Stan Douglas

“I feel the same way about disco,” Hunter S. Thompson once quipped, “as I do about herpes.” Indeed, the decade of jive is often relegated to a less than Periclean position within our cultural history. However, time, as the maxim goes, is what you make of it, and for artist Stan Douglas’s latest show, “Disco Angola,” the halcyon age of disco proves to be golden.

The suite of meticulous tableaux vivants that make up this exhibition—eight large-scale color photographs in all—invite parallels with his Vancouver School cohort Jeff Wall. As with his 2011 exhibition, “Midcentury Studio,” Douglas here assumes the persona of a fictional photojournalist. This time, however, his lens is cast on the apparently disparate eras of disco mania and Angolan liberation, juxtaposing the dance floor revolution with a more incendiary one. An image showing a mélange of hedonistic revelers, Club Versailles, 1974, 2012, hangs opposite a photograph of fleeing Portuguese émigrés, Exodus, 1975, 2012: the former crowd flocking to a scene of cultural liberation, the latter fleeing from one. Elsewhere, a couple’s indifference to surrounding nightlife, seen in Two Friends, 1975, 2012, is mirrored in A Luta Continua, 1974, 2012, where the insouciant pose of a young Angolan woman stands in contrast to the stenciled call for uprising on the wall behind her.

Appropriating the photo-reportage aesthetic, Douglas’s “Disco Angola” invokes many of the criticisms leveled against photography—especially critiques lodged of the form’s claims to truthfulness via indexicality. Yet a chronicler’s proximity has never been a guarantee of verity, and distance has never disqualified efforts to record: Herodotus, the father of history, wrote of Attic endeavors at which he was not present. Profoundly, Douglas, far from rewriting history, is instead, through his images, expanding the parameters by which we perceive it. Can you dig it?