Samuel Beckett , Stan Douglas  Stan Douglas 'Monodramas', Samuel Beckett 'Teleplays'

In 1988 Stan Douglas curated an exhibition with Samuel Beckett’s teleplays at the Vancouver Art Gallery. The teleplays were originally produced by Sueddeutscher Rundfunk in Germany in 1981.

They showed 4 figures dressed in red, blue, yellow and white following a simple choreography in a square. We thought it makes sense to show this material together with Douglas’s Monodramas, ten 30- to 60-second videos from 1991, conceived as interventions into commercial television, that interrupted the usual flow of advertising and entertainment when broadcast nightly in British Columbia for three weeks in 1992. These micronarratives mimic television’s editing techniques, but as kernels of a story they refuse to cohere. They are tales of dysfunction and dislocation, misanthropy and misunderstanding. When the videos were aired unannounced during commercial breaks, viewers called the station to inquire about what was being sold, their responses evincing how the media can refocus attention from content to consumption. (Guggenheim Collection).