Stan Douglas: "Doppelgänger" @ David Zwirner
At David Zwirner gallery a couple of weeks ago, Stan Douglas’s piece Doppelgänger (2019) offered me a kind of unique mixture of feelings: entertainment, pleasure, embarrassment, and frustration. The playful naiveté of the work dragged me at first into an insufferable state of happiness, a too peaceful trance pertaining — according to my superficial apprehension of philosophical literature — to earlier and happier times, when it was customary for the imagination to isolate a number of characters, expressions, and attitudes from the reality of humankind and, like a child withdrawn to its corner, play with them, invent conflicts for them, and invest them with powers whose depth and reach surpassed the measurement of normal existence. The world inhabited by these figures then was light, restful, and divested of all contradiction, so that every desire that burned their hearts was always fulfilled, and at their whim they could gently dance their way from one situation to the next. Their faces and bodies were monuments to the eternal ideal. Their minds, in full possession of reason, were entrusted with the judgements of nature. And thus every time I was able, I wrestled myself away from this contemplative vision. It was rather unsettling to confront such a lavish and beautiful order in tandem with a surmounting feeling of dullness and silliness at my activity, as if I was playing a sport instead of looking at an artwork.
Sometimes perfection and lightness are anathema in descriptions of artworks, as they positively refer to that hated vanity and superficiality tabooed from any serious work. Often lying at the surface, they are usually missed by most “critical” viewers, who when approaching artworks with their scholastic spectacles, want the objects to teach them only “serious” and “deep” thoughts. In Douglas, however, superficiality permeating the smallest details marks the violence of reflection. Not a dramatist but an engineer, his creatures are empty silhouettes or robots programmed with the static thoughts of liberal common sense. The poses, the gazes, the smiles, the vital appearances of these creatures, whom the dictionary of fashion has pejoratively classified under the epithet of “experts”, are those of the new aristocrats. To them belongs truth, to them beauty and judgement. They do not lend themselves to psychological or dramatic reconstructions, but merely are what they are: technical experts, military experts, moral experts, and of course, those who expertly sacrifice. They do not argue but merely explain, listen, and command. In the figures of play, of course, it is rather unusual to find the weariness and boredom that furrow the brows and deform the cheeks of plain and revolting mortals.
Still from Stan Douglas’ Doppelgänger, 2019. Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner
But before I get ahead of myself, let me spell out the plot in a few words. Doppelgänger portrays the teleportation of a female astronaut, Alice, to an unknown planet, from which nobody thinks she will ever return. But she unexpectedly does. Due to an unorderly characteristic of quantum nature, however, she is also divided into two different selves — one an exact inversion of the other. And in turn the whole reality each inhabits, spatially as well as temporally, appears as the mirror experience of its opposite. She moves, answers, types, looks, in one screen contrary to the other; every utterance, movement, and thought is momentarily meaningful as a moment of repetition. An apparently arbitrary event is abstracted into an element of form and pervasively subsumes under itself the manifold aspects of reality. From the smallest detail to the totality of the narrative construction, the story bifurcates. In one version, she is accepted and allowed to safely return back; in the other, the process fails, she is incarcerated, and with her organs backwards, she is mistrusted as an aberration. Upon her return, she is at both sides of a division more imaginary than concrete: judge and victim of a tribunal where reason is not to be exercised.
Naturally the idea is that the hero Alice, in returning to Earth, is forced to confront her own self and have a say in the actions and ideas that are to regulate her future. But the decision is never to take place. Alice's confrontation with herself is the moment of transcendental transformation in a world without transcendance. The gods never judge: because what is true, right, and beautiful has already been decided a priori and is eternal. For them, the problems of nature are merely technical and their solutions emerge through the mixture of factual knowledge, precedent, and expertise, which is most ironically marked in their accents. In the most postmodern tribal way we have: the Indian computer boy, the American military officer, the German scientist, and the equally German UN ambassador, and of course, the “sacrificial” black woman herself: Alice. When the ambassador arrives at the scene, there is only one question she is meant to answer: what are the legal rights of this new person? Because, of course, from where else do rights and freedom originate but from the endowments of experts and gods?
In a story lays claim to reality, a knowing wink may reveal a different character of its structure: the necessity to somehow do away with the illusion and accept that after all, “it was just a story.” In order to be recognized by the world of experts, Alice is asked “if you measure your life by the tick of the clock” to which she answers “emit deifier evil”, instead of what she is supposed to “[you] live reified time.” This careless irony gives away the suffering narration involves in a world where it is no longer possible to tell stories. With the same sleight of hand that creates the image of a fine world, the author casts aside the illusion of reality and points at the sacrifice made, the paradise forever lost, sought, and never found. For while directed to the world of the story, irony may decry the possibility of every illusion for change; it equally reveals that reality, accomplished and rounded, is nothing but the compensation for selfless resignation. //
