Tag Archives: Stan Douglas

CHARLES GAINES IN CONVERSATION

When I went to graduate school in the 1960s… I was faced with a dilemma… I was surrounded by ideas about art that I couldn’t identify with. I couldn’t identify with the practice of trying to decide what to put in a painting using a kind of intuition. Or looking at a painting as a vehicle for self-expression. It’s not that I looked down on that, or that I thought it was such a bad idea. It’s just that I wasn’t working in a manner that required that kind of behavior… Then I ran into a person who told me about a couple of books, which I bought and read. One was by the art historian Henri Focillon [1881–1943], called The Life of Forms in Art [1934]. The other was a big picture book on Tantric Buddhist art by Ajit Mookerjee [1915–1990]. In those books I began to find things that made sense to me in terms of art production.

[Focillon] had a Platonic perspective, that form was synonymous with number, with mathematics, with structure. And he said that form had a life of its own, had its own reciprocal fitness, had its own autonomous exigency..

This sounds like the tenets of high modernism. I don’t think it followed those tenets in talking about some kind of tautology or self-referential or self-reflexive apparatus. I saw it as a general critique of expressionism, which was central to my problem. I didn’t feel connected with the objects I was making, because when I made them, I wasn’t convinced that there was any connection between my motive to make something and the thing that I made. It just seemed arbitrary to me. I would see painters laboring in front of a painting, trying to decide whether a corner should be red or blue. To me it didn’t make any difference. It could be red or blue, you know? How can they feel good about a judgment that they make? On what basis do they establish this connection? And for the life of me, I couldn’t figure it out.

Focillon gave me the idea that you’re ultimately not the author of the object. You’re more like a vehicle of this realization without an author. With Tantric art I saw visual representation of the same idea.Charles Gaines*

This weekend—in conjunction with his Hauser & Wirth exhibition CHARLES GAINES—PALM TREES AND OTHER WORKS—join Gaines in conversation with Thelma Golden, Laura Owens, and Gary Simmons.

ARTIST TALK—CHARLES GAINES IN CONVERSATION with THELMA GOLDEN, LAURA OWENS, and GARY SIMMONS

Sunday, November 3, at 3 pm.

Hauser & Wirth

901 East 3rd Street, downtown Los Angeles.

“Charles Gaines, January 31, 1995,” in ArtCenter Talks: Graduate Seminar, The First Decade 1986–1995, edited by Stan Douglas (New York: David Zwirner Books / Pasadena, CA: ArtCenter Graduate Press, 2016), 172–197.

See Gina Osterloh on Gaines’ Shadows series.

Charles Gaines—Palm Trees and Other Works, Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, September 14, 2019–January 5, 2020, photographs by Fredrik Nilsen. Images courtesy and © the artist, the photographer, and Hauser & Wirth.

STAN DOUGLAS AT THE HAMMER

“Jacques Derrida loved the word observe. He paid special attention to its root word, serve, which tied observation to respect, service, and deference. To observe something, he thought, was an act of humility. You gave yourself over to the details, gathering data and storing it in reserve for the future… *

Stan Douglas uses lens-based media to facilitate this kind of servitude to details. I mention Derrida not to overemphasize the theoretical structures at work in Douglas’ output (and there are many), but rather to point out that the production details Douglas wants viewers to notice in his work are many and fine, and require sustained concentration…. [His work] is an invitation to become curious: about the narratives that have brought Douglas’ subjects to his camera and to the viewer’s gaze; about the processes Douglas uses to make an image look the way it does; and about how his subjects have emerged from seemingly long-lost historical moments and ended up in his pictures.” — Katie Anania

This week, Stan Douglas will give the UCLA Department of Art Lecture at the Hammer.

STAN DOUGLAS talk

Thursday, April 25, at 7:30 pm.

Hammer Museum

10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles.

*See Jacques DerridaMemoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 23.

Stan Douglas, from top: Exodus, 1975, 2012, digital C-print mounted on aluminum; Malabar People series, Dancer, 1951, 2011, digital fiber print; The Secret Agent installation view, David Zwirner, New York, 2016, six-channel video installation, eight audio channels with six musical variations, color, sound, 53:35 minutes; Luanda-Kinshasa (2013, still, Jason Moran at left), single-channel video projection, color, sound, 6 hours, 1 minute; Abbott and Cordova, 7 August 1971, 2008, chromogenic print mounted on aluminum; Inconsolable Memories (2005, still), two synchronized asymmetrical film loop projections, 16 mm black-and-white film, sound, fifteen permutations with a common period of 5:39 minutes. Images © Stan Douglas and courtesy the artist, David Zwirner, and Victoria Miro.

HELEN LAWRENCE AT ROYCE HALL

The artist and professor Stan Douglas explicates our postmodern condition—our crossed lines of narrative in a post-metanarrative age—for his students at Art Center College of Design, and for the rest of us in works like his multi-channel video installation The Secret Agent (2016).

In 2014 Douglas—in collaboration with writer Chris Haddock and Canadian Stage—created Helen Lawrence, a postwar, film noir piece set in The Old Hotel and Hogan’s Alley in Vancouver. “Performing live on a stage that functions as a giant blue screen, Helen Lawrence’s cast of twelve are filmed and transported into 3-D environments, the combined elements virtual and real then projected on a transparent screen hanging in front of them.”*

The Los Angeles premiere of Helen Lawrence takes place this weekend in a CAP UCLA production directed by Douglas.

 

HELEN LAWRENCE, Friday and Saturday, October 13 and 14, at 8 pm.

ROYCE HALL, UCLA, Los Angeles.

cap.ucla.edu/calendar/details/helen_lawrence2

J. Kelly Nestruck, Helen Lawrence review, The Globe and Mail, October 20, 2014.

Crystal Balint and Allan Louis in a Toronto production of Helen Lawrence. Photograph by David Cooper.

David Cooper

 

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