Late in the afternoon of 29 February 2048, on a bench overlooking Lost Lagoon, Stanley Park, Vancouver, BC, a retired curator, Reid Shier, is reminiscing with the brain of the artist Stan Douglas, which is suspended in a gravity-resistant MindGlobe.
Murky waves lap at the cold feet of a Canada goose. Above the firs and cedars, the buzz and zip of countless drones. Reid Shier sits in silence on a shiny plastic bench, staring out across the lagoon, while Stan Douglas’s disembodied brain floats nearby, shifting restlessly in the warm afternoon light.
“Two hundred years ago today, a series of revolutions erupted in France and spread across Europe,” says Stan’s brain. “And yet here we are, living in the age of the quadrillionaire cult, with an Amazon warehouse on the moon. Plus ça change.”
“It’s your first week in your MindGlobe and you still want to talk about minor histories and failed utopias? Let’s enjoy the view of the lagoon. The buffleheads are back this year.”
“I’m haunted by my failures. Humanity remains subjugated.”
“Failures? Twenty-six years ago we were in Venice, almost celebrating, despite the rumblings of the Third World War. La Serenissima was abuzz with your vision.” Orange bubbles gurgle from the back of Stan’s brain. “Stan? Are you listening?”
“I’m listening to Miles’s Black Satin. The production has an allover quality. I never expected to appreciate Miles even more, but this spherical existence enhances my perception of the music. I can see, hear everything, from all directions, all in simultaneous flux.”
“And Venice?”
“You included my work in the first show you ever curated, and we collaborated on many projects over the years, but Venice 2022, the Canadian Pavilion, the show 2011 ≠ 1848, that was our greatest – ”
“Come on, Stan – you’re the artist. I was your linebacker, clearing paths for your ideas.” As a scruffy raccoon walks indifferently past the stiff goose, a shaft of sunlight bounces off a silvery electrode attached to Stan’s brain.
“I still have ideas.”
“Of course you do. But let’s remember what you achieved in Venice. In the Canadian Pavilion, that angular shack in the Giardini, four largescale photographs, each one a recreation of the various, seemingly unrelated riots and protests that swept the world in 2011, each one constructed on soundstages, using multiple exposures, a composite photograph that combined meticulous research and vivid reinvention. In 2017 you made the Pembury Estate picture, based on the London riots in summer 2011, sparked by the killing of Mark Duggan, a Black man shot by the police. You compared the London riots to the Arab Spring, making a picture of the protests in Tunis, people on the streets talking politics late into the night, their candlelit vigil. And finally, the picture of the protester from Occupy Wall Street – a movement you thought was inspired by the Arab Spring – on the Brooklyn Bridge, being dragged by cops into the back of a paddy wagon. The detail and historical accuracy of those photographs was extraordinary. Polyphonic visions reminiscent of Bruegel.”
“I used a Phase One, 150 megapixels, unimaginably huge at the time. Multiple exposures, months of postproduction. Now I can snap pictures of almost infinite size from almost infinite angles right from this globe. Navigating the sublime horizon of information with aesthetic judgement is the challenge of our present age. By the way, let’s be clear: protesters are not hooligans. In the footage I saw of the London riots, there was no real vandalisation, there was instead the spontaneous joy of challenging injustice. And you forgot the Vancouver picture.”
“Ah, yes… the Stanley Cup riots. All those hockey fans, busting windows and torching cars in front of Vancouver’s old post office, right up the street from this murky lagoon.”
“The riot was a spontaneous eruption of class tensions, the hockey game merely the fuse. Central Vancouver represented an unattainable space, impossibly expensive. Now look behind us. Substantial blocks of social housing integrated into downtown Vancouver. Department stores as artist studios. Cooperatives at every corner. The revolution of 2041 busted monopolies, restored our urban spaces. But remember that all revolutions are temporary – Amazon owns the moon, after all. New generations must remain vigilant.”
“Art helps maintain that vigilance. When the banks collapsed in 2008 there was a brief hiccup of terror, but months later execs were getting fat bonuses again, sucking at the teat of quantitative easing. Fury started brewing worldwide. In 2011 rage spilled into the streets. You made connections between 2011 and 1848. Art is both our collective memory and our vision of the future.”
“One action nudges another,” says Stan’s brain. “News of the Vienna uprisings travelled by steamboat from Trieste to Venice, plodding across the Adriatic. Even without frictionless technology the fury spread across Europe like a Siberian wildfire. The truth will find its dock. In 2011 news of riots spread via social media, when smartphones were clunky slabs of anticipatory illumination. In the present day we are all omniscient, with infinite information available all day, every day, yet still our consciousness is distorted, alienated. Contagion travels at the speed of light. Art is our only filter.”
“Consciousness and data are indistinguishable. We live in a perpetual panopticon. It’s paralysing.”
“I repeat: art is our only filter. And I repeat again: I am haunted by my failures. By our failures. We must harness the eternal return of the revolutionary moment.”
“In Venice we created one of those moments. Remind me what you showed in Zattere. Wait, I remember – a video installation in a grimy old warehouse.”
“Not that grimy. A critic at the time described the work as pharaonic.”
“‘Grimy and pharaonic.’”
“Sounds plausible. It was a largescale video installation, complex and recombinant, typical of my work. Weirdly, I can’t remember much either.”
“MetaGoogle it. I left my OmniTab at home.”
“Let’s live in the present. Our subjective experience of time is our only freedom. And art. Difficult art.”
Waves tickle the legs of the unmoving goose. A warm breeze rustles the cherry blossoms above; a large clump of pink petals falls onto Reid’s lap. A child, accompanied by a MindGlobe, passes behind them.
“Speaking of my failures,” says Stan’s brain, “you know I wanted to write a script based on Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. Against the backdrop of the 1848 revolutions, the young protagonist Frédéric has two mentors: one in the artworld, one in business. The ethical and existential dilemma presented by the novel is even more pressing today. Amidst the fury of the Parisian riots, surrounded by death, Frédéric felt as if he were watching a play. In the present age, everything is aestheticised. Violence is art.”
“Hold on, Stan. You did write that work, a couple years after Venice. In fact you made a film, showed it London and New York in 2026.” Stan’s brain shudders in its MindGlobe, drops to the earth, buzzes along the mud and pops up again.
“Reid, you’re right. I need to reboot my MemoBulb.”
“And I’m pretty sure I remember a line in the script: ‘In the present age, nothing is aestheticised. Art is violence’.”
“All aphorisms are interchangeable.” A weak smile shifts under Reid’s white beard. Stan’s brain emits something like a sigh.
“Do you remember”, asks Reid, “when we worked on Journey into Fear in 2002? In those days you often quoted Marx: ‘We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead’. It seems to me that nowadays we suffer far more from the dead than the living.”
Reid drifts off into empty thoughts, glances at the drones. A couple of buffleheads paddle along the shore, occasionally plunging their luminescent heads under the water. The goose lets out a mechanical squawk, snapping Reid back into the moment. On the lookout for Stan’s brain, he swivels his head. Ah, there he is, mumbles Reid to himself. He’s dancing. Under a willow tree, beside a fellow MindGlobe, two of them dancing like a couple of loose moons in the violet light of dusk.
Stan Douglas’s 2011 ≠ 1848 is on view at the Canadian Pavilion in the Giardini as part of the 59th Venice Biennale, 23 April – 27 November. A second installation by Douglas will be presented simultaneously in Magazzini del Sale No. 5, Dorsoduro 262. Both are commissioned by National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
Craig Burnett is a writer based in London
