Dtourning the Image of Everyday Life:

Te Use of Local History in Two Recent

Public Artworks by Stan Douglas and Ken Lum
Jordan Lypkie
UBC Undergraduate Journal of Art History Issue 1 | 2010
Just as the accelerated history of our time is the history of accumulation
and industrialization, so the backwardness and conservative tendency of ev-
eryday life are products of the laws and interests that have presided over
this industrialization. Everyday life has until now resisted the historical. Tis
represents frst of all a verdict against the historical insofar as it has been the
heritage and project of an exploitative society.
Guy-Ernest Debord
1
Te 2010 Vancouver Olympic Winter Games provide an interesting set of circumstances
to frame the context of two new public artworks in the city by Stan Douglas and Ken Lum.
Directly or indirectly funded by the Games, these artworks, whether through the now obliga-
tory investment in cultural capital as a part of the spectacle or through their incorporation
into new real estate developments speculatively built on the market after-efects of the global
exposure of the city, have been placed in a manner that seems to criticize the very conditions
which engendered their creation. Global capital investment and gentrifcation can be con-
nected to tourism and the branding of Vancouvers image internationally, while also being
controlled by political and economic reconstruction.
2
Te public display of artwork in this
context serves to add a layer of culture to the worldwide marketing of local identity; as past
industries of resource extraction have been eclipsed by the creation of a more abstract, sym-
bolic economy tied closely to globalization, a global stage is required to ensure its prosperity
and expansion.
3
Te recent Olympics can be seen as a manifestation of this desire. Emerging
out of the context of the Games scope and zealous late-capitalist ambition, these two works
1 Perspectives for Conscious Alterations in Everyday Life, in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken
Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 73.
2 Neil Smith and Jef Derksen, Urban Regeneration: Gentrifcation as Global Urban Strategy, in Every
Building on 100 West Hastings, ed. Reid Shier (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002), 66.
3 Melanie OBrian, Introduction: Specious Speculation, in Vancouver Art & Economies, ed. Melanie
OBrian (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007), 13.
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Jordan Lypkie
are entangled in a cultural production that subversively questions the nature of representation
within postmodern circumstance.
Stan Douglas and Ken Lum engage local activist and counter-cultural histories of
possibility and disappointment, resurrecting past ideals of Vancouver art and political prac-
tices to contrast them with the very systems of complexity and control that have emerged out
of their ashes. Land use has become governed by a speculative economic model of real estate
caught up within the spectacular, utilizing as it does a branded image of Vancouver as an iden-
tity for sale to global wealth. Using public space that exists precisely because of its allotment
by private interests, Douglas and Lum juxtapose these turning points in local history with the
subsequent solidifcation of a globalized economy and its efect on the course of local urban
development. Situated within this complex spectrum of history and its representation, both
artists, and their works, consequently demand a particular reaction from their viewers, creating
moments of refection within everyday life.
Te theoretical discourse of the Situationist International, a group of artists, writ-
ers, and architects operating mostly out of Paris in the years leading up to the uprisings of
May 1968, considers this dazzling alienation to be the result of a consumer-driven economy.
Debord describes the spectacle both as the totalizing scope of a consumer society mediated
by images,
4
and the movement of living into mere forms of representation,
5
where the true
is the moment of the false.
6
More than a simple critique of contemporary capitalist society,
Debords essay is also signifcant as a methodological outline, as applicable now as it was when
it was originally published.
7
Debord articulates methods for discovering the freedom implicit
in everyday life, seemingly driven by a consumer economy and vested proft-driven interests,
through creativity and activities that promote free consciousness. Seeing the potential for his-
tory to lend a space of lived time, Debord advocates that individuals imagine environments
as autonomous domains of lived experiences, and understand life as a voyage of self-contained
meaning.
8
In between the voids of the consumer city, he found the power of recollection to
be one aspect of the conscious resistance to this way of living. Vancouver, in its desire to be-
come a world class city in the wake of the Olympic moment, has developed itself as a place
to attract wealth at the expense of tearing down and neglecting important aspects of its past.
Notwithstanding the relatively new status of the city, critical memories embodied in historical
architectures are an important aspect of regional identity. Te rediscovery of these histories
within the spaces of the metropolis then become a more potent form of transparency than
their ubiquitous glass walls pretend to suggest.
4 Guy-Ernest Debord, Te Society of the Spectacle, Situationist International Text Library, http://
library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/, thesis 4.
5 Ibid., thesis 1.
6 Ibid., thesis 9.
7 Tis position is partially afrmed by Debords 1988 addition, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle,
UbuWeb, http://www.ubu.com/papers/debord_comments.html.
8 Debord, Te Society of the Spectacle, thesis 178.
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UBCUJAH Issue 1 | 2010
9 Scott Watson, Against the Habitual, in Stan Douglas, ed. Scott Watson (London: Phaidon, 1998), 36.
10 Sharla Sava, Cinematic Pictures: Te Legacy of the Vancouver Counter-Tradition, in Vancouver Art &
Economies, 51. Sava charts the history and validity of the term in her very informative essay.
11 Ibid., 57.
12 Tim Lee, Specifc Objects and Social Subjects: Industrial Facture and the Production of Polemics in
Vancouver, in Vancouver Art & Economies, 105.
13 Ibid., 107.
14 Debord, Te Society of the Spectacle, thesis 11.
15 Ibid., thesis 18.
Since its very beginnings, Douglass work has sought to deal with repressed history
and its subsequent imagination, often using advanced photographic and cinematic techniques
to articulate fateful stories that nonetheless suggest possibilities of radical political freedom.
9
Working with large-format photography, flm, and installations involving video and music, he
uses modern media and methods of storytelling to analyze history, its use, and the context in
which it is represented. In this manner, Douglas has been vital to the artistic production of
what may be labeled the regional school of photoconceptualism. Issues of art-market brand-
ing and generalization aside, the term photoconceptualism can perhaps allude to a discourse
around local history and political engagement through exploration of formal techniques de-
rived from flm and commercial media.
10
Rather than push against formal conventions, as had
often been the drive of the avant-garde, photoconceptualists like Douglas deny the complete
refusal of representation, and, in fact, use it to their advantage, accepting theatricality as a
suitable method of confronting social injustice in the writing and staging of history since the
1970s.
11
In efect, they adapt the media most commonly used in the construction of spectacu-
lar society, such as photography, flm, and television, in order to expose its means of doing so.
Te creation and cultural reception of images are examined in such a way that the viewer can
recognize the ideologies behind representations.
12
Additionally, the viewer is made aware of
how his or her response to these media is so passively accepted in daily, primarily visual, life
through Douglass inversion of the spectacle.
13
If the spectacle is characterized as the sensation
of a self-perpetuating socio-economic ensnaring of society in its historical moment,
14
then
Douglas discovers a way to use the spectacles materials of appearance as reality to mine critical
historical moments lost in the midst of a development driven for its own sake. He reverses the
nature of the spectacle as the opposite of dialogue,
15
using its privileging of the visual to elicit
radical cognition.
In this manner, and by using public space to open debate, Abbott & Cordova, 7 August
1971 is a signifcant work in Douglass oeuvre and in the discourse of an increasingly public
Vancouver School practice. Situated outside of the gallery and literally built into the walls of
market housing (albeit here with concessions to public meeting space and social housing), the
work refects its conditions as glaringly as the windows of so many new condominiums. Te
piece is unmistakably connected to place. Te Woodwards building, that it is both contained
in and adorns on one side, is a historical centrepiece of Downtown Eastside community and
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Jordan Lypkie
history. What was once the neighbourhood commercial centre is nostalgically held by many
to have also been a place of community and of shared interaction between all levels of the
urban fabric.
16
Te buildings closure in 1993 efectively led to the demise of the area as a
typically functioning urban sector and contributed to the proliferation of an underground
drug economy.
17
Subsequently occupied by squatters and left vacant by developers, the former
department store re-emerged as market housing units, giving confrmation to talk of immi-
nent gentrifcation in the area. In this sense, Douglass involvement with the project could be
interpreted as part of the way that art is implicated in globalization, lending a cultural texture
to the consumptive landscape.
18
However, by confronting the history of the area, Douglass
artwork uses the photographic medium to reveal a depth normally lacking in the sort of bill-
boards with which it ostensibly shares qualities of medium.
19
Given a stage in the context of
public reception, and, in efect, calling attention to the privatization of public space, Douglas
uses the opportunity to draw attention to a repressed collective memory of the area through
a re-enacted demonstration. If the aftermath of the Olympics intends to attract mass tour-
ism and subsequently sell real estate in an already infated market, it then follows that public
space becomes a rare privilege in a community of commodities. Where street-level views so
often feature signs advertising new developments or extolling a particularly livable Vancouver
lifestyle, Douglass space at Woodwards presents us with an instance of resistance from the
past and its unfortunate violent culmination so as to question certain values inherent in our
present stupor as consumers living in this city. In the 1959 Internationale Situationiste journal,
dtournement is described as a radical critical technique of altering or negating the original
intent of a medium as a way of organizing a new meaning with an increased scope and efect.
20

By appropriating the form of murals or billboards that advertise lifestyles, commodifed in
themselves and fxed by market speculators, Douglas creates an image that gains strength not
only in criticizing such media but in utilizing the power inherent in these visual forms. Tis
strategy, in turn, has the efect of calling into question the historical and social compromises
made in order to satisfy the exploitative ends of media imagery.
Te scale of Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971 is immense. Seeming to appear almost
as large as the city block it portrays, and positioned above eye-level, its presence is undeni-
able. Tis visual strategy is commanding, and is further accentuated by elements of the works
formal composition and creation. Artifcially lit in a studio re-creation of the nearby street,
16 Jef Sommers and Nick Blomley, Te Worst Block in Vancouver, in Stan Douglas: Every Building on 100
West Hastings, ed. Reid Shier (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002), 51.
17 Reid Shier, Introduction, in Stan Douglas: Every Building on 100 West Hastings, ed. Reid Shier
(Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002), 14.
18 Smith and Derksen, 74.
19 Douglas has also analyzed this area in his photographic contributions to Stan Douglas: Every Building on
100 West Hastings, ed. Reid Shier (Vancouver, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2002).
20 Ken Knabb, ed. and trans.,Dtournement as Negation and Prelude, in Situationist International
Anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 55.
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UBCUJAH Issue 1 | 2010
the scene of the photograph appears carefully composed through active direction and digital
studio technique. A triangle of aggressive police confrontations forms the central motif, the
cast light of street lamps creating slightly misaligned areas of conjunctive illumination for the
entangled fgures. Within this zone, two fgures appear running mid-stride, one visibly fear-
ful and the other acting with defance, and yet another, a woman with no apparent direction,
refusing to look back at the violent scene she fees. Upon closer examination, her position, feet
frmly planted on the ground, seems contrived and forced. Trough the artists direction and
digital insertion, she seems to represent the emotions of surprise and confusion in the face
of shockingly violent police oppression. Trampled fowers, broken glass, and Vancouver Sun
newspapers litter the scene, representing a kind of symbolic confrontation between hippie
subculture, anarchy, and the manipulative media, allied with the state forces. Cars painted in
primary hues frame the scene and align visually with the mosaic of the Woodwards building,
connecting the built environment to the circulation of outside citizens. In the foreground, a
charging policeman on horseback draws the viewer into the scene, while of to the side an ado-
lescent seated on the curb looks back, not to the viewer, but into the seemingly empty studio
where Douglas triggers the shutter release.
Te dual nature of the work, capable of being seen from both sides, creates a curious
sense of transparency. When viewed from inside the Woodwards building, storefront letter-
ing appears reversed, backwards, and therefore unintelligible. Tis element of the background
provides an astute parallel to the formal consideration that Douglas brings to his work, along-
side historical and social strands. Te entire image, then, becomes a mirror of its creation,
and is replicated multiple times by partially refective strips of glass that vertically divide the
artworks placement on the wall. Tese mirrored surfaces and divisions become metaphors for
the way Douglas inverts intentions in representation and reception: refecting the past while
also distorting it. In this way, numerous histories are inevitably altered from various angles and
perspectives, and attention is drawn to the system of representation rather than to the artist.
21
Meanwhile, outside, the text achieves legibility. Tis diferent view could possibly attest to the
artists sympathies for those beyond the conditions of the housing complex, those simply pass-
ing by or left out of its shelter. Similarly, by presenting a visual anomaly to the viewer while
inside, Douglas, in a way, respects his or her self-consciousness of place. Te viewer, therefore,
does not have a clear view of exterior life when inside the comfortable interior. Paradoxically,
Debord observes that separation between reality and image maintains the unity of life.
22
Tis
distinction, then, in regards to Douglass work, is rendered in a striking visual parallel. If the
city is the locus of history and contains a concentration of social powers that make possible
its re-understanding in order to defect its subordination to a diversionary economy,
23
then
Abbott & Cordova is a complicated snapshot of an instance meant to be forgotten, but here
21 Lee, 113.
22 Debord, Te Society of the Spectacle, thesis 7.
23 Ibid., thesis 176.
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Jordan Lypkie
24 Shaun Dacey, Te Gastown Riot as Public Art, in Megaphone Magazine, February 11, 2010.
25 Jef Derksen, Fixed City & Mobile World: Urban Facts & Global Forces in Ken Lums Art, in Ken
Lum Works with Photography, ed. Kitty Scott and Martha Hanna, (Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Contemporary
Photography, 2002), 32.
26 Some examples include Four Boats Stranded: Red and Yellow, Black and White (2001), Tere is no place like
home (2000), and Lums series of portrait-logos (1984-86).
27 Kitty Scott, Ken Lum Works with Photography, in Ken Lum Works with Photography, ed. Kitty Scott
and Martha Hanna, (Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, 2002), 13.
reinserted into the social memory.
Douglas retrieves a piece of partially forgotten local history, of a counter-culture pro-
test opposing undercover police tactics, and pressing for the legalization of marijuana. Te
violent crackdown of the protest that Abbott & Cordova portrays ultimately led to the rezon-
ing of this blue-collar area, made up of industrial buildings, which were used as hippie squats,
into a commercial district, thereby collapsing the social infrastructure, and creating changes to
police intrusion upon public and private spaces.
24
In the restructuring of space following the
aftermath of the Gastown riot, the police department greatly beneftted from the improve-
ments to surveillance these spatial changes entailed. Today, police ofcers can now control
public gatherings of protest more acutely from their onset, negating the possibility for the
assembly of large groups in public areas, and can powerfully assert their patriarchal presence
before the need to disperse a crowd with force arises. Te democratic rights for groups to con-
vene publicly and protest have been thus carefully squandered and exacerbated by a market
hungry for spaces previously unavailable for sale. Furthermore, by mandating use for the area,
the new zoning laws allowed police to restrict and inhibit spatial occupation by those that had
until that time squatted and lived there. By reassessing this particular moment of change in
the context of the present, Douglas confrms the way the spectacle mutates in order to hide
its dubious origins, controlling society through the very manipulative images it propagates. At
the same time, Douglas reopens the past to active dialogue, leading the viewer to draw con-
nections between the use and refusal of history in the present, and to consider the ideology
behind the will to forget the moment that his image articulates.
In his new work from shangri-la to shangri-la, Ken Lum realizes similar concerns.
Trough a less dramatic, but equally complicated, public artwork, Lum connects an obscured
moment of local history to the present day entanglement of globalized economy. Issues of
identity, class, and place have long been central themes in Lums practice. Another touchstone
of Lums oeuvre has been his critical engagements with globalization through playing with
notions of immigration, language, and stereotype.
25
Tese works have often been infuenced by
commercial billboards, as well as by sculptures that criticize Minimalism, in order to produce
a social examination of place and identity.
26
In this new public work, he draws from a variety
of these practices. Kitty Scott observes of Lums work that he poses aggressive interventions in
public and social spaces as a means of exploring anxieties and contradictions within that very
space.
27
While this particular work may be considered less confrontational in comparison to
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UBCUJAH Issue 1 | 2010
previous ones that, for example, rely on the use of large text and portraits full of gestural body
language, its message and utilization of place are similarly complex and critical.
From shangri-la to shangri-la is situated adjacent to the new Shangri-la building, a
luxury hotel and condominium tower that ironically derives it marketed image from the nos-
talgia for imperial privilege and snobbery of a Hong Kong institution in a city with a past
of Asian racial exclusion.
28
Tis Orientalist imagery becomes just one aspect of the concept
for Lums complicated work. Historically, the piece refers to a squatter community on the
Maplewood mud fats in North Vancouver. Intertidal squatter fats have long been an aspect of
the citys history, and were able to exist due to unclear jurisdiction over the land in the intertidal
zone, whose ownership was disputed due to its ephemeral nature. Te eventual arson by au-
thorities of the makeshift buildings of this community of artists, writers, and counter-cultural
fgures seems in retrospect to provide a point of no return in the transformation of metropoli-
tan Vancouver.
29
Trough this act, the city seems to have set a precedent for the eradication
of socially experimental communities and humanist ideals in favor of market-based develop-
ments, supposed embodiments of progress. Increasingly neo-liberal government practices in
the interim have allowed economic conditions to dictate land use in accordance to that which
reaps maximum profts. Tis laissez-faire attitude is exemplifed in the recent suggestion that
by using taxpayer money to partially fund the recent Olympics, increases in local economy and
land values would follow, benefting all members of the community through trickle-down ef-
fects and a distributed share of the profts. Astute observers, however, recognize that one side
benefts at the expense of the other.
Built of the detritus of North Shore construction and inlet driftwood, the shacks pro-
vided a symbolic counterpoint to the prevalent Modernist development of Vancouvers urban
identity at the mid-century mark.
30
Situated at the margins of the expanding city, the mudfats
community can be interpreted as a utopian reaction against such corporate civic development,
closely tied to the counter-culture of the period. As an example of this contrast, a period
National Film Board documentary on the community, Mudfats Living, depicts the seemingly
idyllic lifestyle of hippie families set against the stif conservatism of the mayor, who planned
to demolish the area in order to build a shopping centre.
31

Lum also references an early work of photoconceptualism by Ian Wallace, La
Mlancolie de la rue, which examines suburbanization and the modern architecture of civic
28 Rhodri Windsor-Liscombe, Architizing: Te Subjugation and Exploitation of the Architectural
Profession Trough Seductive Marketing Is Examined in the Context of the Explosive Vancouver Condominium
Market, in Canadian Architect (August 2006): 27.
29 Scott Watson, Urban Renewal: Ghost Traps, Collage, Condos, and Squats Vancouver Art in the
Sixties, in Intertidal: Vancouver Art & Artists, ed. Dieter Roelstraete and Scott Watson (Vancouver: Morris &
Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 2005), 40-41. Tese counter-cultural fgures included, at times, Under the Volcano scribe
Malcolm Lowery, Greenpeace founder Paul Spong, and sculptor Tom Burrows.
30 It should be noted that the great irony of Modern architecture is that its own social aims were cast aside
in its transformation into a corporate International style.
31 Robert Fresco and Chris Paterson, Mudfats Living (National Film Board of Canada, 1972).
8
Jordan Lypkie
cultural institutions by counter-positioning them with an image of the mudfats.
32
In a similar
fashion, Lum alludes to the mudfats in the context of urban development. Calling upon both
social and artistic histories, he adds layers of engagement to the piece, increasing the scope
of its critical boundaries and testifying to the complexity of his own considerations of urban
form, social values, and identity. Just as Wallace prompts his viewer to observe the tension of
locality embodied in architecture,
33
Lum complicates this very tension in his own work by
incorporating the globalized nature of downtown business and condominium development.
Te squatter community was part of a suppressed local history of marginalized communities
defying the dominant middle-class culture that characterized the growth of the city.
34
By stag-
ing a visual memory of this history within the downtown core, he draws a connection to the
sort of protest of place that had rallied against the economic and social systems of the down-
town fnancial district since the beginning of its recent development. In this method of using
urban form, Lum creates the sort of environment Debord envisions, that is, an environment as
a game of participation.
35
Lums work asks the viewer to actively consider his or her environ-
ment in regards to its history and context, encouraging participation in the social construction
of urban form. Te passerby, enthralled by everyday life amongst built icons of unattainable
wealth and global prestige, participates with Lums work at a reduced physical scale. At the
same time, the viewer witnesses an expanded historical and social scope. In accordance with
the precepts of dtournement, Lum determines his public (in this case, largely consisting of
white-collar workers, tourists, and patrons of the hotel), and manipulates the built environ-
ment in order to produce a parodic form that reorders its context.
36
Another determination of
dtournement, Debord claims, is to evoke the idea that by reconstructing one neighbourhood
within another, the resulting confusion would be beautiful. For him, life can never be too
disorienting.
37
Te backdrop of Lums work evokes Minimalist style, as it is contained and set within
an entirely tiled corner. Tis allusion is ironic considering Lums previous engagement with the
style, creating critical and playful inquiries into the genres forms. Here, such a visual strategy
serves as a backdrop to the Vancouver Art Gallerys rotating ofsite exhibition space at street-
level beside the hotel. Lums replica of the mudfat squatter housing appears like an oversize
architectural model, seemingly crafted by hand and decorated with an environment of fake
plants and sand that defle the austerity of the pristine Minimalist backdrop. An artifcial tidal
32 Jef Wall, La Mlancolie de la Rue: Idyll and Monochrome in the Work of Ian Wallace 1967-82, in Ian
Wallace: Selected Works 1970-1987, ed. Christos Dikeakos (Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 1988), 67.
33 Sava, 54.
34 Ian Wallace, Te Frontier of the Avant-Garde, in Intertidal: Vancouver Art & Artists, ed. Dieter
Roelstraete and Scott Watson (Vancouver: Morris & Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 2005), 55.
35 Guy-Ernest Debord, Unitary Urbanism at the End of the 1950s, in Te Situationists and the City, ed.
Tom McDonough (New York: Verso, 2009), 101.
36 Guy-Ernest Debord, A Users Guide to Dtournement, Bureau of Public Secrets, http://www.
bopsecrets.org/SI/detourn.htm.
37 Ibid.
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UBCUJAH Issue 1 | 2010
38 Lance Berelowitz, Dream City: Vancouver and the Global Imagination (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre,
2005), 27.
39 Scott Watson, Discovering the Defeatured Landscape, in Vancouver Anthology: Te Institutional Politics
of Art, ed. Stan Douglas (Vancouver: Talon Books, 1991), 247.
40 Watson, Urban Renewal, 38.
41 Wall, Four Essays on Ken Lum, in Ken Lum (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1991), 39.
42 Sava, 55.
area separates the constructions from pedestrians, and also refects the forms of both its ar-
chitecture and that of the surrounding high-rises, reassembling their axonometric projections
together into Constructivist shapes, a tacit reference to another form of failed historical uto-
pianism. By exploiting the sites jarring placement, Lum debunks the myth of nature espoused
by the mudfat dwellers, and emphasizes the reality of globalized urbanization. Interestingly,
the site, like so much of Vancouvers real estate, faces the North Shore Mountains, as though
buying into the marketed values of this impressive view is a primary concern for the local real
estate industry. When in fact, in doing so, the property is shadowed from the sunan irony of
local development strategy used in a city that is so frequently overcast.
38
Lum thus places the
memory of the mudfats within the overbearing and deceptive public space of late capitalism,
where the privatization of basic living values is starkly contrasted with the communal pos-
sibilities earlier artists and activists saw in truly public space.
Scott Watson, an art historian and curator specializing in Vancouver, connects the
emergence of the contemporary Vancouver School of artists that Douglas and Lum belong to
with the art of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
39
Te era is remembered as one of protest and
youth engagement with the capitalist system, in both its faults and imperatives. Vancouvers
place on the West Coast lent further emphasis to this counter-culture: the citys naturalness
and laid-back living style was suitable to the ideals of the movement. Tis period, however, saw
unprecedented expansion and reconstruction through demolition across the capitalist world,
creating new downtown cores that paved over the revolutionary ambitions of bohemian art-
ists. Jef Wall calls this the creation of the generic city.
40
It was in these circumstances that a
new turn toward art concerned with the urban form began to emerge, marking a move away
from the nave natural utopianism of the island artists (so named because they took up resi-
dence away from the urban core on various Gulf Islands).
41
As has been pointed out in the
case of Wall and others, the alterations to the social and economic construction of the city
managed even to institutionalize transgression.
42
For Douglas and Lum then, working within
the contexts of the construction of the social and economic spectacle must now seem like the
most useful means of staying politically radical. Utilizing methods of dtournement to create
instances of clarity within the muddled conditions of cultural appropriation, both Douglas
and Lum conjure past examples of revolutionary ideas in order to push towards a new histori-
cal continuity perhaps waiting to unfold. Even as these works exist on the basis of allocation
from a small fraction of Olympic expenditure, their continued presence in Vancouvers post-
Olympic moment is signifcant in regards to the values propagated at the expense of the citys
10
Jordan Lypkie
43 Derksen, 35
44 Debord, Te Society of the Spectacle, thesis 164.
collective wealth. Urban spaces where people may gather are rendered as welcome opportuni-
ties for corporate advertising, or as benefcial luxuries adjacent to expensive condominium de-
velopments, and patrolled by security guards wary of those not speaking into a Blackberry and
walking along at a brisk pace. Te public becomes a conduit for various private realms where
one expresses their identity through consumption of status-objects and by partaking in the
images that they seek to attain and that surround them. If public art is just another piece of
this consumption, and Douglass and Lums works appear on the terms of the social spectacle,
these public pieces nevertheless become hard to swallow as everyday life. Trough looking
back, they fnd ways to look ahead, and to look at all, imparting to the viewer the necessity of
consciousness in the realm of the everyday.
Local poet and writer on art and urbanism, Jef Derksen, writes that globalizations
efects are realized in an urban reality flled with dense tensions, time-worn activities, major
crack-downs, mercurial eruptions, and all the other pressurized or mundane determinants and
perplexing or libertarian indeterminacies.
43
It is these moments of the pot boiling over that
Douglas and Lum look to elucidate, capturing the instants where the spectacle is partially rup-
tured before repairing itself with images of a history constantly updated in order to reinforce
the present and describe a future of progress, caught within a cycle of continual economic
development for its own sake. Te current spate of resource industry propaganda and publicly
funded private development, which advertises proximity to nature in the midst of the 2010
Olympic Winter Games, contradicts the environmental and communal qualities the event
itself advocates. Refection, then, becomes a force for understanding an alternative future, and
for focusing on failed utopias and the now recognized navet of late 1960s and early 1970s
idealism. Douglas and Lum revisit the resistance created in these moments to address current
societal conditions. By recognizing the dissolution of these moments and movements, both
artists reveal the connection of these events to contemporary moments, instigating another
chance for their rearticulation, albeit heavily modifed and adapted to the complexity that has
grown out of them in the time since. For Debord, the world already possesses a dream of a
time whose consciousness it must now possess in order to actually live it.
44
Bringing forgotten
histories back into the spectacle of the globalized late-capitalist present, Douglas and Lum
seek to transform places of public viewership into new spaces for critical resistance within
everyday life.