At the center of Stan Douglas’s current survey at Bard College’s Hessel Museum of Art in Upstate New York is a new video installation with images so appalling and so hypnotic that I watched the work through three times.
That video installation shares its name with, and remakes a portion of, D. W. Griffith’s three-hour silent movie Birth of a Nation (1915), a troubling cornerstone of film history that popularized editorial techniques still in use today while also offering racist images and white nationalist tropes that have also unfortunately lingered on. Douglas’s Birth of a Nation appropriates a particularly egregious sequence from Griffith’s epic, then explodes it and weaves a new tapestry from its fragments.