Stan Douglas
Stan Douglas, Inconsolable Memories (film still), 2005 Courtesy the artist
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Stan Douglas, Inconsolable Memories (film still), 2005 Courtesy the artist |
Stan Douglas is renowned for creating work that is both historical chronicle and social commentary. His most recent project, Inconsolable Memories, was spurred by a very particular objective: to see Cuba before Fidel Castro dies.
As expressed in the exhibition’s catalogue, post-revolutionary Cuba stands as “an ideological relic of the twentieth century,” its long-standing resistance to advanced capitalism occupying a potent position in North American collective mythologies. Inconsolable Memories combines documentation of the lived realities of contemporary Cuba with a filmic portrait of unresolved issues facing the country and the culture.
The exhibition is introduced by a series of large-format photographs. The images document buildings in Havana that have been “repurposed” in the years since the 1959 revolution. Lavish structures—once banks, churches, theatres—have been structurally redefined to fit the needs of existing communities. They are uneasy images, depicting multiple histories, needs and ideologies in a single frame. This is the backdrop to the exhibition’s centerpiece, Douglas’s new film installation.
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Stan Douglas, Panopticon, Isla de Pinos / Isla de la Juventud, 2005, Digital C-print Courtesy of the artist/David Zwirner Gallery, New York |
It’s not quite a remake, but close. Based on a 1968 film by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Inconsolable Memories reinterprets the story of Sergio, a disillusioned architect struggling with conflict and change in tumultuous times. It is itself a repurposed narrative, and Douglas transposes Alea’s original, set in 1961–62, shortly after the enactment of the American embargo, to 20 years later, during the Mariel Boat Lift incident. In 1980, when Castro temporarily lifted the restrictions that kept Cubans from leaving the country, some 125,000 people left their homes for the United States. Sergio is compelled to leave, but refuses; he stays in Cuba, trapped in a kind of existential limbo. Douglas’s resurrection of Sergio-the-architect in 1980s-era Cuba hints at a fly in the ointment of ideology: the recurrence of a bourgeois class (supposedly eliminated by the coup), post-revolution. Inconsolable Memories thus points to much more than one man’s existential angst, hypothesizing the potential failure of the revolution as a whole. History, here as elsewhere, repeats.
The structure of the film mirrors this recurring anxiety. Using the interplay of two separate film loops of different lengths, Douglas has created a work that “recombines” scenes each time it repeats. The result is a film that can run inconsolably: hundreds of hours can go by before the scenes replay in the same order. Inconsolable Memories, like Havana’s architectural hybrids, acts as a constant reminder of conflicts unresolved by time, and perpetually resists the defining factors of ideology, myth and narrative.
Image captions:
Stan Douglas, Inconsolable Memories (film still), 2005, Courtesy the artist
Stan Douglas, Panopticon, Isla de Pinos / Isla de la Juventud, 2005, Digital C-print mounted on 1/4 inch honeycomb aluminum, 1.21 x 1.98 m, Courtesy of the artist/David Zwirner Gallery, New York
Stan Douglas, Rooftops, Habana Vieja, 2004, Digital C-print mounted on 1/4 inch honeycomb aluminum, 1.21 x 1.39 m, Courtesy of the artist/David Zwirner Gallery, New York
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