'What makes “Ghostlight” not just important but restorative is how it stands against two tendencies in contemporary art that share an unfortunate core. One is biographical: to turn the artist’s personality or identity into the object of appraisal, justifying the most lackluster exhibitions through backstories, interviews, disclosures, selfies. The other is referential: to gas up ordinary or careless work with a string of endless citations, and having the label do the work the artist did not rise to. Both these tendencies, Douglas shows us, are running away from the whole power of art. Mere citation will never suffice, and personal chronicle is a narcissistic nonstarter. (One of his first lessons to his students at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., where he taught until recently: “Unless your name is Malcolm X, I’m not interested in your autobiography.”)
The pictures still have to work by themselves, with both a visual beauty and a conceptual underpinning, or else they just drown in the stream of posts and shares. That lesson reverberates through Douglas’s newest work, the 13-minute “Birth of a Nation” (2025), which reinvents the racist epic at the origin of American cinema as a Freudian hall of mirrors.'
Image: Stan Douglas, stills from Hors-champs, 1992Two-channel video installation with stereo sound, 13:20 min
