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Welcome to One High quality Present, the place Observer highlights a lately opened exhibition at a museum not in New York Metropolis, a spot we all know and love that already receives loads of consideration.
I like to put in writing about images on this column as a result of I don’t all the time get the possibility to see these exhibits in individual, and images is comparatively simple to eat nearly. But it surely’s additionally amongst my favourite mediums and the way I first got here into artwork; a stint at LIFE journal made me extra assured in discussing it. Then I came across exhibitions of latest works by Gregory Crewdson and Stan Douglas, artists who use Hollywood-style methods to stage works that appear like movie stills or photojournalism, respectively, with the small modification that they’re false. These films by no means existed; the occasions captured are staged. It turned out that fact not had any worth in images, and all that point within the LIFE archives could as effectively have been spent on Instagram.
I do know slightly extra about artwork now, however nonetheless really feel underqualified to put in writing about Douglas’s “Ghostlight” at Bard School’s Hessel Museum of Artwork. I did see this muscular survey in individual, the place the format wraps round Beginning of a Nation (2025), the artist’s five-channel response to D.W. Griffith’s 1915 racist epic, which was screened at Woodrow Wilson’s White Home and arguably the primary blockbuster. Surrounded by that movie are practically forty works from the Nineteen Nineties via to the current that contact on matters like settler colonialism and the complicated work of picture creation.
The exhibition takes its title from a large-format 2024 {photograph} that exhibits a vacant Los Angeles theater illuminated by a single lamp, which greets you upon entry. The title refers back to the mild that permits superstitious staff to navigate the stage after hours, but it surely’s clear that the title of the work goes deeper nonetheless. The truth that this single bulb illuminates all the theater with such element and sweetness speaks to the historical past of all images, which is nothing however the report of sunshine, printed onto a bit of paper via the usage of one other sort of mild.
However the early work isn’t any slouch both. Hors-Champs (1992) recreates the vibe of a free-jazz live performance on French tv from the Nineteen Sixties. It’s infused with the spirit of 1968, and might be mistaken for an archival work, although the performers sometimes drift into unusual and unlikely locations for an precise up to date recording, like La Marseillaise and The Star-Spangled Banner. Such specific politics are a inform; they make all of it too good, which is signature Douglas. He doesn’t need you to really imagine that any of that is actual.
One room at Bard is given over to “2011 ≠ 1848,” his exhibition for the Canadian pavilion of the 2022 Venice Biennale, a set of labor that must also be absorbed within the context of apparent politics. To touch upon the up to date ones, Douglas returned to 2011, the time of Occupy Wall Road and the Arab Spring. New York Metropolis, 1 October 2011 (2021) exhibits a confrontation with the police on the Brooklyn Bridge that might be mistaken for a scene from the George Floyd protests. However no: this can be a pretend scene from an earlier motion. Actual or pretend, 2011 or 2020, the tip outcomes have been precisely the identical.
“Stan Douglas: Ghostlight” is on view on the Hessel Museum of Artwork via November 30, 2025.
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