Stan Douglas Parallax @ Jeu de Paume

Stan Douglas, Hastings Park, 16 July 1955, 2008

The fall shows are now well underway, and I began the season with a visit to the Stan Douglas exhibition at the Jeu de Paume. The title of the exhibition, Parallax, so perfectly captures the spirit and conceptual problems explored by Douglas in his photograph and moving images. Shifting vision and perspectives are everywhere within individual images as well as in their relationship to the way that history is told. Douglas is a master of the parallax.

Take the image that accompanies the exhibition's publicity material, for example, Hastings Park, 16 July 1955. The photograph shows a crowd at the races, and most striking of all is the isolation of each figure. Those in conversation either do not have the attention of their listener or whatever they are saying draws disapproval. The man in the bottom left talks to the woman on his left who is either disinterested or unimpressed, a man in the upper left pulls a face and the woman to his left has a similarly ambiguous response. In the middle, a woman in a blue dress communicates with a man to her left, but his mind is elsewhere. Everyone is dressed up for a day at the races, but being together is not their priority. Being at the races in 1955 is about getting dressed up, placing bets, and being seen. 

Stan Douglas, The Secret Agent, 2012
Installation view @ David Zwirner, 2016

In this show and in Douglas's images in general, we find split and double screens, public spaces representing histories appropriated into private memory, photographs presenting as film developed over time, the skewing of reality through canted frames and events continuing beyond frames that deliberately leave us wondering. In The Secret Agent, a six channel video installation, Joseph Conrad's novel displaced to the terrorist events in Portugal in the summer of 1975, perspectives change over time. The installation includes three sets of double screens, each showing a different perspective of the "hot summer." Administrators, the street, and everyday life events such as a cat walking down a street, go about their business paying little attention to the threat of terrorism. Like all of Douglas's videos, over time, history unfolds in the articulated spaces of each screen, ultimately revealing the difficulty of breaking away from social structures without an event such as a terrorist attack.

Stan Douglas, 2 March 1914, Penn Station's Half Century, 2021 

There is always something visibly artificial in the photographs: up close we see the outline of objects, the human figures standing out from their background which are often abandoned or empty places and spaces. The large format photographs look like images made from film footage, taken out of a series, not just a frame, to give the impression of events unfolding over time. This plasticity also draws attention to the impossibility of the photograph, not just its illusion and its deception, but its impossibility. This is presumably Douglas's desired effect, created through the synthesis of multiple images — taken at different times — emphasizing fabrication.

Stan Douglas, Birth of Nation, 2025

In one of the most exciting works in the exhibition, Douglas re-visions history through a re-presentation of D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, 2025. In a five channel video with the Griffith film as the central image, Douglas alters, mirrors and replays the original film from different perspectives. He focusses on the sequence in which Gus is wrongly lynched for Flora's death. Douglas includes two new black characters, Sam and Tom, both freed Confederate captains, who are visions of the white men's racist imaginations every time they encounter Gus. Douglas accentuates the technical achievements of Griffith's film—pioneering narrative coherence through parallel editing, close ups, slowing down the image for important emotional resonance. In his multi-channel, multi-perspectival version, Douglas uses the same strategies to accentuate the racism, misrecognition, and to expose what official history does not show. The final frames of the video on the bottom left are in colour, showing Douglas bringing the past into the present. As viewers, we are left reflecting on the racism of today.

Stan Douglas, Abbott and Cordova, 7 August 1971, 2008

Most of Douglas's photographs are conceived within a series of images, and one disappointment I had with this otherwise stunning exhibition was that there were often only single images from the series. That said, there were other rewards for a French audience. In a photograph that had particular resonance for Paris viewers, Abbott and Cordova, 7 August 1971 is an eerie image looking down at an empty street with people on the fringes. The title refers to the "Gastown Riots" in Vancouver when police charged peaceful demonstrators in Maple Square, Vancouver. The protesters had gathered in response to increasing tensions between police and hippies. Although present, but not emphasized by Douglas, similar to current events in France, police were overly aggressive. Arrests and injuries from violent confrontations with the police are clearly not only a thing of the past. 

Giacometti in the Tanks @ Tate Modern

The exhibition of a dozen Giacometti sculptures in the former oil tanks underneath Tate Modern is an exquisite display of his work. The experience of being in these haunting dark spaces is breathtaking. I have seen Giacometti's men walking, women standing, their bodies trapped by the intensity of their material, in memorable settings. At the Art Institute of Chicago, at the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen and here in Paris at the Montparnasse atelier being stand out displays of the emaciated, elongated bronzes. But the fragility and vulnerability of misshapen bodies so beautifully articulated by sparse lighting and hard concrete walls in the depths of Tate Modern took them to another level. 

I thought I would pop in to see these familiar works on my way out of the Mendieta exhibition, but I was so entranced by the quiet reflection, the delicacy of Giacometti's figures that I struggled to leave them. So much of the tone of the exhibition is in the chiaroscuro lighting, as if the bronze figures are shyly hiding underneath the great bulwark of a building. They are frail and vulnerable, misshapen, some even missing limbs, and their shadows distorted against the industrial walls of the oil tanks, hardened concrete with its own variations in wear and tear. Interestingly, contrary to Tate's website, I didn't think they evoked the isolation and alienation of Giacometti sculptures in other settings. Rather, they were resilient, quietly reflecting on their entrapment, enclosed by the darkness of shadow. 

The tanks were constructed for oil storage when the  building was a power station. The subterranean spaces are everything that a gallery with windows looking out to Millennium Park in Chicago are not. While Giacometti's figures are often surrounded by windows to accentuate their motion, in the underground world of the Blatnavik building, it is their stasis, their inward reflection and contemplation on their incarceration that is emphasised, making their weakness all the more apparent. This is a masterful instance of curation. 

James McNeill Whistler @ Tate Britain

 

James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Silver, Chelsea, 1871

As to be expected, the highlight of the Whistler exhibition at Tate Britain is the room devoted to the Nocturnes. It is a rare treat to see so many in one room, together reflecting and meditating on the River Thames, soaked in industrial life in the 1870s. They are breathtaking. I believe that the Nocturnes set Whistler apart from all other painters of his time. His courage to paint these radical, almost abstract visions of industrial London, their haunting contemplation so at odds with how others were looking at industrial modernity. Peaceful, serene, at a moment in the day when light is ephemeral, gone in a split second, there is nothing in Whistler's paintings of the modern life so often painted by others in this period. Subject matter aside, what makes the Nocturnes  radical and unique is their technique. At the time, the thin, whisper-like watery paint was considered outrageous. Whistler's paintings were unfinished, some said. But the scraped away, thinned out paint on unprimed canvases is what enabled Whistler to capture the very special light of this time of day. The Nocturnes, together in one room, literally glow in their quiet meditative vision of what painting can do but had not yet dared. 

James MacNeill Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Cremorne Lightrs, 1872

Another delightful element of the exhibition were the drawings and pastels and watercolours that Whistler did as he travelled from city to city, many of which I had not seen before. In his later years, after he had been rejected by the art world, Whistler was interested in cities built around water - London, Amsterdam, and of course, Venice. Paris in the earlier years of his career was filled with the hustle and bustle of daily life in the backstreets, the medieval parts of the city. But the most exquisite drawings were those that captured the reflections of light on water moving, lapping, and trundling around buildings in Venice and Amsterdam.

James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Silver, The Lagoon, Venice, 1879-80

Whistler began scraping and rubbing and distressing the canvas very early in his career. His various techniques of pulling paint off a canvas rather than layering it on are evidenced in some of his earlier full length portraits. The scraped away areas on the canvas are in abundance, directing the viewer's attention to the face, or to the mood created in paint, away from any emphasis on story or character. Whistler's works are about air and light and "breath on the surface of a pane of glass" to quote him. They are not character studies or narrative paintings. Whistler wanted to do something that was only acheiveable through paint, using paint in a new way to create mood, the elements, and times of day. Of course, there was no question that this would bring with it the visibility of the canvas weave. No wonder critics such as John Ruskin were up in arms: Whistler was an outlier, and eventually, cast out for his innovation. 

James McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White no. 2, 1864

James McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Black, 1882-86

I was disappointed - perhaps predictably - with the lack of mention of his repeated use of greys and greens, and the falling of figures' clothes into the background - even the white girl loses her definition to grey as her face melts in the mirror. Whistler was always striving for the musicality of colour - the ethereality of his painted canvas had to mimic the objectlessness of music. But so often this was only possible through his exploration of paint application and resonance, something best acheived through a radical use of greys, greens and their shadows.

James McNeill Whistler, Note in Pink and Brown, 1880

The exhibition also focused on the Japanese influence of Whistler's style and composition, shown through exhibition of prints by some of the Japanese masters such as Hiroshige. Whistler's radical flattening of the canvas is the most obvious result of this influence. His removal of the diagonal from the composition and created these very flat and lateral compositions in paint, chalk and pastel equally. In Amsterdam, for example, buildings dissolve into air, layers of life in their floors. Then when he begins to paint the Nocturnes the flatness, lack of perspective, and horizontality becomes the perfect strategy to represent air. While it might be smog filled, it is air, creating all but abstract spaces in which figuration is a shadow, a hint of a person. People and things were not important to Whistler, but always composition, colour., and the magic of translating the air into an image were what mattered most. 

James McNeill Whistler, Courtyard on Canal, Grey and Red, 1880

Ultimately, Whistler showed extraordinary uniqueness; still today, his work is singular in its technique and aesthetic. It is true that he was exploring similar issues to those of French painters of his time. For example, the fascination with daily life as seen in Manet's paintings, the capturing of light on the canvas of Monet. But he took it one step further thanks to the thinness of his paint and the push to full abstraction in the 1870s. It's difficult to overstate how radical that was.  Where cloth is all but indistinguishable from the background and cities are interesting for their patterns and reflections, not for the realism of the lives lived therein. What an inspiration he was, and remains today!