Stan Douglas
Michigan Central Station
Michigan Central Station is part of a larger photographic series by Stan Douglas, Detroit Photos, which includes images of houses, theaters, stadiums, offices, and other municipal structures. Continuing his fascination with failed modernist utopias, Douglas depicts Michigan Central Station as a monolithic, almost prison-like structure lording over a desolate landscape. Once the hub of industrial transportation, the station is now devoid of any human activity and lies fallow, surrounded by train-less tracks and vegetation-less ground. Douglas’s preoccupation with obsolete sites like this seems less concerned with revisiting or memorializing them than in reviewing the conditions of their failure.
Stan Douglas makes videos and photographs that draw on the legacy of modernism to explore the cultural, social, and political history of the twentieth century. This is evident in his reference to large-scale housing works and other public projects. It also surfaces, perhaps more unexpectedly, in his connections to that period’s cultural production, like the great “auteur” filmmakers and authors, whose grand and utopic artistic projects now seem impoverished.