Marcel Dzama
David Zwirner, New York, USA
On the Banks of the Red River (2008)
Marcel Dzama has long rendered his ink-and-watercolor-and-root-beer-syrup drawings all the more dreamlike by placing them against expanses of blank manila paper, but in his dioramas darkness surges up as though it’s always been there, just waiting to be noticed. Eerily lit, often with velvet curtains and floorboards like those in old theatres, the dioramas are partly inspired by Mexican shrines and Joseph Cornell’s boxes (works such as Cornell’s 1943 Habitat Group for a Shooting Gallery, one imagines, since others seem to protect cherished objects and beings, and there’s precious little safety here), while their spot-lit figures and scary-funny absurdity are worthy of David Lynch. ‘Even the Ghost of the Past’, which includes 15 drawings and 13 collaged sketchbook pages, draws on sources that include Dante, Goya, Homer, and Buñuel. Gun-slinging cowboys and hooded insurgents have also infiltrated Dzama’s armies of old-fashioned humans and sad animals, establishing a kind of mystical link with Adam Helms’ buffalo-masked revolutionaries.
This parallel world may have become infected by contemporary violence, but it’s still shaped by childhood experiences and Canadian lore. Two hauntingly apocalyptic works, whose titles recall a 19th-century rebellion in the Winnipeg area, feature a crowd of blank-faced men firing rifles at a sky teeming with creatures. In On the Banks of the Red River (2008), a show-stopping diorama based on a 2005 drawing, glossy ceramic flowers gleam against a dark backdrop that’s also studded with bats and dying vermilion doves. At the hunters’ feet lie human and animal bodies, including a deer with bloody holes instead of antlers. The drawing The Banks of the Red River: A Veritable Army of Underdogs (2008) – in which cats, bats and an upside-down horse tumble from the air like damned souls in a Last Judgment scene, or like murdered angels – revisits the same theme.
Other dioramas show demented-looking Pinocchios standing on poles in neat rows and a couple offering a child to a feline, bat-wielding deity. Art-historical father figures also haunt the dioramas. A life-size plaster Minotaur guards the entrance to the room, a bucket full of paintbrushes at its feet – a nod to Picasso that might be insipid if it weren’t for the rifle slung across its chest – while a peephole diorama provides Duchamp’s Étant Donnés (1946–66) with an imaginative back-story, though Dzama is better at suggesting mysteries than solving them.
The artist’s recent forays into diorama-making and filmmaking complement each other. A flickering, feverish dream, the DVD Lotus Eaters (2005) is projected in a room set up with rows of theatre seats, some days accompanied by a pianist, silent-movie style. In the film, an artist encounters a doppelgänger then follows his dead wife into a murky underworld where beings he has created – bears, tin woodsmen, guerrillas in plaid hoods – take revenge on him for controlling their actions. Tapping into the same voyeuristic, drunk-on-early-cinema delirium as fellow Winnipegger Guy Maddin, Dzama incorporates keyhole shots and scratched 8mm and 16mm footage, as well as expressively smudgy scenes shot with a Pixelvision camera. As with his drawings, both these movies and dioramas are worth the risk of incurring the wrath of his creations.
Kristin M. Jones
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