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LUDION
Stan Douglas: The Secret Agent
Foreword by Dirk Snauwaert. Text by Eric C. H. De Bruyn, Jason E. Smith. Afterword by Séamus Kealy.
Stan Douglas: The Secret Agent 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’ oeuvre.
This film still from Stan Douglas' new six-channel film "The Secret Agent"—on view through April 30 at David Zwirner gallery—is reproduced from Ludion's gorgeous new book of the same name. Reviewed by Randy Kennedy in this week's New York Times, the film is an adaptation of a 1907 Joseph Conrad novel about a terrorist plot to blow up an English observatory, reimagined for Portugal during the post-revolutionary summer of 1975. "Douglas' The Secret Agent is above all a film about modernity," Jason E. Smith writes. "It is 'about' modernity, though, in a very special way: in the story, modernity is not merely evoked, it is targeted for attack… From the perspective of our present, to watch The Secret Agent is to measure the distance between the volatility of the time depicted—its modernizing dynamism, its opening onto an indeterminate future—and the present of the crisis, our crisis." continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 8.5 x 10.5 in. / 192 pgs / 300 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $45.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $60 ISBN: 9789491819384 PUBLISHER: Ludion AVAILABLE: 1/26/2016 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA ASIA AU/NZ AFR ME
Published by Ludion. Foreword by Dirk Snauwaert. Text by Eric C. H. De Bruyn, Jason E. Smith. Afterword by Séamus Kealy.
Stan Douglas: The Secret Agent 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’ oeuvre.