Stan Douglas: The Secret Agent (special edition)

Foreword by Dirk Snauwaert. Texts by Eric C. H. De Bruyn and Jason E. Smith. Afterword by Séamus Kealy

Stan Douglas’s The Secret Agent, published in October 2015, is also available as a special edition. The book surveys three recent works by Stan Douglas (born 1960), all dealing with the politics and culture of the turbulent 1970s. The video installation The Secret Agent, which lends this monograph its title, transposes Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel to Lisbon during the upheaval following the Carnation Revolution of 1974. Disco Angola compares two roughly simultaneous moments—the hedonistic glamour of New York nightlife in the ’70s and the Angolan Civil War—in a series of eight staged historical photographs set in New York and Angola. The third work, Luanda-Kinshasa, is a six-hour jazz film set in 1974, constructed around 11 songs recorded at the legendary 30th Street Studio where the likes of Miles Davis and Glenn Gould worked. Stan Douglas: The Secret Agent includes original scripts, film stills, production shots, and extensive archival material to illustrate these crucial works from Douglas’s oeuvre.

The special edition of 100 copies comprises a copy of The Secret Agent as a white hardcover book, and a colophon page signed and numbered by the artist. Taking the fictitious role of a crime photographer, Douglas has created two selenium-toned silver gelatin prints, also included in this unique boxed edition. 

$560.00

Publisher: Ludion

Artists: Stan Douglas

Contributors: Eric C. H. De Bruyn, Séamus Kealy, Jason E. Smith, Dirk Snauwaert

Designer: Sven Beirnaert

Printer: DeckersSnoeck

Publication Date: 2015

Binding: Hardcover

Dimensions: Book: 8 1/2 x 10 1/2 in (21.6 x 26.7 cm); Box: 10 x 13 3/4 in (25.4 x 34.9 cm)

Pages: 192

Reproductions: 184 color, 34 b&w

ISBN: 9789491819384-1

Retail: $560 | €500

Status: Available

Stan Douglas

Since the late 1980s, Stan Douglas has created films, photographs, and installations that reexamine particular locations or past events. His works often take their points of departure in local settings, from which broader issues can be identified. Making frequent use of new as well as outdated technologies, Douglas appropriates existing Hollywood genres (including murder mysteries and the Western) and borrows from classic literary works (notably, Samuel Beckett, Herman Melville, and Franz Kafka) to create ready-made contextual frameworks for his complex, thoroughly researched projects.

All Stan Douglas books