ART CITIES: N.York-Stan Douglas

Since the 1980s, Stan Douglas has created films, photographs, and other multidisciplinary projects that investigate the parameters of their respective mediums. His ongoing inquiry into technology’s role in image making, and how those mediations infiltrate and shape collective memory, has resulted in works that are at once specific in their historical and cultural references and broadly accessible.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive

Stan Douglas’ solo exhibition “The  Enemy  of  All  Mankind” features  the entire body of his  new photographic series, “The Enemy of All Mankind: Nine Scenes from John Gay’s Polly”. In this series Douglas stages scenes from the eighteenth-century comic opera “Polly”, written by English dramatist John Gay (1685–1732), using the narrative as a vehicle through which to engage a wide range of themes that remain highly relevant today, including race, class, gender, and media. Since the 1980s, Douglas has created films, photographs, and other multidisciplinary projects that investigate the parameters of their respective mediums. His ongoing inquiry into technology’s role in image making, and how those mediations infiltrate and shape collective memory, has resulted in works that are at once specific in their historical and cultural references and broadly accessible. Since the beginning of his career, photography has been a central focus of Douglas’s practice, used at first as a means of preparing for his films and eventually as a powerful pictorial tool in its own right. The artist is influenced in particular by media theorist Vilém Flusser’s notion of the photographic image as an encoded language that is determined by a specific set of technological, social, cultural, and political circumstances. A sequel to Gay’s well-known” The Beggar’s Opera”, ” Polly” was censored by the British government for its embedded satire and critique, particularly of policies around the parceling out of land; as a result, it was never produced during Gay’s lifetime. Douglas further notes that “Polly”was ahead of its time, as it “satirizes imperial patriarchal hierarchies of race and class, as well as gender norms, which it depicts as performative”. Gay’s stage play follows the eponymous Polly Peachum, who travels to the West Indies to search out her estranged husband, Captain Macheath, who has disguised himself as a Black man known as Morano and adopted the life of a pirate. Upon her arrival on the island, Polly is, unbeknownst to her, sold to a wealthy plantation owner as a courtesan. After eventually securing her freedom, she is advised to disguise herself as a young man to ward off unwanted male attention, and as a result becomes entangled in a series of skirmishes between the colonial settlers, the native population, and the pirates. To create the photographs, which were shot in Jamaica using Hollywood-level production effect, Douglas enlisted a cast of actors to read from a loose script that he adapted for the chosen scenes, modifying certain characters and elements to bring the themes in line with the present day. For example, in Douglas’s version, Captain Macheath was a Black man passing as white in London who, once in the West Indies, drops the disguise and lets his hair grow out. Rather than posing the players, he photographed them continuously as they acted out and improvised the dialogue, then selected as the final images those that best embodied the ideas put forth in the narrative. The resulting large-scale photographs are dynamically realized, taking the form of sweeping tableaux where dramatis personae and setting collide in vivid color. Retaining Gay’s sense of comedic folly and satire as well as the underlying pathos of the story, the images bear traces of the various forms of media through which they have been filtered, employing formal elements drawn from theatrical, cinematic, and photographic conventions alike. Accordingly, Douglas positions the viewer as a spectator—a voyeuristic witness to the various narrative turns and apparent absurdities in which relationships are transactional and enemies expendable. Douglas’s use of “Polly” as the basis for this project arose out of his long-standing interest in maroon societies, large groups of enslaved persons who banded together to run away and start new proto-democratic societies. Contrary to their depiction in popular media, pirate ships occasionally functioned as collaborative maroon societies in their own right. The title of the series, “The Enemy of All Mankind”, is taken from a doctrine of eighteenth-century maritime law (in Latin, hostis humani generis) under which pirates could be attacked by anyone since they fell outside the protection of any nation, but its core notion of defining certain groups as enemies or outsiders resonates broadly today. In Polly, the pirates—in contrast to the settlers and indigenous people—are meant to embody immorality and evil, yet in pulling out specific strands of the narrative, Douglas points to a more nuanced understanding of such sweeping generalities.

Photo: Stan Douglas, Act I, Scene XI: In which Polly Comes to Understand that Mrs. Trapes has Sold Her to Mr. Ducat as a Courtesan, 2024, Inkjet print mounted on Dibond aluminum, 59 1/4 x 59 1/4 inches (150.5 x 150.5 cm), Framed: 60 3/4 x 60 3/4 inches (154.3 x 154.3 cm), Edition of 5, 2 AP, Signed verso, © Stan Douglas, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery

Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 525 West 19th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 12/9-26/10/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com/