By IPS Correspondents
VANCOUVER, Canada, Nov 1 2007 (IPS)

Stan Douglas is an internationally renowned photographer, filmmaker and multimedia installation artist who has been called "one of the most accomplished Canadian artists of the younger generation".

Stan Douglas Credit:

In recent years, he has devoted much of his time to a number of ambitious projects that challenge traditional modes of narrative filmmaking.

Douglas recently sat down with Am Johal at his studio in Vancouver, where he lives and works.

IPS: You just got back from Stuttgart, Germany, where a comprehensive exhibition of your work is being shown. Can you tell me about your show?

SD: It was a solo exhibition that was composed of 14 installations, 120 photographs from the last 21 years. It was the first time the two main galleries in the city, Württembergischer Kunstverein and Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, had collaborated on such a large, comprehensive project – to provide us with a little over 4,000 square metres of exhibition space. It was an intense installation process so I really didn&#39t get a chance to see my own work – I will go back in November to look at it properly as a civilian.

SD: I started photographing my sculptures for documentation and realised I found it far more enjoyable and interesting than making the sculptures. Therefore, I defected from one medium to another. Toward the end of my time I started making slide projections and began working in film and video soon after graduation.

IPS: How has Beckett influenced your work?

SD: Beckett was certainly an early influence. I was fascinated by his work but it was difficult to encounter so I made an exhibition of his work for television and film, "Samuel Beckett: Teleplays" (1988) in order to see it for myself. Research for the show was the occasion for my first trip to Europe, I went to places like Stuttgart, Paris and London to look at archive footage. The show began at the Vancouver Art Gallery and toured for about four years. I even developed a reputation as a Beckett scholar because no one had put this work together before.

His work for me is not an "endgame," to use the title of one of his plays. For me, it is a kind of foundation. His investigation of inter-subjectivity, the communication is tragic and humorous at the same time – the constant defeat of the desire for people to communicate is an a priori of Beckett&#39s work, but it is the starting point, not the end point of further communication. It is a type of optimism under dire circumstances, rather than absolute pessimism, and the opposite to the usual caricature of Beckett.

For me, he was an early influence and a primary one. There is still this sense that language is failing people in my work – in Klatsassin (2006), for example, where multiple languages are spoken, and gilt and greed provoke people into lies and faulty recollection.

IPS: Your work "All the Buildings on 100 West Hastings Street" is set in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. How did you come up with this idea as a project, in terms of this particular neighbourhood?

SD: I made the work for personal reasons and also had more objective reasons for choosing that block. There is a block like that, or many blocks like that, in almost every city in North America. A buffer block between a gentrified neighbourhood and one that is not. I remember seeing graffiti in Detroit where someone was writing "compost" on buildings in similar areas. This block had that function in Vancouver. And it simultaneously became a place in which poverty could be contained.

In this picture we are seeing the 100 Block from the point of view of the historic Woodwards building. Though the abandonment of the Woodwards building was not the cause of the poverty, its absence from the neighbourhood has had a very strong worsening effect. The Woodwards building is the "absent one", the one who "sees" in cinema, in this photograph. Personally, I edited the Vancouver Anthology in the Kootenay School of Writing space in the middle of the block, I was on the Board of the Or Gallery which was toward the east end of the block, my second studio was in the Province Building at its west end. This block has always been of interest to me.

IPS: How did you come across the subject matter of Klatsassin, the Chilcotin Chief, who was hung after a land dispute led to an insurrection, what some still call the last war on Canadian soil in 1864? Why was this interesting to you as a concept?

SD: Well, it&#39s a very important event in BC [British Columbia] history. When I came upon it, I was very embarrassed to have never heard about it such an important event – as you say, the last war fought on Canadian soil. I had the intuition that Europeans arriving uninvited to extract gold from the soil would not be welcomed by the local inhabitants. I imagined there would have had to have been skirmishes between miners and First Nations, but I eventually learned about this conflict that is still commemorated on the Chilcotin Plateau to this day.

IPS: How did you come up with the concept of your project "Inconsolable Memories", which made reference to Cuban Director Tomas Guttierez Alea&#39s classic work "Memories of Underdevelopment"?

SD: It was a very long project. I met a lot of Cuban writers and artists over the years. There was the possibility of doing some teaching and getting a visa because of that. So I was off to see for myself a country that has so many contentious myths surrounding it. The director of ICIAC, the Film Institute in Cuba, gave me some key Cuban films, including Alea&#39s film, which I sadly hadn&#39t seen.

My elaboration of it centres around the idea of "cycling", which has been a characteristic of many problems in the Cuban revolution itself. Changes implemented for a while, but not to their final resolution – then things reverting back in predictable cycles. The very conditions of privilege and selfishness that the revolution was supposed to get rid of were eventually replicated by the revolution. "Memorias" was set during the exodus of 1959, when (mainly white) bourgeois people left the island and my film is set in the eighties when many working-class (and frequently black) people left. Both films have a main character named "Sergio" – one was born bourgeois and the other became bourgeois through the revolution.

IPS: In terms of broader cultural issues, how has this era of the George W. Bush administration affected contemporary art?

SD: It&#39s a hard one to fully understand, but it certainly has had a major impact. In terms of what it has done to the world system, it couldn&#39t be worse. In terms of what has happened to personal liberty, the economy and governance of the U.S. itself, it couldn&#39t possibly be worse. It will take years to make things right again. No government has lied to its country and the world as much as the Bush administration. They have lied about global warming, their rationale for going to war, collateral damage to the people in Iraq. It has certainly led to a dark turn in my work. Before, I was working on ideas which had to do with the problematics of modernity and the ideals of utopia that had not been fulfilled, but had the potential to be fulfilled. But since 2001, with a work called "Journey into Fear", my work has, at least allegorically, been about these very dark times we are living in.

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