Which truths are self-evident?
Parallel realities are the specialty of Stan Douglas, the Vancouver photographer who since the 1980s has staged increasingly disorienting scenes of historical re-enactment that often draw on archival research to push the limits of his medium.
Cold War Canada, disco New York, the Arab Spring, forgotten scenes from the history of the old Pennsylvania Station: Douglas reconstructs his moments with all the casting and costuming of Hollywood. He wields flash and toning just right, so that the first glance tricks us. Is this an actual shot from 1950? Is that an Eggleston snap from some cokey after-party in 1975? Closer inspection says no, and Douglas leaves us — very much on purpose — to interpret these strange forgeries that want so plainly to be real.
Now the David Zwirner gallery in Manhattan is showing Douglas’s longest reach yet: “The Enemy of All Mankind,” through Oct. 26, a collection of nine large prints. They depict scenes from a 1729 ballad opera, “Polly,” by the English poet and dramatist John Gay, a slapstick comedy of pirates, gender bending and greed in the British West Indies.
The most celebrated playwright of his time, Gay (1685-1732) served up astonishingly self-aware caricatures of human transaction. Writers have since revamped his “Beggar’s Opera” to lampoon Weimer Germany (words by Bertold Brecht), Harlem (music by Duke Ellington), Nigeria (by Wole Soyinka) and the Czech Republic (in a rendition by the political dissident and first president of the country, Vaclav Havel).
Douglas chose the sequel, “Polly,” for its “ahead-of-its-time exploration of mutable identity,” said a Zwirner representative. With sizes and aluminum backing that conjure flat-screen TVs, these photos could be stills from “Pirates of the Caribbean.” You want to unpause them. Step back, though, and they lead a growing trend among artists to air concerns from the 21st-century — about how race and gender have been told in our history books — by adopting the ironically self-reflective guises of the 18th.