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The Haunting

In an outer gallery, its walls filled with drawings in Marcel Dzama’s signature illustrational style, a Minotaur sits sentinel by an arched doorway. One hand and one leg stick out from the old bedsheet that covers its body; its seamed plaster head, roped together with twine and wooden splints, resembles a mould for some kind of metal casting and sprouts a pair of mismatched horns. A rifle, made of a pistol bandaged to a long, embossed tin barrel, hangs from its neck. And on the floor before it, a whitewashed paint can holds tools and brushes like those in Jasper Johns’s cast-bronze Savarin coffee can. The ghostly-pale Surrealist bull-man, cobbled together from scraps, clearly stands in for the enigmatic artist. He’s the guardian of a secret and his strange Picassoid appearance signals new developments in Dzama’s oeuvre.

Beyond the Minotaur and through the arched doorway in Dzama’s recent exhibition, “Even the Ghost of the Past,” at David Zwirner’s vast premises in New York’s Chelsea district, the viewer entered a large darkened room, illuminated only by the lights of five dioramas set into the walls. Each of these evoked a small theatre set, with drawn velvet curtains framing the action. And each featured a cast drawn from the artist’s repertory company of familiar characters, whose origins lie in children’s books, second-hand pulp novels, film noir and vintage science fiction. The eclectic roster of personages that has evolved in Dzama’s drawings over the last dozen years has included cowboys, astronauts, gangsters and molls, anthropomorphic animals and trees, naked ladies and robots. In his new works, he brings his creations to life, or at least to a kind of frozen embodiment in three dimensions. Fully in the round, the artist’s figures now pose in tableaux on their shallow stages.

From "Marcel Dzama: The Haunting" by Joseph R. Wolin, Canadian Art, Fall 2008, pp. 94-100

In the smallest of the dioramas, a nocturnal scene originally titled Infidels and renamed Welcome to the land of the bat (all works 2008 unless otherwise noted), nine albino vampire bats hover under black light over the bitten body of a collapsed bear—or perhaps it’s a man in a bear suit; in Dzama’s universe the two may be equivalent and indistinguishable. In La Verdad Está Muerta: Room Full of Liars (2007), six Pinocchio puppets rest on upright rods and stare wide-eyed into the footlights with dopey grins on their faces. A naked woman with bobbed black hair crouches over a hole in a wooden floor in The Underground; a plastic tube leads down from between her legs to the mouth of a man in a bow tie who is casually reclining in a subterranean chamber that we see in a cutaway view, like a prairie dog’s burrow in a natural-history display. Three hooded men in suits stand guard with AK-47s, while a small dog (or a very large bunny) sits in another hole, its head and neck sticking up above the floor. The odd portrayal of kinky water sports and possible subjugation suggests that the artist might have deep-seated issues with women—or does it? In an age in which both psychoanalysis and pornography are the stuff of popular culture, Freudian symbolism may be just another tool in the savvy artist’s arsenal. The masked men with automatic rifles certainly add an incongruously topical note to a fetishistic scenario.

Indeed, we might unpack allusions to current events from many of Dzama’s new works, from the flying white bloodsuckers denoted as unbelievers (Welcome to the land of the bat) to a showcase of boyishly unabashed dissemblers (La Verdad Está Muerta) to the confluence of figures that can only be read as terrorists with some sort of sexualized power dynamic (The Underground). Dzama appears to have left behind the whimsy of his earlier, hermetic creations for a darker mode that acknowledges the world outside. Gunmen in balaclavas swarm—without regard for horizon or gravity—across the 16 joined sheets of the large drawing Inflated Threat (2007), along with cowboys in Lone Ranger masks wielding pistols and lassos, a mounted bugler and short-skirted riflewomen and archers. The same female archers float weightlessly in an all-over arabesque on the four sheets of Poor sacrifices of our enmity as they pierce a goat (a scapegoat?) with multiple arrows. In Tenuous, lissome and charming even (2007), fashion-model types in fanciful hats ascend into thin air while being filmed and photographed. Three figures in robes and hoods bear klieg lights on crossbars above their heads, while a ringmaster keeps them in line with a whip. Are they meant to evoke penitentes or the infamous photograph of a hooded prisoner from Abu Ghraib? Only the gun-toting rabbit knows for sure. Cameron Shaw, in an essay in the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, argues for specific political interpretations of the drawings and dioramas, but whether one finds this convincing or not, it seems that sexual politics in Dzama’s works always go hand in hand with the more conventional variety.

The origins of Dzama’s ever-expanding world, inhabited by monsters, comic figures and, lately, ranks of ideological foot soldiers, lie in Winnipeg, where the artist was born in 1974, grew up and studied art at the University of Manitoba. Wayne Baerwaldt, then the director of the artist-run centre Plug In, remembers meeting the young artist and his friends at the university in 1996, in the ramshackle studio known as the Dairy Barn. “Have a look,” he was invited by their teacher, Alison Norlen. “They barely speak; they’ve burrowed their way into the barn.” These reticent young men included Dzama’s uncle Neil Farber, Michael Dumontier, Drue Langlois, Jonathan Pylypchuk and Adrian Williams. Later joined by Dzama’s younger sister, Hollie, and Langlois’s brother, Myles, they would form the Royal Art Lodge, a group knit together by shared studio space and communal art-making practices, particularly collective drawing. At the time, they were drawing and painting on all sorts of discarded and found materials, and listening on an old record player to music from the 1920s and albums by the likes of Steve Martin and George Burns. Extremely shy, they were “gorging themselves on comedy but could never tell a joke themselves,” Baerwaldt recalls.

Yet Dzama’s drawings immediately impressed the curator, who saw in them the wry humour of Burns and Gracie Allen. Single figures, couples or vignettes were positioned in the middle of sheets of buff paper, often coloured with the artist’s instantly recognizable palette of khaki, olive, dirty plum, grey, black and the rich golden-brown of root-beer powder, a favourite pigment. His subjects might include an aviatrix riding a giant eight-legged hare, poker-playing cowboys watching a catfish-like alien through a window, the Tin Woodman and a flying monkey driving a herd of cattle or a blonde woman lactating into the mouth of a bedridden invalid. Isolated in the centre of the page and surrounded by copious amounts of empty space, the characters suggested stand-up comedians to Baerwaldt, or figures who might be put under a spotlight, on stage, gesturing or naked.

From "Marcel Dzama: The Haunting" by Joseph R. Wolin, Canadian Art, Fall 2008, pp. 94-100

Baerwaldt included Dzama’s drawings in exhibitions at Plug In and at Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica, California, in 1997, and Heller followed it up with a one-man show. The artist’s unpredictable and often existential humour, coupled with his distinctive style—part storybook, part comic strip, part retro porn—proved widely popular, and drawings sold to everyone from the major art collector Dean Valentine to the actor Jim Carrey. The following year, Dzama mounted solo exhibitions at galleries in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Berlin, at the Artpace foundation in San Antonio and at David Zwirner in New York. The rest, as they say, is history.

Dzama’s early and rather meteoric rise to fame—between his show at Zwirner in 2005 and the one earlier this year, for example, exhibitions of his work were held at galleries and art centres in Seattle, Birmingham, Glasgow, London, Düsseldorf, Stockholm and Guadalajara—gave rise to a certain tension within the Art Lodge, but also spurred on the group: several of its members have followed in his footsteps and established international careers. Various members eventually left Winnipeg and, after the debut of a retrospective exhibition of both individual and collective work (full disclosure: Baerwaldt and the author were the co-curators of this exhibition, “The Royal Art Lodge: Ask the Dust,” which toured from 2003 to 2005), Dzama himself moved with his wife, Shelley Dick, also an artist, to New York in 2004, although he still collaborates with Dumontier and Farber under the Royal Art Lodge brand.

The Royal Art Lodge produced prolifically in a wide range of media—drawings, paintings, sculptures, collages, photographs, costumes, dolls, puppets, comic books, kites, videos, music performed live and recorded on tapes, records and CDs with handcrafted covers. The group activity generated torrents of inventive and experimental DIY-style work, marked by endless self-reference and countless inside jokes. It both fed off and inspired the individual output of each of its members, and Dzama was no exception. Influences and support travelled in many directions, with other Lodge artists sometimes turning Dzama’s characters into costumes to be worn for film or performance projects. The most ambitious of these, The Lotus Eaters (2005–07), was screened in a room behind the dioramas in Dzama’s recent Zwirner show with, on scheduled dates, a live piano player producing the musical accompaniment for the silent film. The 19 1/2-minute film, which was shot in various formats, including Fisher-Price Pixel Vision, features an artist spied upon through a keyhole by his own doppelgänger, dancing bears, a nude woman and a lively party peopled by dozens of extras from Dzama’s imagination. With Dzama’s father Maurice playing the artist, psychological implications should have reverberated throughout The Lotus Eaters, but the moving images never really cohere. Disjointed and provisional despite its scope, the film resembles the sketchbook pages that were displayed in a vitrine in the gallery among the drawings, never attaining the clarity or trenchancy of the watercolours or dioramas. And its simulation of the look of a silent movie pales in comparison to the compellingly weird and radiantly black-and-white works of the Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin, its obvious precedent.

Dzama’s dioramas were the real stars of his show. On the banks of the red river, the largest at more than 20 feet wide, contains nearly 300 elements and stands as the artist’s most monumental work to date. Derived from a drawing called You Gotta Make Room for the New Ones (2005), which was included in his previous exhibition at the gallery, the tableau contains figurines of people, animals and plants fabricated in editions, like those in the other dioramas, in ceramic at a workshop in Guadalajara, Mexico. In front of a black backdrop studded with glossy red flowers, 20-odd riflemen, nattily dressed in sport-coats and ties, take aim at a flock of bats, pigeons, ducks and owls. One bird hangs decapitated in mid-air, while a bloodied, robed flying figure, presumably a witch, appears about to crash. A shot squirrel tumbles over and other creatures lie dead or dying on the ground; the kill includes several deer, a bison, a huge toad, a lizard, a turtle, what might be a possum, an elephant-headed man and three human figures with large, misshapen, frog-like heads. A pair of female legs sticks out from a tree trunk amid the carnage, representing either someone hiding inside a hollow log or one of Dzama’s ambulatory trees felled by the hunters. Five oversized and disembodied fat heads float (on shelves) or rest on the ground, bleeding from assorted orifices and wearing extremely peeved expressions.

The nearly identical appearances of the gentlemanly sportsmen suggest that we should identify them as if the scene were a political cartoon or a rather anachronistic allegory—the forces of industrial capitalism, militaristic mechanization or masculine colonialism. Their assault on beings both ordinary and magical reads like an attack on the natural world—and on the imagination. Has the artist given us an ecological fable or a psychological one? Dzama seldom makes meaning so uncomplicated, however, or so public, and the fact that a number of grotesques lie among the casualties intimates that everything is not what it may at first seem. And regardless of any more-or-less convincing thematic interpretation, all the upraised guns and heads separated from bodies call to mind a serious castration anxiety. It is probably no accident that Sigmund Freud wrote during the era of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, flappers and aristocratic shooting parties.

A sixth work rounded out the dark room of dioramas, the eponymous Even the Ghost of the Past. A small weathered wooden door sat in the wall within a brick arch, recalling the similar installation of Marcel Duchamp’s last great work, Étant donnés, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Through a peephole in the door, instead of a woman splayed on a bed of twigs and holding a gas lamp (as in Duchamp), we see two figures, the head and one shoulder of a woman on the right and a naked man on the left. Their arms are intertwined familiarly, eyes closed—a pair of lovers asleep, or, perhaps, dead. A mangy fox stands behind their heads. As if Dzama has created the view from the door next to that in Duchamp’s masterpiece, we can finally glimpse the face of the nude woman and observe what goes on beyond the sightlines of the original. In place of the uncanny, somewhat misogynistic charge of Duchamp, however, we get deadpan, vaguely homoerotic normalcy. Rather than the cryptic cipher, Dzama offers an intimation of a mildly amusing narrative. Dzama might seem to turn Duchamp’s primal mystery into a pallid joke, but it’s an engrossing one, with a sort of comfortable strangeness all its own.

From "Marcel Dzama: The Haunting" by Joseph R. Wolin, Canadian Art, Fall 2008, pp. 94-100

Despite the similarity of their names, Duchamp, the intellectual strategist, makes an incongruous choice of artistic forebear for Dzama, the purveyor of interior mini-dramas veneered with cuteness. Yet Étant donnés stands, along with the work of Joseph Cornell, as the chief example of the diorama in modern art. Dzama brackets his new sculptural tableaux between the Duchampian shout-out of Even the Ghost of the Past and the Picassoish Minotaur, between the cerebral aesthete and the protean horndog, the two creative titans of the 20th century. Perhaps art history is the ghost haunting Dzama’s recent production. Yet by making reference to geopolitics with the ingenuous characters that inhabit a universe of his own making, he grounds his work securely in an open-ended and ongoing, if quirkily personal, present tense.

Fall 2008

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