Alum Diego Bruno in conversation with artist Stan Douglas: “History is not over yet”
Helsinki: The Saastamoinen Foundation residence apartment is bathing in quaint light, September continues to stay warm and humid. Across the table Stan Douglas, Canadian visual artist and Diego Bruno, Argentinian Helsinki-based artist engage in a dialogue that bounces around in plentiful fragments, ranging from art as a machine, the viewer as an ethical being––and how the work works.
Diego Bruno: Your work is very vast, building a palimpsest of references and formal devices. I would like to name a few recurring, structuring elements. These are: history, time and temporality, space and its depiction. Media and medium, and a questioning of the reproduction of national, class, gender and race representations.
One question that I have is overarching: how do those elements composing the work support the question of its contemporaneity, of being current? What do you think your work does, or in other words, how does that work work?
Stan Douglas: To me, in the words of poet William Carlos Williams, the work of art is a machine that makes meaning. You put the elements together, to work together like a machine in various ways to produce meaning over time and in space. The various machines that I make often refer to history, which is not an autonomous past, separate from us but is something that is still ongoing. History is not over yet.
What I very much want to do in my art is to provide a sense of alterity, of otherness. In art, you can produce models of thought. You can think otherwise in a way that you may not be able to in everyday life. That is the possibility that the machine offers. A status quo that does not necessarily have to be the way it is. In my work, I look at moments in history that are liminal and transitional, where history could have gone one way or another.
DB: You mean moments in history that remain open?
SD: Moments in time, where something crucial happened but where there was potential for something else to take place. The year 1848, the time of the French Revolution, has been an ongoing interest of mine ever since I read Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert. A moment in time when the European people had an intuition of what the bourgeoisie should do as a class to gain representation within governance and power. Eventually, every country had their own 1848 whether it succeeded or not.
DB: Later you situate your references in the people’s uprising of 2010 and 2011. Here, however, it is not the bourgeoisie revolting, but the working class. So the work becomes radically different, non?
SD: These later uprisings were never regarded as political protests but rather as disturbances in need of police action. What happened in Tunisia, other parts of North Africa, the US and the UK, were never truly believed to challenge their respective political situations primarily because there was no common platform or party. These people were thought to be utopians, radicals or hooligans. Nothing that would pose a real threat in the way 1848 did, because this was a working class revolt and not a bourgeois one.
DB: Going back to the beginning of our conversation, and art as a device, what do you think happens with the spectator? How do you work in order to avoid the issue of a preconceived viewer? A kind of ethical being that precedes the work and produces identification with the content of the work?
SD: I cannot preconceive, since I cannot assume that every viewer is the same. Each person will have their own interpretation of the same machine, of the same event. Like in the case of the police and the demonstrators, the situation is laid out, but not in a judgemental or ethical way. It is not saying that ‘this is good’ or ‘this is bad’, or ‘this is how it was’. Even if I am doing so in a very artificial manner, I am not working in order to be realistic or photographic. The images of these demonstrations are hyperrealistic––too much is being seen in the shadows, there is too much resolution in the characters. It is just not like a real picture. What you see however, is relations between characters, these micro-narratives and mini dramas between characters which do play towards the larger whole. Sometimes playing to the dynamics of the crowd.
With the 2011 Vancouver Stanley Cup riots, I, in turn, wanted to look at it as a political action. The revolt has often been brushed off as hooliganism but many of those people were working class in a city that is just so expensive that the nurses, teachers and, indeed, its police officers cannot live in it. Young people will never be able to buy a home there. It is a horrific situation, and I think a lot of the resentment was taken out on the city of Vancouver.
DB: When it comes to the characters, and the references they build in terms of identity––African-American, Native American, Black Canadian, migrants––to me it still seems that the work has to do much more with class.
SD: Everything to me is intertwined. In a way I think class is a primary category and racial identity is the technology of class division.
DB: I have a question regarding your moving image work. I am curious about the moments when the viewer might struggle with the material. Like with looping, the variation and recombination of montage in real time and camera angles and dobbelgänger projection.
SD: All of the techniques used in the time-based work are practical. It is all based around the issue of making time-based work for a museum setting with people walking in and out randomly. How do you accommodate that viewer experience with time-based work? I kind of solved that problem a long time ago with Overture (1986), where the installation uses three sets of film of a train journey through the Rocky Mountains with six texts from the opening section of Marcel Proust’s, In Search of Lost Time looping in the soundtrack. You are never sure whether you have seen it all before, whether you are somewhere in the middle––you find yourself in the same temporal confusion as the narrator.
DB: There is something about spaces in your work which I think is crucial because politics take place. Sites and space seems to be an axis for the visualisation of the political subjectivities that you are referring to. Space also becomes the object that allows you to see and articulate something that remains unresolved.
SD: Right, when I first began looking at the 2011 demonstration material from Hackney, the commentary on Sky News was talking about hooligans stealing TVs. But what I saw was people turning upside down the relationship of who is controlling the space. The police no longer controlled it, but the people living in the neighbourhood. They could close down the streets, they could stop the traffic and the police. While the police made a few attempts to shut the whole thing down, they got thrown off by the scale of the activity. There was tremendous pleasure in turning the status quo upside down. Protest through pleasure.
In Abbott & Cordova (2009), my piece that restages the Gastown riot, in the thirteen by eight metre photograph, we see the police looking for the hippies as middle class couples living in the area walk past on their way to dinner, not getting molested by the officers. All these bodies are being created into groups by outside agents.
DB: This opens up another aspect of the work, the extreme levels of besideness. The characters are indexes that are highly composed, referring to processes that are not visible in the moment of a riot.
SD: It is a hyperreal condition, almost like a schematic of a riot.
DB: And then there is the camera that defines a space of visibility.
OK––how are we going with time? Ten minutes? Time is going so fast. I have one more question about subjectivity: what have you learned from your work?
SD: Everything, I guess. Through my work I want to make something elusive, concrete, distant or vast. Something I want to share with people.
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Stan Douglas, born 1960, is a Canadian artist based in Vancouver. Using photography, film and video installations, Douglas engages with historical narratives and contemporary issues, often investigating the parameters of respective mediums. His ongoing inquiry into technology’s role in image making, and how those mediations infiltrate and shape collective memory, has resulted in works that are at once specific in their historical and cultural references and broadly accessible. The artists’ significant achievements include numerous solo exhibitions at prestigious institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and Tate Modern, and his work has been featured in exhibitions internationally since the early 1980s including documenta IX, X and XI and five Venice Biennales. Douglas has received accolades for his contributions to contemporary art, including the Hasselblad Award, the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement and the Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.
Diego Bruno, born 1978, is an Argentinian artist based in Helsinki since the mid-2000s. He holds a BA in Fine Arts from the Escola Massana, Barcelona and an MFA in Fine Arts from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. Bruno’s work has been shown at WIELS, the centre for Contemporary Art in Brussels, the Latin American Art Museum of Buenos Aires, the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica in Barcelona, Manifesta 08 Murcia, Center for Contemporary Art Celje, Extra City in Antwerp, Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, Malmö Kunsthalle, Biennial of Moving Image Buenos Aires, Bienal Sur in Buenos Aires and the 39th EVA International Ireland Biennial, Gallery Hippolyte and Gallery Oksasenkatu 11, Helsinki amongst others.
Text: Elena Sulin