Stan Douglas: Abbott and Cordova, 7 August 1971

Stan Douglas

• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781551524146
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Monographies d'artistes

This is an art book on the politics of urban conflict based around artist Stan Douglas' stunning photo installation of the same name, depicting a violent confrontation in 1971 between police and Vancouver's counterculture known as the Gastown Riot.The book, which features essays by Alexander Alberro, Serge Guilbaut, and others, addresses various issues raised by Douglas' work, including the suppression and assimilation of the counterculture. It also includes other works from Douglas' Crowds and Riots series. Stan Douglas has exhibited widely, including at the Venice Biennale, Whitney Biennial, and documenta. He is the subject of numerous books, including Stan Douglas (Phaidon Press).

THE DERELICT, THE DESERVING POOR, AND THE LUMPEN A History of the Politics of Representation in the Downtown Eastside

Jesse Proudfoot

Immediately to the left of Stan Douglas’s Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971, a series of posters featuring portraits and quotations proposes an interpretation of the Woodward’s site and its historical significance. Adorning the entrance to one of the chain stores, they depict local residents and their answers to questions such as, “What do you think of the changes going on in the area?” and “What do you think about the Woodward’s development?” Considering that the piece was created by the developers, it is unsurprising that it offers a sunny interpretation. The carefully chosen faces of marginalized Downtown Eastside residents, new middle-class arrivals, and community leaders all speak of the positive impacts of the new development and the ongoing gentrification of the neighbourhood. Couched in the language of “social mix,” their quotations extol the virtues of “diversity,” misleadingly implying that the Downtown Eastside—one of the most diverse neighbourhoods in the city—somehow lacked diversity in the past. The quotes trumpet the social housing component of Woodward’s, even though the number of housing units is a fraction of what community groups argued was necessary. And they make fallacious claims that the new businesses are employing Downtown Eastside residents and helping them to “get off the streets”—as if the problem of poverty in the Downtown Eastside was the result of too few minimum-wage jobs.

Writing on Douglas’s piece in The Walrus, Leigh Kamping-Carder¹ remarks that real-estate developers often forget that neighbourhoods like the Downtown Eastside are palimpsests—spaces continuously written over by different social groups throughout their history. Pace Kamping-Carder, what texts like those described in the previous paragraph suggest is that developers are in fact acutely aware of the histories of the places they seek to remake, at least insofar as it helps them sell condominiums. The quotations attributed to this all-too-perfect collection of faces are uncanny precisely because they seem to address every facet of the public discourse around Woodward’s, seeking to reassure new property-owners that not only is their investment secure but that their very presence is beneficial to the community. The ideological centre of the text is found in a quote from “Ali,” who, in giving his thoughts on how the neighbourhood will change, jokes, “[I]n five years, I won’t be able to afford a coffee here.” To the newly-arrived middle class being hailed by this discourse, the message is clear: Don’t sweat the bad reputation; this place is going to be worth a fortune.

It is in this politically contested space that we encounter Stan Douglas’s Abbott & Cordova, a depiction of a 1971 riot in which police attacked a group of hippies protesting marijuana prohibition. It is a somewhat frivolous protest compared to the

1Leigh Kamping-Carder, “At the Gastown Riot,” in The Walrus (July-August, 2009); http://www.walrusmagazine.com/ articles/2009.07-profile-at-the-gastown-riot-stan-douglas-walrus-vancouver-art/.

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THE DERELICT, THE DESERVING POOR, AND THE LUMPEN

Woodward’s development posters, July 22, 2011. (Photo: Colleen Heslin)

political struggles more commonly associated with the neighbourhood: the labour strife of the 1930s, the fight against urban renewal and demolition in the 1960s, or the struggles against gentrification (including the occupation of the Woodward’s building itself) in 2002. Nevertheless, in this minor event located at the periphery of the protest movements of the 1960s, we encounter a powerful representation of the naked violence of the state brought to bear on a group of people.

What can be said about the politics of this image? What function does it perform here in the historically overdetermined space of the Woodward’s building? On one level, Abbott & Cordova is a representation of a riot and can be read as a powerful indictment of state repression and police brutality, and as a defence of civil liberties during a time of social upheaval. In so far as it dredges up an uncomfortable past, the image offers an important corrective to sanitized histories of the neighbourhood that efface the traces of conflict from the palimpsest of the Downtown Eastside. We can also discern parallels between that historical period and our own, reading the piece as a reminder that such political struggles and violent repression continue, even if the issues and actors differ.

Conversely, we can read the piece looking not for similarities but differences, and call attention to what might be effaced in this representation. In this reading, we look at the riot and ask: Whose riot? Which community is being represented? Hippies are not the first group that Vancouverites associate with the Downtown Eastside of the 1970s. They were, after all, only recent arrivals to the neighbourhood. The more iconic figures of the Downtown Eastside were the working-class men living in the neighbourhood’s residential hotels—those men who look on like detached spectators from the peripheries of Douglas’s mural. We are therefore entitled to ask about the important class differences between the middle-class protest depicted in Abbott & Cordova and the traditionally working-class politics of the Downtown Eastside. Indeed, ___________

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Jesse Proudfoot

why is it that in Woodward’s, at the very site of the neighbourhood’s most contentious battles over gentrification, we find the depiction of a riot concerned not with the politics of redistribution but the politics of (marijuana) consumption? Could we argue that Abbott & Cordova functions as a sort of gentrification of the political history of the Downtown Eastside? Could we even suggest that it somehow apologizes for the gentrification of Woodward’s by providing an image of middle-class protest for the gentrifiers to identify with, thereby legitimizing their presence in the neighbourhood as the rightful inheritors of the legacy of the 1960s protest movement?²

This line of questioning likely goes too far, for it is clear that Douglas intends quite the opposite with the piece. It’s clear that he intends this image of a notorious riot to facilitate a discussion about the contested history of the neighbourhood. Nevertheless, it is precisely because such a conversation is necessary that it is essential to pay attention to how class and class struggle are articulated in representations of the Downtown Eastside—especially when real estate developers are actively engaged in writing their own histories of the neighbourhood with the goal of making it safe for property speculation rather than political discussion.³

In the historical analysis that follows, I take up these issues of class, class struggle, and the politics of representation. Following Douglas’s remark that Abbott & Cordova concerns a moment of transition for the neighbourhood, I discuss a series of interrelated transitions that have had profound effects on the Downtown Eastside. Such transitions have had equally powerful effects for political efforts to improve the lives of the people who live here. The central transition I am concerned with is representational: it is the transformation of public discourse about the Downtown Eastside primarily as a result of political struggle from a variety of groups within the community. Specifically, I focus on the articulation of a discourse of “working-class community” by the Downtown Eastside Residents Association (DERA) in the 1970s and 1980s as a reaction to the earlier language of “skid row” and the subsequent...