2 the Moving Still Small

8/13/2019 2 the Moving Still Small

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Iwritinginthethirties,avant-gardefilmmakerHansRichterexpressedhisfrustrationwith documentary fiimmakin , declaring that a beautiful fi1m of a rural landscape ora"romantic"villageishighlyproblematicbecauseitrevealsnothingofthehistoryand socio-politics of the region. He observes,

..outwardly, ever}'thing looked quitepicturesque,andtherewereplentyofopportunitiesfor,marvelousshots.Butsucha manner teaches one nothing about the obiect represented. And yet this is the.documentarist,,s usual style, this superficial reportage.,,' Richter is rifing on hiscompatriotBertoltB.e.ht,sbynowinfamous,t"t"-",'tthat..[aJphotographofKruppsortheAEG,yieldshardlyanythingaboutthoseindustries.,':ThechallengeforRichter,andforcountlesssubsequentimage-makersworkinginthephotographicrealist medium of film, is how to ..reveal,, the history, the story, behind imageswhoseindexicalpullanchorsthemtoafalsetruthbasedonappearances.Someearlypractitioners,suchasHannahHoch'foundasolutioninphotomontage;others,likeAleksander Rodchenko, resorted to ..photo-fi1es,,; later journalists, such as Henricartier Bresson, added texts to create photo-essays; and still other artists' like MarthaRosler in The Bowery in Two Inadequate Ducriptiae systents G974-7)' posited bothphotographyu,'dt""tasinsufEcientformsforaddressingsocialconditions.Inshort,theproblemscreatedbytheessentiallypictorialnatlyeofthestillphotographicimageled an increasing number of artists working in the genre of documentary to moveaway from the nineteenth-century medium Jf photog."phy and toward the twentieth-centurymediumoffilm.Thoughstillhighlylimitedandriddledwithitsownproblemsofsignification,thelatter'withitstime-basedrepresentations'wasseentobemoreadequate for depictions ofhistory

ForRichter,o,,"ud.,".,.ugeoffilm(ifexecutedproperly'layinthemovementof the camera and skillful editing, which allow for a multipliciry of perspectives andnarrativestoemergeoverthecoufseoftime,Richtercontinues,..[t}hecinemaisperfectlycapableinprincipleofrevealingthefunctionalmeanngofthingsandevents,forithastimeatitsdisposal,itcancontractitandthusshowthedevelopment,theevolutionofthings...Thevillage,notaSanidyll,butasasocialentify''4Cinemawasunderstood to record the passing of time, of events, whereas photography representedan isolated moment in history-a snapshot-always necessarily incomplete preciselybecauseofitssingularityinspaceandtime.ButbothafilmcomposedofdiscreterHansFltchter,strugtefortbeFilm:Touanlsasociall1RuporcibleCinema,trms.BenBrewster(Aldershot,UK:wildwood

House, 1986),46-47. , j--^^-: ^^in^reri^n. AEG was Allgemeine Elektricitits-Gesellschaft'z Krupps was a steel tactory Germanys oldest and largest corporation; AEG was AllgemeG.r-uty't tqoivalent of General Electric',RertoltBrecht,"DerDreigroschenprozess'einsoziologischesExperiment"'inGesanmeheV'erkeinzoBlinden(Ftnkfurt' ,- *"'"' Suhrkamp Verlag rqo-)' Bmd r8' r6r', Richter. +l


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frames and an isolated photograph have the same effect: freezing or stilling time.Andr6 Bazin refers to this process as one of mummification in which the photographicprocess embalms a certain moment (or moments). 'W'hat is recorded by the camera'seye is caught and suspended in a fi-xed temporal and spatial dimension-within eachframe, movement is frozen or stilled. A reanimation process occurs when the individualframes are run through a projector and given the illusion of movement. Theories ofanalogre representation work from this conceptual premise; first, the still image of thephotograph, then the moving image of fiIm. Film is composed of multiple frames of stillphotographs which, when set into play are perceived of as motion. riTith video there is ashift since the videotape is not composed of individual frames but rather of a modulationofscanning lines. And, during the past two decades, the advent ofdigital production hasonce again altered the way in which time, space, and movement are created.\fith digitization, the temporal and spatial composition of film is radicallyaltered. Instead of space and time being broken and separated into discrete units witha continuum activated through the mechanical process of editing and of the projector(cinema is often referred to as the "Last Machitt."i), time, in Lev Manovich's words,"becomes spatialized" and "distributed over the surface of the screen."6 No longerdoes a filmmaker or editor work with seemingly endless strips of celluloid footage thatneeds to be meticulously assembled into a relatively stable whole; rathe she edits on acomputer inwhich images have been transformed into complex and condensed codes,structured by pixels and organized by sofrware programs. The painstaking processof memory connected with assembling and tracking rushes gives way to a programin which everlthing is always already there, accessTble by easy clicks and strokes ofcomputer keys. In addition, full digitization makes obsolete cinema's prior dependenceon the perfect shot, settings, lighting, and the like. Advanced colour correctionand green-screen technology allow the filmmaker to make infinite adjustments andchanges in background and details, much like a painter uses her palette to affect colourand tone, or her brush to eliminate or add objects at will.'W-hat the digital cameraphotograph does not necessarily have to bear is a close resemblance to how the finalimage will appear. Manovich refers to this metamorphosis in the cinematic process asa transformation from a "Kino-eye," to that of a "Kino-Brush." Digital photographyand film now appear as a sub-genre ofpainting instead of as an index of realiqzr Inaddition to adjusting how film is produced, the transition from analogue to digital has5 Filnmaker Hollis Frmpton coined the phrase, which was later adapted by Ian Christie in his excellent study of earlycinema, Tle Last Macbine: Early Cinemd arul the Birtb of the Modem W'oild (London: BBC Educational Developments,t994.6 Lev Manovich , Tbe Language of Nezu Media (Canbtidge, MA: MIT Press, zoor).r Ibid., zqt.


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also homogenized previously discrete and disparate images and sounds. Put otherwise,whereas formerly a film might have been made as a r6mm print or a videotape and arecord as a vinyl LP, digital media convergence transforms everlthing into the samecomputer data. In short, formal or technological variations become obsolete.\fhat might this mean for the representation of time and history in the context ofthe documentary photographT To what extent do formal or technological details informthe way in which a work of art is conceptualized and carried out? Is there a relationshipbetween the thematics of a work and whether or not it is carried out in analogueor digital form? Does the representation of history change? If the representation ofmovement and time was previously achieved visually-with sound, this is somethingentirely different-through the activation of a series of stills, with digital production,movement and time are containedwithin the composited image. The "time framed" ofeach discrete unit has been replaced with "framed time." As Garrett Stewart suggestsin his consideration of the electronic image, "frame time gives way, orr several fronts atonce, to that flashpoint of mediation I am calling framed time. This is the spatializedconfiguration of time itself as in its own right a malleable medium."8 Thus, no longeris it only film that has the capacity to represent spatio-temporal movement; nowdifferent times and spaces can be contained within the photographic still. The logicsof ordering, from still to movement, become reversed and instead, we move fromfilm (movement) back to the still image. How might such a reverse movement effectthe representation of an event? Further, in departing from the "real" for the virtual,the digital loses its inherent documentary quality and instead enters into the poeticregime, a shift akin to history painting rather than recorded reality,Stan Douglas's public artwork Abbott dv Cordova, 7 August r97r (zoo9) foregroundsthe problem of historical representation and the task of rendering the socialunderpinnings of an historical event through the medium of photography when theundercurrent of the indexical pulls the photograph so strongly toward a truth basedsolely on surface appearance. This photographic work addresses the challenge bydrawing on cinema's abiliqy to multiply perspectives and narratives, and its capaciry,through movement, to represent multiple moments in time and points in space.Although Douglas is an accomplished filmm aker, Abbott s, Cordoaa, 7 August r97r is nota motion picture; rather, it is what I will call a "moving still."

Abbott dt Cordova, 7 August r97r is a monolithic double-sided image embedded inglass measuring fifty by thirty feet (r3 x 8 metres) installed in the multiuse complex8 GarrettStewart,F'mmed'fime:'lbwdrdAPostflmicCinema(Chicago:LlniversityofChicagoPress,zooT),2.9 Dmian Srtto\ Phatograpby, Cinema, Memory:'l'be Crystal Inage of Tine (Mrnncapolis: Univcrsity of N{innesota Press,zoog), 4.


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Stan Douglas, WinShow, 1998. Two-cinstallation; 204,0with an average deach. Installed atGallery. 1999. (Ph

erected on the site formally occupied by the \Toodward's department store inVancouver. Suspended above passersby in the newly configured atrium, this muralrecalls oversized images projected in drive-in movie theatres or the huge luminescentadvertisements such as one finds in places like New York Ciqy's Times Square. Abbottdl Cordoaa, 7 August rg1r tepresents an historical event, of what is now known as the"r97r Gastown Riot" or the "Battle of Maple Tiee Square," which involved a violentconfrontation between hippies who were peacefully participating in a street festival andthe Vancouver police. An "event" here is understood as an occurrence that produces asignificant change in condition: there is a clear understanding ofa before and an after.ForAlain Badiou, an event must compel "the subject to inaent a new way of being andacting in a situation."'o An event is a pivotal moment or instance; it may be social,historical, personal, or even technological. Throughouthis euare, Douglas has aimedto address "moments when history could have gone one way or another," noting that"lwle live in the residue of such moments, and for better or worse their potential isnot yet spent.'t' Thus, for example, Douglas's eadier 'Win, Place or Shoza (t998) is a mocktelevision serial centred on rwo dock workers, Donny and Bob, who are confined toa tenth-floor, one-bedroom apartment that they share. The floor plan for their livingquarters is derived from r95os blueprints of a neverrealized, low-income urban housingproject designed for the working-class Vancouver neighbourhood of Strathcona. Theinitial project was part of the city's program for urban renewal, a process that wouldinclude razing the old neighbourhood and erecting apartment towers, row housing,and dormitories for the predominantly male dock workers. The project was neverrealrzed due, in no small part, to the organization of a powerful lobby of local citizens,which decried the proposed demolition of a neighbourhood in favour of anonymous,barrack-sryle housing. Douglas constructed the set for \I(in, Place or Sbow to replicateas closely as possible an apartment unit in one of these ill-Fated high-rises.ro AlainBadiou,El6ics:AnEssayontbeLlndtrxandingofErlPeterHallward,trans.(London:Verso,zooz),42.rr Diana Thater, "Diana Thater in Conversation with Stan Douglas," in Stan Douglas, eds. Scott \Vatson, Diana Thater,

and CarolJ. Clover (London: Phaidon, 1998), rr.


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For this earlier work, Douglas did not just signal an unrealized architectural site;rather, he highlighted another failed project in the public sphere: television. In itsformar, Win, Place or Sbow evoked television

serial dramas. More specifically, Douglasshot the scene in the style of a 19 6 8 Vancouverproduced CBC series, Th e C lients'Slighdyexperimentalinstyleandform,thisseriesenjoyedonlyashortrun'ultimatelyfailingbecause the "concise parables did not abide by conventional rules of television drama:the employment of long takes, the absence of master shots, and the inarticulateness ofleading characters wefe among its signature features."" Tlte Clients, in other words' wasnot successful because it tried to provide an alternative to the hegemonic style of NorthAmericanbroadcasting. But there is more; 'win,Place or Shou,)wasa highly sophisticatedrlouble screen installation, a six-minute-long sequence shown in a continuous loop'Shot from twelve different camefa angles, and cut together in real time by a computerprogfam capable of generating an almost endless series of montages, evefy selluencerepeats differently The exceedingly high production quality of the installation, as wellas the computef generated variations, foregrounds the technological aspects ofwork'In his convefsation with Diana Thater, Douglas remarks that "Mhen they becomeobsolete, forms of communication become an index of understanding of the worldlost to ,ts."'3 Win, Place or Sbow teferences televisiofl at a point in history when' asa medium for audio-visual communication, it was unparalleled in the field of masscommunications. Through developments in cable, satellite, and video in the eighties'however, the Internet and advances in computer technologies emerged in the nineties'leaving television forever fundamentally changed and nearly obsolete''+ The concept ofa potential public united by a common experience, i.e., receiving and watching more orless the same broadcasts, has been lost, replaced by an isolated form of spectatorshipdefinedbythecompletefreedomtodecidewhattowatchandwhen'lVin,Placeorsbout signalsprecisely this shift from analogue to digital production and distributionas well as its impact on the entertainment industry

More recently, Douglas's Le D1troit focused on the urban deterioration of Detroit'once the fourth largest city in the United States. His camera reflects the decrepitand degraded present of an abandoned proiect. Le Ddtroit (whose French title refersto the naming of Detroit as "the strait," a description of Detroit's location on theDetroit River linking Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie) was made in ]1999 and constitutesa farewell to the fwentieth century A strait is a liminal space located between two

rz Stan Douglas's project descriptio n of lYin, Place or Sbou]i ililti"?;r."t"rly insightu study on the impact of the innovations on film production see Timothy corrig at' A cinema.W.itbout\yalls: Motl* ora Crmri,qrrrL4en)m (New P,runswick, NJ: Rutgers Llniversity Press, r99I)'


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THE I"IOVING 5TlLL

larger bodies of water; it is a channel for a passage or transition-in this case' fromone century to the flext. Le Ddtoit is composed of a double-sided screen on whichtwo negative film images in black-and-white are projected, nearly cancelling eachother out. The work's barely perceptible timing delay produces an eerie spectraleffect on the already shimmering, shadowy greys of the image. This ghost-like effectof a present haunted by a past records the passage of time from one century tothe next; as an installation, Le Ddtroit becomes a metaphorical strait across whichthe images pass from one space to the next. As in all of Douglas's work, the social,historical, political, and technological are inextricably ent\Mined. Echoing \TalterBenjamin,s claim that any aesthetic innovations, such as photography, can never beseparated from their social underpinnings, Douglas's practice actualizes and bringsto the fore such connections'

Abbott dt Cordoaa, 7 August r97r performs a similar grafting of socio-historicalcontent onto the form and mode of its own production. Douglas's mural at oncereferences two pivotal moments in history: t97r and 2oo9-Io' vrhen the complexopened. The Gastown neighbourhood in which the piece is installed was formerlypopulated primarily by working-class families. In the late sixties and early seventies,young hippies gradually moved into the area, often squatting in abandoned commercialproperties; their presence caused tension with the more conventional residents' Theevent represented in Douglas's work was catalyzed by a peaceful "smoke-in" in latesummer rgTr.Thepolice were called to disperse the crowd and break up the gathering'Flowever, their interactionwith the hippies became violent, and a riot quickly erupted'\rhat later emerged was that, instead of a spontaneous response to break up a crowd,the police intervention had been carefully planned and strategized to the extent thatundercover cops, disguised as hippies, had infiltrated the peaceful group in order to

Stan DougLas, Le DTwo-channel anamfiim installatjon; 6installed at 90 AnWinnipeg, ManitobPlug in Gailery,20


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S::n Douglas, Vid6o, 2A07. HD=- ,.,ith stereo sound. Instailedl: .id Zwirner, New York. 2008.(Photo: Cathv Carver)

instigate clashes with the police.'r Douglas meticulously restages this event in hiscomprehensive, expansive image.

Abbott dt Cordoaa may likewise be viewed as part of alarger rubric from the sameyear loosely called "Crowds and Riots" that focus on events of "police riots" in which"the very actions of the police generate the kind of violence that they are presumablymeant to contain" (Alberro/Douglas zorr). These were initially presented in zoo8at the New York gallery Davrd Zwirner, in a show entitled "Humor, Irony, and theLaw," and include Powell Street Grounds, fi January r9rz, and Ballantyne Pier; 18 June r9j5(both zoo8). The historical subject of the former C-print was police oficers breakingup a crowd of unemployed that had been organized by \ffobblies to address labourconcerns; Ballantyne Pier addresses a r93j labour action during which striking dockworkers clashed with police who resorted to extreme forms of violence to disperse thedemonstrators. Although thematic affinities emerge in these works in terms of theirform, they radically difrer in their intended audiences. The C-prints were produced aslarge-scale photographs to be mounted on the wall of a commercial gallery and viewedby the narrow field of art-world cognoscenti. The final product of Abbott dl CordorLa,however, was designed for a broader and more random, and hence less predictable,group of Vancouverites who enter the multi-use 'Woodward's atrium to go home, goto work, go shopping, attend classes, engage in entertainment activities, and the like. Thetwo intended audiences are radically different: the former is a relatively homogeneous,small controllable elite who are granted permission to enter a private space of a gallery; thelatter is an everyday public from all walks of life.'6 The local scene represented n Abbox dtCordoaa interacts with them in a very dift-erent way than it does installed in its dirninutiveform in a private space 3,ooo miles away in another country

In order to make Abbott dt Cordorta, Douglas painstakingly researched the event,A sinilar tactic was used by pro-Mubarek forces in Egypt who paid individuals to try and inject violence into the peaceful demonstrations in Cairo in February zorr and thereby legitimate a lethal nilitary resPonseThe bottom Line that galleries are indeed private cannot be ignored as the zoro incident at New York's Gagosian Galleryreminds us, when the employees ofGagosian ordered the forcible removal ofvisitors (members of m orgmization calledU.S. Boat to Gazd to an Ansclm Kiefer show


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Stan Douglas, DTwo-channel 169:50 each LoopStaatsgalerie S2007. (Photo: S

delving deep into archives to study newspaper clippings, stofies, and images. Hethen built a Hollywood-like set in a parking lot and re-created the event using periodprops and authentic paraphernalia from the late sixties and eady seventies. Just likein a studio production, everything was re-created for, in Siegfried Kracauer's term,this "Calico \flodd"; the crew built a street, sidewalks, and flats of the buildings.'rVerisimilitude was strived for down to the last details such as posters announcing rockbands, discarded newspapers, and other events dated to r97r. Actors were chosen,and the scene \Mas directed. Roles were carefully cast and performed, and multipletakes resulted in a databank of images, of which Douglas selected fifty to be digitallycomposited into the single picture, Abbott dy Cordova, 7 August ry7r. The process ofconstfucting a film set, making a movie, and then creating a photographic image outof that process is also an event. As Douglas explains, each of his projects involvesboth a back-story and a sensible model; in this case, the event occurs in the story (theGastown Riot) as well as in the mode of production-fiIm. And yet, one may ask why,when digital postproduction allows for the possibility of changing, and altering, thefinal product, did Douglas resort to an almost old-fashioned mode of pre-production?One explanation may be that he is also recording the passing of film, just as earlier, inIVin, Place or Sbow, he signaled the demise of a certain type of television, and in DerSandnann (r99), he relied on an early feature of trick photography-compositing-tostress how the old wipes away the new as the new wipes away the old. Again echoingthe theories of Benjamin, of central concern to Douglas is how ideas are intimately17 Siegfried Kracauer, "Calico-World," in Tbe lvlax Ornanent. W'eimar Erays, ed., trans. Thomas Y Levin (Cambridge, MA:Hanard University Press, r995), z8r-88.


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linked to modes of representation. As certain models become obsolete, so too do waysofthinking. New codes ofrepresentation bring about newpatterns ofunderstanding''what immediately strikes viewers abott Abbott dl cordova is the depth of focuspresent in all aspects of the image. This effect-a result of the high densiry of the fiftycomposited images-would have been impossible to achieve with analogue systems'pointing to the degree ofmedia convefgence that has been reached in the digital era'

Douglas's resulting image is of the intersection of the two streets (hence thetitle) at night. Three antiquated street lamps illuminate the scene. The intersectionitself, or middle of the "photograph," is relatively empty populated only by threeisolated figures crossing at a diagonal; their backs turned to the calnera' one youngman looks over his shoulder. Notably most activity is concentrated on the margins ofthe photograph. In the immediate foreground, a mounted policeman assails a groupof ten people pressed back against a black convertible with its top up. Across thestreet, two additional police on horses push a crowd back against a storefront window;preventing them from entering or crossing the middle of the stfeet. In the rightforeground, rwo uniformed police violently push a struggling, long-haired protestorinto a black paddy wagon. This sector of the image becomes disconcerting as soonas we notice two additional hippie figures on each side of the van's doors, apparentlyassisting the policemen. Upon closer inspection, we see that while the "prisoner's" hairflails wildly in struggle, in contrast, theirs is contained under protective helmets and,further, that the man on the left wields a baton which is caught mid-air as it descendson the unlucky victim.

'w'hat does this curious detail mean? As our eyes travel up thephotograph and across the street, we find, on the opposite cofnef' a policeman andrwo similady clad "hippies" with protective headgear and batons. As we follow thepolicemans gaze across the street to the upper right of the image, we find two morepolicemen dragging another affestee, presumably to be packed into the van. To theirleft, walking away from the scene with their backs to the camera, are fwo young mendressed in innocuous blue jeans and loose shirts, their heads covered in the same bluehelmets. Their calm, authoritative demeanour as they strut down the middle of thestreet stands in strong contrast to the panicked and distraught gait of the fust threefigures described who are caught by Douglas's lens in the act of fleeing. Instead, theseself-possessed individuals are clearly in control, their official blue headgear linking themto the other four individuals still assisting the police. For these two, their work has beencompleted. A11 six of these figures historically reference the undercover plainclothesmenwho the police used to infiltrate the "smoke-in" and to help incite the riot from within'The margins of the photograph, which are marked by the streets, are populated with


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Stan Douglas, HTwo-channel vid13:20 each looWii rtte m berqi scStuttgart, GermStan Douglas)

passersbywho observe the confrontation: one couple sits on the curb, another stands atthe street corne some emerge out of a bar. They are, as Douglas explains, "working-classolder men who watch the action as if it were street theatre. That's something I noticed inphotographs and film footage at the time. People who couldrit be outwardly identifiedas hippies didnt feel threatened by the police action" (Douglas zorr). In short, we finda theatre or spectacle in the round consumed by passive witnesses who watch the abuseand violence unfold but do nothing about it. Aviewer of Abbott dl Cordova,lookingup atthe work from the \Toodward's complex, would be similarly positioned on the marginsoutside of the action-sutured into the perspective of the spectators in the image. Thetwo types of viewers are then brought together across time and space to converge andperhaps question their role in silently witnessing, accepting, and consuming abuse.

Abbott dtCordova depictsthe unfolding of ahistoricallyspecific event-the Gastownriot; however, metonymically it references a particular climate of riots prevalent inNorth America at that time. A riot, defined as a relatively spontaneous civil disordeqin contrast to a demonstfation, is disorganized and unpredictable. \7hat happened onthe corner of Abbott and Cordova was relatively unimportant in light of all the otherriots and demonstrations that were taking place in the \Testern world in the late sixtiesand seventies, and yet it remains significant for having been syrnptomatic of them. Itwas precisely this climate of civil disobedience that enabled the Gastown riot to takeplace. In an interesting parallel to the composition of the image that focuses on themargins, the actual intersection depicted in Douglas's scene was not at the centreof the riots but on its periphery And arguably while very important for an urbanhistory ofVancouve the Gastown riot, within the larger\Testern perspective of youthdemonstrations such as May '68 or the Levitation of the Pentagon, is relatively minor.The event is related to, and certainly part of, an era of protest and demonstration, butis located on the margins or peripheries of those events. As with much of his work,


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Douglas uSeS a ..minor,, moment in history to point to a much larger history'8 Forexample, his double-sided project ion, Hors-cbamps G99)' calls attention to ftee iazzwhile, at the same time, commenting on the African-American expatriate communiryliving in Paris, as well as the French Communist Parry The periphery thus commentsupon and maintains the centre and vice versa in a centrifugal/centripetal relationship''e

TheBattleofMapleTieesquareissignifi.cantonanumberoflevelsbeyondthe initial display of police brutaliry for it initiated changes in law and policies thatremain in place today Prior to this event, Gastown was zoned as a partially residendalneighbourhood,therebypermittingSquattersandotherstotakeupresidence:intheaftermath of the riot, the zoning was quickly changed to purely commercial' therebytransformingit into a dysfunctional zone.The subsequent decline of the neighbourhoodinto a seedy skid row area infested with drugs is attributed to this change in zoning'In the fi.rst decade of the twenry-first century further attempts were

made to gentrifi/the area, including the development of a former department store, \Toodward's. into amulti-usebuilding,whichincludeslow_incomehousing.ItwasforthissitethatAbboxdt Cordoaa, 7 August I97I was commissioned. The space, however, is no longer publicbuthasbecomecompletelyprivatized,subjecttotherules,regulations,andcontrolof private interest. The transformation from public space to private zone is a globalphenomenon as corporations purchase evergfeater swathes of land, some located inprime urban real estate areas.'oThe implications of this transformation are farreaching'After the Gastown riot, the police were held accountable for the ensuing violence'Theircalculatedandaggressivefesponse.wascensofed,and,aspublicServants'theywere warned not to har,,' d..rir.ns in the future. Precisely because the police force'like the military, is supposed to serve and protect (although abuses are rampant)' intheory,theyarestillaccountablefortheiractions.withthetransformationfrompublic to private, a shift occurs' and, as Douglas observes' "certainu..", ur" designated private properry and patrolled by privatesecurity companies which, unlike the police force of r97r' atenot answerable to citizens" (Alberro/Douglas zorr)' Of course'on a much larger scale, the same phenomenon persists as prlvateenforcement militia such as Blackwater are employed with deadlyconselluences in countries such as Iraq' From small' innocuousgated communities to full-scale insurrections' the detouring of lawsprot..ting citizens' rights is assisted through privatization' There Stan

to o198instaioop

18 I am using "minor" here explicitly referring to T)eleuze's concept See Gilles Deleuze md Felir Guattri Kzfha: TbuardaMinorLiterature,trans DanaPian(Min;eapolis:University,ofMinnesotaPress'r986)'rq See Tiinh r Minh,ha, n brr rbr'M";;;i;*; k): Reprerentation, Genderl and culturalPo1t?r (i:tt York: Routledge' r99r)';: il;;;;.;;-0r", 'r tr'" SoNY center in the Potsdamer Platz in BerLir'


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THF MOV]NG STILL

68 is, however, another side to this story for Abbott dt Cordovawas commissioned by theprivate developer of the \Toodward's complex, thereby allowing Douglas a certainamount of freedom. For had it been sponsored by the city, still eager to bury thatunsavory history it is likely that such a provocative image would have been censored.

Douglas photographed the dramatic scene of Abbott dt Cordotta, T August r97r froma slightly elevated angle looking down. This perspective gives the impression not onlyof a detached observer surveying the events from a second-floor window (the actualpositioning would have been from a rooming house in which many of the hippies hungout at the time) but also of a type of surveillance calnera that is now all-pervasivein both private and public spaces alike. Today as we live in an unprecedented era ofsurveillance, all such "public spaces" are heavily monitored with cameras triggeredby movement and "trained" to record every angle of space. The extension of militarytechnologies to the monitoring and management of urban environments connects toMichel Foucault's theories of biopolitical regulation. Photography was the mediumofpolice surveillance (Bertillonage) from the nineteenth century to the present, usedto track criminals and to fill files on individuals. The theme of surveillance emergesin several of Douglas's works, including his homage to Beckett titled Viddo (zoo7), inwhich a video camera tracks and follows a young North African woman through theprojects outside of Paris, and Subject to a Film: Marnie Gg8g), which recreates a pivotalscene in Hitchcock's film in which we witness the lead character's thievery Today,just as booked criminals are photographed, so too are demonstrators and protestors'such as those in Seattle at the'W'TO protests, recorded in order to monitor theiractivities and to identify them as potential troublemakers. Abbott dl Cordopa recallsthat history as it projects into the future. But in its overt use of the digital format,the work also remincls us how we, as subjects, have been transformed into bits of datasorted and stored in databanks ready to be accessed at any moment. \fe are tracked asconsumers, as travellers, as patients, as commuters, as students: our movements andpatterns recorded and ordered. To be anonymous without a digital trace has becomeas difficult as existing without a shadow

Abbott dl Cordova connects to several other recent works by Douglas' Seven yearsearlier, he made Eoery Building on roo'V{/'est Hastings (zoot), a photograph depicting theentire roo block of \7est Hastings Street in Vancouver." The street and its immediateneighbourhood had degenerated from being an alternative community populated byartists to one overrun by crime, populated by drug dealers and homeless people. InDouglas,s words, the photograph "depicts the neighbourhood as it was left to go fallowzr'IhetitlereferencesEdwarclRuscha'sEreryBuildingontbesunsetStripGgTo).


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until it became commercially exploitable again" (Douglas/Alberro zorr). Interestinglyenough, Every Buildingon roo West Hastings depicts the buildings on the south side of thestreet. This is because the north side was almost entirely occupied by the abandonedbuilding dating from r9o3 that formerly housed \Toodward's department store. a oncesplendid and thriving shopping mecca. Like so many of these establishments fromthe first half of the twentieth centur), as suburbs grew and convenient shopping mallssprang up, it became increasingly impossible to remain financially viable. In addition,the re-zoning of the area because of the Gastown riot led to the neighbourhood'sdeterioration. In other words, the event depicted by Douglas in Abbott c; Cordoaauncannily loops forward and backward to the bleak scene photographed in zooI.-When\Toodward's closed in 1993, the roo block of West Hastings, which had undergone abrief renaissance, took a turn for the worse and became skid row Abbott ct Cordovawas commissioned for the renovated \Toodward's complex that now includes condos,stores, community spaces, subsidized housing, an extension of Simon Fraser Universirydaycare, and more. The multi-use complex is a full-scale project and product of urbangentrification carried out by both private and municipal partnerships.

Douglas'spublic artworkAbbottdvCordova,TAugustrgTr stands as apiece of historyDouglas asserts lthat] "the photograph has produced an image of something that couideasily be forgotten, it consolidates hearsay into a picture that will hopefully producemore hearsay and a conversation about history" (AlberroiDouglas zorr). To that extent,it connects back to documentary whose etymological roots are to teach and to warn.In its composited form, Douglas's photograph restages and combines a multirude ofimages created out of a series of incidents and fractions of seconds, resulting in a singlewhole, self-consciously and self-reflexively composed of fragments. As a result, theangles in the image are at times impossible, and the totaliry of the picrure is dificultto take in. But it is not enough to acknorvledge the complexiry of the image itself;we need to recall the architecture for which this public mural was conceived as well.Meant to be vierved from different vantage points, it speaks to individuals looking upat it while crossing the atrium at street-level, casting a glance across it from a second

j

- -: .: )ettait Photos::: :::-,nent EuiLding,: -:::rlc print. lmage; -:-:ions: 18 x 36 in


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70 or third-foof apartment, or gazing down at it from the roof-top." Thus, Abbott dlCordova unfolds to the viewer in bits and pieces. And because of its high densiry andits fifry different embedded shots, it resists producing a single view that is any more orless distinct-each fragment is a hermeneutic monad. Ti'ue to its Romantic roots, eachfragment is charged, and each is a crystallization of an event. Formally one feature ofdigital composition is its potential as a portal or interface, and we could imagine thepossibility of zooming in on and clicking on various parts of the mural to enter into thedifferent individual histories referenced.

Abbott dt Cordoaa, 7 August r97r harkens back to Douglas's eadier excurses intopublic art: Tbleuision Spots G988) and Monodramas (t99i, short video sketches thatwere inserted into public television broadcasting. In both content and form, theywere markedly difrerent, calling attention to alternative possibilities for television.One characteristic of these works was their length-usually between thirty and sixtyseconds-thereby employing a very condensed form to deliver a punch. PrefiguringAbbott dt Cordoaa, these earlier works consist of fragments of narratives inserted intoa much larger media flow just as fragments are composited together into the wholeof Abbott dt Cordova.In both instances, what is at play is a form of condensation orreduction of information into one image-or in this case into fifty different imagescomposited into one. Because of all the different images or scenes, it does not conformto the work of a typical billboard but is rather like a mural or a painting by HieronymusBosch in which multiple temporal and spatial events are depicted in a single plane.This multiplicity of scenes contained and reconciled within alarger whole is similarto how Henri Bergson characterizes the process of memory as one of "contraction,"in which images from the past are put together to form a single memory They remindthe viewer of what took place on this spot forty years ago and what might take placeagain. For, in the words of Benjamin, the spectator regarding a photograph "feelsan irresistible compulsion to look for the tiny spark of chance, of the here and now,with which reality has, as it were, seared the character of the picture; to find thatimperceptible point at which, in the immediacy of that long-past moment, the futureso persuasively inserts itself that, looking back, we may rediscover it-"'t

The fragments form a naffative that is meant to provoke the passersby intothinking about what happened and their present condition as autonomous subjects. Ifearlier forms of photographic social commentarywere performed through the reliance

To that extent it functions like the behemoth multi-story television screen installed in the CNN Center headquartersin Atlmta, visible and audible from every location.'W'alter Benjamin, 'A Short History of Photography," Screen (t972) ryG): 5 26. (Originally published ry3t h TbeLiterarische IYelt.)

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::- Douglas, felevision-::;: Funny Bus, "1988.S:lls from a video for: :::ast television. 0:15

Nora M. ALter

of captions and texts, such as in photojournalism, Douglas achieves the same objectiveby compositing dill-erent moments in time and space within one image-a moving still.If music, another time- and movement-based medium, was used as a compositionalstrategy with/in some of Douglas's earlier work, here it has been replaced by anothertime-based medium: film. XTriting about the form of the essay half a cenru[' ago,Theodor Adorno reflected that it "thinks" in fragments. For Adorno. the essar,- u'asthe form of political critique par excellence, one that did not seek conclusions butwas open-ended and produced dialogue, not judgments.'a Much in the same spirit,Douglas's work may be viewed as an image essay-albeit without text-that through itsfragments produces a conversationwith the present and the future that is interrogatir-e.Douglas does not make us aware of the present by any anachronistic insertsl rather.he signals the present by the very digital format used, one that dramaticallri arrd self-reflexively calls attention to its form, hence underscoring that memory and historywill be stored (and possibly erased) as data bytes in the future.

z4 The odor rJ(. Adorno, "1'he Essay as Form," Nltes to l.iterdture, vol. r. trans. Sherrr' \\ eber \ich olsen (\ew YorkColumbia University Press, tggt), 3-23.

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