Anthology Film Archives, New York
2018
February 16, 2018 Anthology Film Archives in New York showed Stan Douglas’s early works Television Spots (1987–1988) and Monodramas (1991) as part of a new screening series called ON THE AIR: ARTIST TELEVISION.
Curated by Rebecca Cleman from Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) and Ava Tews at Anthology Film Archives, the February 16 program of ON THE AIR presents works created by artists for public television, and also includes films by Ernie Kovacs, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Chris Burden, Dara Birnbaum, and others. The series is being presented in conjunction with the exhibition Broadcasting: EAI at ICA at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (February 2–March 25, 2018).
Douglas’s Television Spots were originally made to be inserted in fifteen- to thirty-second-long slots between the advertisements on a private Canadian television network. The twelve short video sequences were shown on a nightly basis and without any introduction, and feature narrative fragments unfolding in ordinary or banal settings. Similarly, the artist’s Monodramas feature brief, dislocated events—a car and a school bus nearly collide at an intersection, only to drive away; a pedestrian on the street greets an Afro-Canadian man who responds, "I’m not Gary."
As the artist told Roxana Marcoci in an interview after winning the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography in 2016, "Early projects like the Television Spots and Monodramas were all about an alienation effect, putting an irritant into broadcast television by means of these counterfeit advertisements to make people look at the context around the ads in a different way."
Image: Stan Douglas, still from Monodramas, 1991