Stefan Jovanovic
This study focuses on a single work within the oeuvre of the Canadian artist Stan Douglas, the two-channel video installation Win, Place or Show (1998). This piece is constructed as an infinitely-looping counterfactual narrative, set in a modernist social-housing unit in late-1960s Vancouver that was never in fact built. Two dockworkers inhabiting a cramped one-bedroom unit in this imaginary setting repeatedly argue, fight and reconcile, while our view of this action – filmed from twelve different camera angles – is randomized by a computer in real time as the story unfolds and repeats. My study will consider this work within a twofold problematic; firstly, the themes and strategies that form the work's conceptual basis will be examined and situated within an art-historical context, with respect to their correspondences within the whole of Douglas’s body of work and the broader context of Vancouver-based photo-conceptual practices over the past several decades. Subsequently, the work will be analyzed within a range of theories respecting the concepts of space, time and their relation to the construction of narrative and visual culture, and by extension, to the production of everyday consciousness.
I wish to express my sincerest gratitude to my two thesis supervisors, Drs. Olivier Asselin and Charles Acland, for their invaluable direction in the research and writing of this thesis, and especially for managing to provide me with their lucid comments and helpful criticism even under the strictest of deadlines. I am grateful also to DI. David Tomas for very generously agreeing to take the role of my external reader.
As well, I woud like to extend my thanks to the other members of my S.I.P. supervisory committee, Profs. Richard Kerr and Richard Hancox, for lending their interest and support to my self-directed programme of study, and also to Blossom Thom at the office of Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary Studies for all her kind assistance.
I would like to thank Prof. Donato Totaro for his fruitful insights into film theory, and especially for originally sterring me down the "long murky road" toward Bakhtin. Thanks also to my friends and colleagues in the various departments that have comprised my interdisciplinary curriculum for their comradeship, and special thanks to Darcey Nichols, who doggedly scrutinized the text herein and offered many valuable suggestions.
Thanks to Jessica for everything else :) . I dedicate this work to her.