully belonged to Europeans.
Watching Nu•tka• for too long—which is something you might want to do because this six-minute video is so entrancing—can cause dizziness. That seems intentional. Douglas is interested in creating images that trouble what we think we know, causing history to fray or blur. In the Bard exhibition’s catalog, several contributors invoke a 1998 remark by Douglas in which he described a fascination with “moments when history could have gone one way or another.” The remark best describes why there is such a sense of uncertainty in his early work, which, during the ’90s, was austere and opaque.
Since then, Douglas has made more easily legible works such as Luanda-Kinshasa (2013), which may be his most widely acclaimed video. It features six hours of musicians jamming out in what appears to be a 1970s recording studio. To enjoy this work, you don’t need to know that the video isn’t actually a documentary, even though it appears that way, or that Douglas’s set is a faithful re-creation of the famed New York studio where Charles Mingus, Pink Floyd, Miles Davis, and many others recorded some of their most beloved music. You don’t even need to understand that, through its title, the work’s title implies a bond between liberation movements in America during the 1970s and the contemporaneous push for Angola’s independence from Portugal. I suspect that the people I saw dancing to the video’s funky sounds weren’t aware of any of that, anyway.
Does that mean some resonance has been lost in translation? Perhaps, although that may be the point, as Douglas’s photographic work makes clear. Some examples, like those from his 2022 Canadian Pavilion for the Venice Biennale, represent moments of strife, like one showing Occupy Wall Street demonstrators going toe to toe with police officers on the Brooklyn Bridge. They are stunning images whose attractive surfaces contain barbs.
Despite that image looking like a documentary photograph, Douglas’s picture is composed of staged elements that have been elaborately stitched together. (The work’s title, New York City, 1 October 2011, also follows a documentary photography naming convention intended to indicate immediacy and facticity, but Douglas made this piece in 2021, about a decade after the events pictured.) One starts to wonder which people shown here, if any at all, were really there on October 1, 2011—the man with a “MOOSE IS LOOSE” shirt who raises a middle finger to the cops; the stone-faced police chiefs who look on without affect at arrests being made; the photographers who take their pictures from high up among the bridge’s girders, adopting the perspective that Douglas himself mimics.
When I first encountered this photograph in Venice, I paid it little mind, finding it alluring but empty. But seeing it at Bard, the photograph got me thinking about how history is cobbled together piece by piece, just like Douglas’s image, and how new truths result when its elements are reenacted and remade. Inaccuracies inherently result: Google the actual pictures of the demonstration, and notice how many decisions Douglas has made during his restaging of them, including his choice to foreground the heavy presence of law enforcement, which is something some other photographs did not manage to do that day—even as 700 people were arrested. But those inaccuracies lead to truths of their own that we can only see in hindsight.
In the Douglas picture, I’m drawn to one protester—one I couldn’t find in any real pictures from that day—who holds a cardboard sign reading “UNFUCK THE WORLD.” Across his oeuvre, Douglas’s work attempts to do just that, and accomplishes it beautifully, hauntingly, and soberly, revising the past in order to lead us into the future.
