Exceptional Works: Stan Douglas

Stan Douglas, 1995. Photo by Bernard Weil for The Toronto Star

Since the late 1980s, Stan Douglas has created films and photographs—and more recently theater productions and other multidisciplinary projects—that investigate the parameters of their respective mediums. His 1994 three-channel video projection, Evening, is featured on the occasion of our presentation at Art Basel Unlimited, 2023.

In Evening—one of Douglas's earliest multichannel installations—he looks at the transformation of television news broadcasts, a medium that, in the 1960s, was undergoing significant changes in format at the same time it was overtaking radio as the primary conduit of information distribution. Commissioned by the Renaissance Society, Chicago, the work reconstructs newscasts from two different nights—January 1, 1969, and January 1, 1970—in that city, a major media market that was considered a locus of this transformation. Douglas focuses in particular on the rise of “Happy Talk,” the convention of presenting the news with a smile, no matter what was being reported, which dates to that era.

Stan Douglas

Evening, 1994

Three-channel video projection
14 min 56 sec (loop), color, sound

Overall dimensions variable

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“Just as television news began to present social life in the US with greater ‘accuracy,’ it became more and more removed from that realm and obsessed with its own internal logic. This is not to say that methods of reportage had previously been able to offer a more adequate representation of its culture, rather that in the process of making news there was now an increasing evening-out of temporal and social differences.”

—Stan Douglas, Evening project description, 1993

The installation consists of three adjacent screens simultaneously presenting the news from three fictionalized Chicago-area stations, WAMQ, WBMB, and WCSL, each in different stages of the transition to Happy Talk. The sound system is arranged so that in certain areas a viewer may hear the cacophony of all three stations at once, and when in front of each particular screen, they can hear WAMQ undergo the transition to Happy Talk, WBMB maintain its paternalistic conventions, and WCSL perfect its “Happy” rhetoric. The work’s title is thus a double entendre—simultaneously referencing the nightly broadcasts as well as the evening out of the overall tone of the news.

Installation view, Stan Douglas’s Evening (1994), on view in Video Spaces: Eight Installations, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1995

Installation view, Stan Douglas: Evening and Hors-champs, Renaissance Society, Chicago, 1995

Installation view, Stan Douglas: Past Imperfect — Works 1986–2007, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Germany, 2007

“Television was born with an instinct for the sensational and it seems prophetic that television journalism’s coming of age [in the 1960s] would coincide with a tumultuous decade.… in which television’s role as a major force in shaping public opinion was beyond dispute.”

—Hamza Walker, “The News Is Next,” 1995

In addition to the United States’s ongoing war in Vietnam, the stories include the Chicago Seven trial and the first inquest into the assassination of Black Panther Deputy Chairman Fred Hampton. None of the stories are reported in a way that reflects their complexity or irresolution, though ultimately the subject of the work is not the events themselves, but the way in which they are reported.

Installation view of Edition 2 of Stan Douglas’s Evening (1994), on view through July 23, 2023 in Enter the Mirror, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Photo by James Prinz Photography. Edition 2 is in the Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

Multichannel video installations have been an integral part of Douglas’s practice since 1992, allowing for the simultaneous presentation of overlapping narratives or vantage points. Other examples of Douglas’s work in this medium include Hors-champs (1993), which Douglas created the year prior to Evening, and used as a starting point for the later work. Additional examples include Win, Place or Show (1998), The Secret Agent (2015), Doppelgänger (2019), and ISDN (2022).

Installation view, Stan Douglas’s Hors-champs (1992), on view in Blues for Smoke, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2012–2013. Photo by Brian Forrest

Installation view, Stan Douglas’s Win, Place or Show (1998), on view in Stan Douglas and Douglas Gordon: Double Vision, Dia Chelsea, New York, 1999–2000

Installation view, Stan Douglas’s The Secret Agent (2015), on view in Stan Douglas: Interregnum, WIELS, Brussels, 2015–2016

Installation view, Stan Douglas: Doppelgänger, Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio, 2021–2022

Installation view, Stan Douglas’s ISDN (2022), on view in Stan Douglas, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, 2023

Today, nearly thirty years after its execution, Evening remains a prescient meditation on the way information is presented, received, and distributed, presaging the rise of cable news, the internet, and “fake news. ”With this work, Douglas posits that the oversaturation and multiple conflicting narratives that have been the baseline condition of contemporary media since the 1990s—and even more so today—are a direct outgrowth of this historical moment of the late 1960s. Situated on the cusp of a new decade, at a time in America when the shine of the postwar years was beginning to fade, the work exemplifies Douglas's long-standing interest in looking to such transitional moments, when, as he notes, “history could have gone one way or another,” as a means of understanding our current situation.

“It was during this period … that ‘happy talk’ was introduced into local news shows, and media started down the slippery slope of infotainment.… Yet for all its subversive intent, his art doesn't preach or proscribe.… Instead the viewer might find that an irritant has entered his consciousness, a burr that could catch a thread on the garment of received ideas and start a process of unravelling.”

—Scott Watson, curator

Stan Douglas filming at Nootka Sound, British Columbia, 1996