Douglas Stan - Stan Douglas: Abbott and Cordova, 7 August 1971 (ff)

CONTENTS

Alexander Alberro

Serge Guilbaut

Stan Douglas

Nora M. Alter

Sven Ltticken

Jesse Proudfoot

AN INTERVIEW WITH STAN DOUGLAS

Alexander Alberro

This interview took place on November 25, 2010.

Alexander Alberro What is the event that your photomural Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971 represents?

Stan Douglas It all began as a smoke-in at Maple Tree Square in Vancouvers Gastown district, organized by the Georgia Straight, the local alternative newspaper. Bands were invited to play music; flowers, popcorn, and watermelon were given away; and at one point a ten-foot papier-mch joint was paraded around. It was a typical, early 1970s hippie festival. Thousands of people came to take part, and by all accounts were having a peaceful time until 10:00 p.m. when the police arrived and told them to disperse. There were so many people that few heard the [police] chief declare over a megaphone that they had ten minutes to clear out, so few did anything.

It seems that there were a couple of agendas on the part of the police force. Undercover narcotics officers dressed as hippies had mixed with the crowd, seeking to identify drug dealers and what they called trouble makers. Their aim was to detain these people, to arrest them. Other officers were instructed to clear the streets, which is what they tried to do. This made it difficult for the narcs and for those from the mounted squad, who were trying make people stay put until the paddy wagons arrived. Not surprisingly, the police vans were delayed by the whole street-clearing effort.

When the police charged, people couldnt run north because of the waterfront; they couldnt run east because thats where the cops were; and they couldnt go west because thats where off-duty officers had assembled and had begun to march into the fray (you see them in the upper right-hand corner of the picture wearing white helmets). So when people tried to disperse in the directions we see in the picturewest and souththey were trapped by one segment or another of the police force, and the confusion on the part of the cops precipitated the confusion and panic of the whole event.

AA So the corner that the Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971 mural depicts is on the margins of the epicentre of the event?

SD Exactly, yes. The corner of Abbott and Cordova is one block away from the epicentre. But of course the event became dispersed almost immediately. When the riot squad moved in, everyone began to run. Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971 depicts one of what must have been many micro-events around Gastown that night.

AA The twenty-first century has begun with a lot of street demonstrations that have resulted in clashes with the police. To what extent is your decision to focus on the events of August 7, 1971 driven by these contemporary events?

AN INTERVIEW WITH STAN DOUGLAS

SD I consider the demonstrations against budget cuts that were seeing in Europe today, or those against the formation of the World Trade Organization a decade ago, or those against the Iraq War in 2003, to be much more serious than whats depicted in Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971. Relatively speaking, the coming together of people in August of 1971 was a frivolous protestI mean, protesting the fact that they werent allowed to smoke pot.

But in a larger sense, what the protest was about was the curtailment of civil liberties. And I think that the large gathering in Gastown that day, as light-minded as it might appear now, was enabled by the large antiwar and civil-rights demonstrations of the 1960s. So just as the events that Ive rendered are at the periphery of the epicentre of the riot, the event as a whole was at the periphery of, but nonetheless related to, the mass demonstrations of the 1960s and early 1970s.

AA How did the project initially come about?

SD The conversation was initiated by the architect Gregory Henriquez. He asked if I was interested in doing a work for a project he was designing in North Vancouver. I told him that I would be more interested in doing something for the commission he had in Gastown, at the old Woodwards department store site. Eventually I had discussions with him and the developer, Ian Gillespie, and to my surprise they were very enthusiastic about the idea of making a picture of a riot.

AA Was the project very expensive?

SD It was made like a motion picture, like one shot in a major motion picture on a purpose-built location. At first we wanted to work on the original site. But we soon realized that it would be a lot easier, and a lot less expensive, to build the location, which is what we did.

We rented a large parking lot beside the Hastings Park Race Track, laid blacktop for the streets, poured concrete for the sidewalks, installed flats for the two buildings, and then aged everything. We waited for the production of The Day the Earth Stood Still to wrap so we could get all the lighting we needed from Paramount Pictures. Freezing the action of people and horses running about an intersection without too much motion blur at the optimal ISO and aperture required 700,000 watts of tungsten light.

Woodwards Building, 1968. City of Vancouver Archives, CVA1095-201E3_F8S347F17