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Dreamy and Forgetful: Marcel Dzama’s The Lotus Eaters |
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| Winnipeg is a small city in Canada known for its icy-cold winters. Here, blocked in by the snow, Marcel Dzama and other artists, friends and relations founded a small community of artists known as The
Royal Art Lodge. In a city seemingly isolated from the capitals of art and their centres of power, a micro-context of work in art was created and Dzama’s work is an example of its output. |
JASON DANIEL TOUGAW
Marcel Dzama keeps a notebook at his bedside, to sketch ideas that emerge from sleep. “I draw during the day,” he says, “but my ideas come at night.” Dzama’s drawings, paintings, music, video, and sculpture originate in his sleeping mind—a world populated by bat children, vampires, distressed damsels, perplexed bears, walking trees, and skinny cowboys. He originally used “The Lotus Eaters” as the title of a song. “I like it,” he says,“because of the original story’s themes of dreaming and forgetfulness.” In Homer’s Odyssey, Ulysses and his men are driven by a storm to what is now the Libyan coast, where the inhabitants feed them their staple food, the lotus flower. The men who consume the flower become dreamy, indolent, forgetful. No longer concerned for their homes, their families, or their mission, they refuse to leave. Ulysses must drag them forcibly back to his ship and chain them to rowing benches. The tale is a fantastical metaphor for the daily experience of wrenching the mind out of the indolent forgetfulness of sleep. The waking mind, with its rational expectations and rigid boundaries, offers its own kind of forgetfulness. Dzama’s work invites the waking mind to re-visit the fragmentary images and dislocated emotions ordinarily experienced only beyond the threshold of consciousness.
The Royal Art Lodge
The Canadian city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, where Dzama lived until his recent relocation to New York City, is often cited as the source of his wry and austere aesthetic. While in Winnipeg, Dzama and a group of other local artists formed The
Royal Art Lodge, which has included, at various moments, Jonathan Pylypchuk, Adrian Williams, Neil Farber, Michael Dumontier, Drue Langlois, Miles Langlois, and Marcel’s sister Hollie Dzama. The group met on Wednesday evenings to produce collaborative drawings, stuffed dolls, fanzines, collages, puppets, and dioramas—one artist starting work on a piece and passing it along for the others to augment, until somebody pronounced it finished. The collective’s name advertises a playful idealism. The notion of a monarchy of artists ruling a small Midwestern city, where hunting lodges far outnumber art collectives, is typical of the group’s improvisational confidence—inspired by groups like Dada and Fluxus. Gradually garnering international attention, The RAL has exhibited, among other places, at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art. More recently, Dzama has shown with The
Royal Family, an overlapping collective including sister Hollie Dzama, wife Shelley Dick, father Maurice Dzama, mother Jeanette Dzama, and uncle Neil Farber. The spontaneous methods of these collectives are fundamental to the spirited work they produce. “We have no agenda,” Dzama has said. “We just like to draw.” While their work is the expression of a personal sensibility more than an engagement with art world trends or politics, it makes an ethos of idiosyncrasy and spontaneity.
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| Marcel Dzama. Untitled,
2004 |
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The other members of The Royal Art
Lodge may be Dzama’s most immediate influences, but he also cites Hieronymus Bosch, Fluxus, George Burns, Public Image Limited, and Captain America creator Jack Kirby. Some of Dzama’s fantastical creatures are borrowed nearly intact from Bosch; his interest in collective spontaneity is reminiscent of Fluxus; the wit underscoring his most violent images includes a touch of Burns; his sharp bold lines and cartoonish representation of disturbing themes recalls PiL as much as Captain America. But, returning to the origin of Dzama’s ideas in his nightly sleep and dreams, his uncanny condensations of the mundane and the fantastic—an office worker surrounded by menacing tree people, for instance—resembles the methods, if not the aesthetics, of the surrealists.
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The surrealist method, motivated by a collective consumption of the works of Sigmund Freud, involved looking at the world from the vantage point of fantasies that normally remain semi-conscious at best, the more irrational or bizarre the better. While most of the world dismissed the irrational products of daydreams, surrealists pursued and documented them. Dzama’s work suggests a similar method, employed by an artist more concerned with morbid tenderness than Dalí’s cosmic paranoia, Magritte’s philosophical dreaminess, Buñuel’s social critique, or de Chirico’s architectural alienation. Like many of the surrealists, Dzama works in visual snapshots of a recurring personal iconography, replacing floating clouds or melting clocks with tree-people and blood-drinking co-eds. Dzama’s restrictive palette of moss green, black, grey, deep red, and a military brown (achieved with root beer syrup), like a black-and-white film, sends the message that viewers are entering a world similar enough to our own to be recognizable, but different enough that we can’t take anything for granted. Dzama distills everyday images in a tonic of unconscious fantasy to show viewers what the world would look like if fantasy were to stage a coup and overthrow reason and reality.
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Dzama once told an interviewer that he liked to draw the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz “because he could be remorseless because of the missing heart.”The action of The Wizard of Oz takes place in Dorothy’s dream world. If Dzama’s work suggests a dream logic, the Tin Man’s missing heart is a key to revealing why this world is so startling. A man made of tin is novel, but a man without a heart suggests the kind of question Dzama’s work consistently engages: How might a man without a heart behave? Dzama’s answer: without remorse. As in a dream, judgment is absent from Dzama’s rendering of such figures. The Tin Man lacks remorse not because he is a bad person, but simply because tin men without hearts lack remorse. Dzama’s narrative fragments are visually arresting in part because the interaction of novel creatures with non-human dispositions condenses actions and emotions that would otherwise seem incompatible. Throughout his work, Dzama dislocates action and emotion, creating scenarios in which his characters and creatures respond to each other in unexpected ways. A gang of trees abducting an elegantly dressed young woman are startling enough, but when the abductors’ faces express perplexity and the abductee’s appears nonchalant, viewers must adjust their preconceptions and accept the skewed emotional dynamics of Dzama’s visual world on its own terms.
In the recent work represented in The Lotus Eaters, Dzama stretches his characteristic iconography into larger formats and more complex scenarios, enlarging the scope of his personal iconography. In one untitled piece, a procession of young women with machine guns and tree-people, reminiscent of a troop of duty-bound ants, march across multiple panels toward a hole in the ground. But the automatism of the procession dissolves into a small and just slightly frenzied swarm as the armed girls approach the hole’s opening, joined by bats and furry Bosch-inspired critters. A military figure with a bulbous, inflated head has fallen into the hole. This may be a rescue mission or a murderous campaign. As in a dream, it may be both, without contradiction. The mythical Lotus Eaters are compelling because for them the indolent insights of the dream state are enduring, their contradictions never required to face the hard facts of daylight. In larger formats, Dzama’s uncanny scenes feel paradoxically more isolated, momentary, fragile. As the negative space expands, Dzama’s creatures and damsels threaten to dissolve into it. The threat increases the urgency of the scenes, because viewers feel the waking world at their backs— like Ulysses ready to drag his men back to the ship.
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