Saturday, January 9, 2016

Stan Douglas at Wiels

Stan Douglas at Wiels
(link)

"examining the 'failed utopia' of modernism and obsolete technologies"
"a critical analysis of our social reality"
"Samuel Beckett, Marcel ProustE.T.A. Hoffmann and the Brothers Grimm, 
blues and free jazz, television and Hollywood, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud
haunt the uncanny montages
of the Canadian artist"
"In what art historian Hal Foster describes as 
the 'outmoded genre'
in "failed utopias and obsolete technologies"
"a new medium out of the remnants of old forms"
"the parameters, functions and limits of cinematic adaptation"
"creating the effect of a recurring nightmare"
"everything deferred and delayed"
"troubling the material and spatial boundaries of the cinema and museum"
"thematically disturb these distinctions
as his art occupies
a transitional zone
that interrogates 
perception, narrative
comprehension and 
modes of visual and aural storytelling."
"and"
"invites interrogation
from film studies insofar as it not only utilizes the medium but also actively modifies 
and references 
the canonical texts, orientations and histories of cinema"
"Douglas situates Overture in the historical moment that the beginnings of film share with the end of the novel, when Proust's faith in the tantalizing structures of his great predecessors, Balzac and Wagner, was being undermined by the perceptive discontinuities that film helped to bring about."

- Wikipedia.