Stan Douglas: The Enemy of All Mankind, David Zwirner, New York, September 12-October 26, 2024
Our view is from an odd position, perhaps twenty feet in the air (Fig. 1). We look down onto a clearing within a steeply sloping bamboo forest. In the center, two figures in eighteenth-century costumes swing swords at one another. The closer one, crouching barefoot, wears a heavy green coat over some kind of coarse dress; the farther one, a large gash across his mostly bare chest, has just lunged and missed. Furs dangle from his back. Two other figures, possibly seconds for the duel, look on from a few feet away—one in leather shoes, stockings, knee-britches, and a fitted coat over cuffs, the other in loose soiled pants and an open gown. But what perhaps strikes us most about this photograph is the strange, uneven space it depicts, with its central plane of combat tilting ambiguously into hillsides above and below, each (we gather gradually after picking out figures from among the trees) occupied by onlookers loyal to one of the combatants—one group craning to see up, another bracing itself against the bamboo and peering down. Should we be rooting for one of these sword wielders? For one, rather than another, possible future imagined by this tableau? If so, we’ll probably need a bit more context.
Rather than turn, first, either to the press release or to the other eight photographs from this series by the Canadian photographer Stan Douglas (collectively titled The Enemy of All Mankind, and recently on view at the David Zwirner gallery in New York), we might begin with the other work of Douglas’s on display: the 1986 film Overture, an inaugural work of the artist’s that pairs footage of a passage through the Canadian Rockies from a moving train (taken by the Edison Company) with passages from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (read by the poet Gerald Creede) about slipping in and out of consciousness. One reason this was a key work for Douglas is that it staged the (in this case moving) image as a series of effects (timing, path, sightlines) generated more by conditions of technological infrastructure than by artistic will: how fast, along which kinds of track, built on which kinds of terrain, can the train go without crashing? Conceived this way, the partially controlled visual effect parallels the slippage between moments of self-presence and their dispersal in the Proust text. But stretched forward across Douglas’s career, the interest in an “infrastructure” not entirely under one’s control could also describe his engagement with the genres of artmaking and even language more basically.[1]
We may now be ready to glance at the press release, which identifies the image we’ve been studying as one of nine scenes based on the English poet and playwright John Gay’s Polly, a ballad opera written in 1729 (the year after his more famous composition, The Beggar’s Opera), but not performed in Gay’s lifetime. Viewers familiar with Douglas’s work will know that he usually produces a photographic series in relation to each of his films. With his 1995 film Der Sandmann, for example, we get 15 color photos entitled Potsdamer Schrebergärten; with Inconsolable Memories (a 2005 film about the 1980 Mariel Boatlift), we get Cuba Photos. And so on in many other projects.
Some viewers may know also that, less commonly, Douglas reverses this relationship and uses a film crew, an elaborate set, and even sometimes scripts (as in the current exhibit) to stage a single still photograph, or a series, without also producing the film that this larger production might seem to imply. (Rather than movies, he calls these “stillies.”)[2] Perhaps the best-known of the single images is Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971, Douglas’s restaging of what is known as the Gastown riot in Vancouver, which occurred when police attacked a peaceful “smoke-in” that was itself organized to protest police harassment of the counterculture (Fig. 2). The photographs in The Enemy of All Mankind follow this model in that they lack a larger film to which they are related. What here might play this organizing role of the absent film is our experience of Polly, although unlike The Beggar’s Opera, it is, even now, rarely performed. We might, as I did, begin by reading Polly. But given that itis a lesser-known sequel to a famous earlier work, I found that I also needed to watch or reread both its prequel, The Beggar’s Opera, and that work’s famous afterlife, Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera (1928).
Together, these works—two from the eighteenth century and one from the early twentieth century—not just undermine the operative social distinction between petty criminals and powerful capitalists, but also explore a world of fluid categories of race and gender where piracy seems to operate as a negation of nation states and their oppressive laws. Armed with an intricate interpretation of the complex plots, characters, and ultimate political implications, one might then present Douglas’s nine photographs as illustrations of the political unsettling operative in Gay and Brecht, now affirmed and identified with in Douglas’s new work. But you can tell by my tone that I don’t simply want to do this. First off because our rather lengthy research would only confirm more or less what Douglas’s press release tells us; and second because this telling would stand in the place of any kind of primary reading of Douglas’s photographs—any sense that they were doing and not just saying or illustrating. So let us return to them from a slightly different angle.
Consider Overture: In which Convicted Brigand Captain Macheath is Transported to the West Indies Where He will be Impressed into Indentured Labour (2024) (Fig. 3). This is, first of all, a scene that does not occur in John Gay’s 1729 work. Stan Douglas has appended an outwork to Polly. We are looking at a line of captives in tattered clothes entering the deck of a ship framed against yellow brick port architecture behind it. Having stepped onto the barque that will transport him to Jamaica, the opera’s main character, Brigand Captain Macheath, is fitted for leg irons, while the rope ties on his hands are adjusted by two sailors. He stares straight ahead. Six other indentured laborers form a line that comes up the side of the ship, down the stairs onto its deck, across this, and then down another flight into a hold. A square-jawed man with a raised pistol oversees the orderly procession from the left; another man with rope (or a whip?) regulates the first stairway and, in addition to the two men working on Macheath, still another among the crew (whose maroon jacket is the same shade as the outlaw’s) records the proceedings in his book. One of the indentured laborers, next in line for the stairs, turns a bit and glances at Macheath. This curiosity draws a hard glare from both the captain and a sailor next to him.
Overall, this appears to be a scene of simmering potential violence, of nautical jailor thugs eager for an excuse to offer their new captives an exemplary public pummeling. One other departure from Gay becomes apparent: Macheath is now Black. In Polly, by contrast, Macheath is white and disguises himself in blackface as a slave leader only once he’s become an outlaw in Jamaica. Gay pairs Macheath’s racial fluidity with an equally porous model of gender whereby Polly can both pass as a man and have erotic encounters with women in Jamaica. And yet perhaps this added plot contradiction points to one of the limits of Gay’s work: if Polly explores a quasi-utopian fluidity of race and gender, the unstated predicate of this freedom in the Indies appears to be whiteness, from which his characters can then enter into blackface. For Macheath to begin Black in the world of 1729 is for this fluidity to be foreclosed.
This conflict forces us to weigh Douglas’s larger historiographic orientation toward overlooked scenes of potentiality (a socially fluid pirate community as an alternative to the enslaving nation state) against this particular edge or limit: Black Macheath as a reminder about exactly to whom the freedom of the pirate life could and could not extend. The photographs that comprise The Enemy of Mankind, in other words, press the question of just what Douglas seeks to mobilize through his elaborate engagement with historical sources, and with historiographic questions more broadly.[3] In a sense, we might say that Douglas’s interests in historiography and genre continue, now by slightly different means, the same exploration of the limits of autonomous artistic control that he seemed to initiate in Overture.
The best account I’ve seen of this nexus of race, representation, and historiography in Douglas’s reception history is an essay by the composer and musician George E. Lewis about the 1992 film Hors-champs, in which Lewis himself (along with three other musicians) performed Albert Ayler’s Spirit’s Rejoice (1965).[4] Lewis argues that Douglas’s re-enactments of musical performances align themselves against a stereotyped way of representing Black musical expression: “the objectifying, faux-ethnographic finger-fetishism, the focus on obsessively oscillating body extremities and repetitive behaviors that dominates so many jazz films, becomes an object of critique in Hors-champs.”[5] The negative foil, in Lewis’s reading, is the “master narratives of genre that musical discourses themselves are only recently beginning to explore,” and especially “genre’s unhealthy rigidities and its collusions with outmoded modes of race and identity.”[6] Ultimately, Douglas “exposes the poverty of any criticism that conflates genre with history itself.”[7] That Douglas’s music films offer the critique that Lewis here articulates seems absolutely right, as it does to distinguish history itself from a reductive caricature of it. And yet I have cited Lewis’s essay in detail because I think that “genre” in Douglas’s work may not be the best word to describe the problems Lewis identifies, since the concept of genre also plays a series of inescapable infrastructural functions that take us back to the origins of the artist’s work, where its political effects occur not by negating the concept, but by reoccupying and deforming it.[8]
But let us shift to the generic precondition of legibility for historic tableaux like the nine photographs in The Enemy of All Mankind. Here, as critics have noted, Douglas draws on the genre of history painting, but again deforms its typical project (representing kings and queens and their heroic victories) by instead depicting precisely the marginal characters and events that have not been, until now, the object of such lavish commissions.[9] But it is not quite enough to say just that Douglas reverses the social valences of a genre like history painting. Rather, he also uses the genre to reflect on historiography. Douglas engages with the Gastown riot, for instance, not because he wants to make a monument to a group of hippies who were attacked by cops, but because he wants to think about events, processes, and places (like his own neighborhood) that complicate what we think we know about “the 1960s” or the counterculture. Vancouver’s hippies may merely have wanted to smoke pot in public, but for a time their standing in the way of gentrification meant that—consciously or not—they presented possibilities.
The crux of The Enemy of All Mankind, then,is the extent to which we establish some kind of analogous understanding of eighteenth-century piracy as shown in these photographs. Lower-class criminality is of interest in Gay’s works not so much as retribution or gratification of what had been cruelly restricted desire, but rather for how it denaturalizes the invisible upper-class resource extraction with which Gay so powerfully associates it. But given that piracy is a somewhat less developed topos in Gay, that its eighteenth-century world is far more distant from us than that of the hippies, and perhaps most of all that the photographs themselves only begin to hint at a vocabulary of pirate pleasures, comparative freedoms, or even negations, these works seem to present even more historiographic ambiguities than those that deal with the counterculture of the 60s and 70s. We see, in The Enemy of All Mankind, scenes of power and seeming control within the walls of a lavish Jamaica plantation, as well as those of apparent escape, erotic encounter, and battle within what we can assume is the nearby forest. As in all of Douglas’s tableaux, they are complexly constructed and reward the kind of close scrutiny I have only had space to begin with two of them. But, because destabilized by so many open interpretive questions, the ground collectively created by these photographs is perhaps not firm enough for us to plant the black flag of piracy as a fully recuperated political possibility. The extent to which Douglas would even have sought to gather such a vocabulary in a filmic realization of Polly remains uncertain.
Lytle Shaw is Professor of English at New York University and author of New Grounds for Dutch Landscape (Stockholm: OEI, 2021)
[1] For the latter, see his essay on Samuel Beckett that accompanied Teleplays, which Douglas curated. Stan Douglas, ed., Samuel Beckett: Teleplays. Catalogue of an exhibition curated by Stan Douglas at the Vancouver Art Gallery, 1 October-3 December 1988 (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1988).
[2] Dieter Roelstraete, “Apparition Theory: Stan Douglas and Photography” in Stan Douglas: Scotiabank Photography Award (Gottingen: Steidl, 2013), 105.
[3] In an interview from the 1990s, Douglas offers one way to understand why he might pair these two conflicting currents in his work: “my concern is not to redeem these past events but to reconsider them: to understand why these utopian moments did not fulfil themselves, what larger forces kept a local moment a minor moment: and what was valuable there—what might still be useful today” (“In Conversation with Lynne Cooke 1993,” in Stan Douglas [London: Phaidon, 1998], 116).
[4] George E. Lewis, “Stan Douglas: The Polyphony of History and the Limits of Genre,” in 2011≠1848 (Cologne: Walther König, 2011), 149-192.
[5] Lewis, “Stan Douglas,” 172.
[6] Lewis, “Stan Douglas,” 191.
[7] Lewis, “Stan Douglas,” 192.
[8] As Douglas himself puts it: “There is no truly original cultural form; everything is always built on something else, otherwise it could not be understood” (Douglas in conversation with Roxana Marcoci, quoted in https://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/2024/stan-douglas-the-enemy-of-all-mankind (accessed November 14, 2024).
[9] On this, see Noam M. Elcott, “Counter-History Painting: Stan Douglas’s Photo-Panoramas,” in Stan Douglas: Hasselblad Award 2016 (Gothenburg: Mack/Hasselblad, 2016).
Cite this note as: Lytle Shaw, “A Pirate Primer? Review of Stan Douglas: The Enemy of All Mankind” Journal18 (March 2025), https://www.journal18.org/7715.
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