postmodern modernism

stan douglas is an artist from vancouver. though a lot of his work deals with subjects that have a modern sensibility, he approaches it in a decidedly more postmodern way.

with his installation win, place or show (1998), he addresses the issues of the transformation of public space that occurred in postwar north america, specifically the urban renewal that was happening in canada in the 1950s. a grid of apartment blocks and row houses was slated to be built on what was left of one of vancouver's poorest neighborhoods after all the original buildings were torn down. douglas's piece, a looping, six minute film about two dock workers who share an apartment in one of these new buildings, expresses the isolated, agitated feelings of people during this time from a modernist perspective. the film "chronicles an antagonistic conversation that flares up on a wet day off. After erupting into physical violence, it then lapses into weary irritation, only to be rekindled into a smoldering verbal friction."

douglas presents these modern ideas postmodernly: during the exhibition, the video, shot from 20 different camera angles, loops in real time but each time in a different combination of cuts, so that what the viewer gets in an endless, fragmented series of images from many different view points. each time a new montage of cuts plays, there's a new version of the story. "In this way Douglas not only deconstructs the conventions and values integral to the style, the genre, the medium, and even the art form he employs but, by highlighting devices of disidentification, foregrounds the conditions and terms of spectatorship and, by extension, indicts as false any encompassing ideology."

douglas says of his own work that "it is less concerned with the narration of the event than with the space of its unfolding," which i think relates back to what postmodernists were trying to do in finding a new way to express something that couldn't be expressed without language. playing with the idea that since everything's already been done, all you can do is find new ways to do it.

(quotes from this article by lynne cooke: stan douglas and douglas gordon: double vision)



win, place or show (1998)



also connecting back to postmodernism, stan douglas has been influenced a lot by samuel beckett's work. one of his early productions called monodramas (1991) was a series of 30- to 60-second micronarratives that were shown during commercial breaks nightly for three weeks. the videos were made to mimic commercials but were actually fractured bits of a narrative that never came together. douglas also worked as a curator on beckett teleplays (1988) which focussed on beckett's work that dealt with how to produce for television. by considering these two works together, douglas presents himself as the "artist as producer," and shows how the two seemingly-separate roles can actually work well together in order to challenge peoples' ideas on how one can practice art. with monodramas and teleplays, douglas "defines...a syntax constituting and articulating culture and society in terms of difference and representation, where the notion of identity is constantly refracted through an engaged multi-cultural media perspective of the 90s." (source)

one of the videos can be seen here: http://www.mediaartnet.org/works/monodramas/video/1/