Marcel Dzama (CA, 1974)

– heeft in de afgelopen tien jaar gewerkt aan een set karakters die sindsdien vaste gast zijn in zijn getekende fabelwereld en worden aangevuld met figuranten uit beroemde kunsthistorische taferelen.

Kort cv
Woont en werkt in Winnipeg en (vanaf november 2004) in New York (zijn Poolse achternaam spreek je uit met een onhoorbare D)

Opleiding
University of Manitoba, Winnipeg

Recente tentoonstellingen
2009 Sies + Höke Galerie, Düsseldorf (solo)
2008 Marcel Dzama / Edition 46, Pinakothek der Moderne Kunst, München (solo)

Werk in de tentoonstelling (level 1, achterwand)

1. Serie ‘Untitled (4 part drawings)’ (2006) (zes tekeningen)
   Ink and Water colour on paper, 35.6 x 27.9 cm, 1 tekening bestaat uit vier lossen bladen
   private collection, courtesy the artist and Sies + Höke Galerie Düsseldorf
   

Fragment catalogustekst (Robbert Roos)
Marcel Dzama heeft in de afgelopen tien jaar gewerkt aan een set karakters die sindsdien in zijn tekeningen, kijkkasten en sculpturen vaste gast zijn. Dzama heeft zijn eigen fabelwereld geschapen, met hondachtige, gestileerde dieren, bomen met menselijke trekken, jagers en een trits figuranten die soms verwijzen naar figuren in beroemde scènes uit de kunstgeschiedenis. Onder meer Goya's 'Disasters of War' is een inspiratiebron. De schijnbaar kinderlijke tekenstijl is verraderlijk, want Dzama heeft het onverbloemd over grote thema's als oorlog en politieke vraagstukken. Maar alles vanuit de structuur van een parallelle vertelling.

Aanvullende informatie
(4) Dzama is known for providing the cover art to a number of major albums, notably The Else by They Might Be Giants, Guero by Beck and Reconstruction Site by The Weakerthans. His costume designs can also be seen in the music video for the Bob Dylan Song When the Deal Goes Down.

Ook voor het album Bed bed bed van het Amerikaanse poprockduo They Might Be Giants deed Marcel Dzama de illustraties

 

(11) Dzama: "I keep a sketchpad with me at all times. When an idea comes to me I like to quickly sketch it out so I can use it later.
Usually the best ideas happen right before I fall asleep. I have a sketchpad beside my bed and even at times have to use a flashlight so I will remember it.
I find that most of my ideas tend to be influenced by literature or by film. Recently I read Dante's Inferno, and found myself subconsciously drawing some of its imagery.
I have also watched several movies about Nosferatu and Dracula that have undoubtedly found their way into my work."

(10) Martine Rouleau (freelance curator), 7 maart 2007:
Marcel Dzama is sitting in a rather staid meeting space of the Timothy Taylor Gallery. On the glass table at his knees rests a very large paper cup filled with coffee and many torn sachets of sugar. He looks a bit like a child sent to a corner to reflect on his behaviour. He looks as if he'd rather be elsewhere, but he can make do of the situation by amusing himself with whatever his surroundings might hold. Not such a surprising attitude for an artist who turned to small format drawings and collages when he found himself stranded in a hotel room after his house burned down. What's more, in spite of a growing international success, he long resisted moving to New York from Winnipeg, Canada.
This interview was conducted in person at Timothy Taylor Gallery, London on 07/03/07.
Martine Rouleau: You previously refused to move to New York, where many galleries sell you work, stating that it was too hectic. You've now lived there for three years. How has it affected your work?

Marcel Dzama: There's a kind of strange energy there that lets you do more than you thought you could ever do. You see so many people doing so many great things that I think you don't limit yourself as much. When I was in Winnipeg I would think: "Maybe I should try that, but I don't know if I can do it." Everyone is so gung-ho in New York that you just go ahead and do it. It's a lot easier to do things there for some reason just because everybody's so active that you can pick up on that energy and channel it for your own work.

MR: You started doing small scale drawings because you were confined to small spaces. Now that you have a lot more space at your disposition, has this affected the scale of your work?

MD: Yes, I go quite large now sometimes with drawings because I developed this new way to work by connecting drawings together so I just kind of keep connecting them upwards and sideways so it turns into this big connected mess of drawings.

MR: Would you allow the galleries to sell them piece by piece so that all the collectors have to meet and agree to lend their part of it in order to show it?

MD: [laughs] No, they have to sell the whole thing.

MR: In 1996, you helped found the Royal Art Lodge, an artist collective that assembled friends and family members in a shared studio. The artist collective met weekly to create puppets, videos, dolls, musical performances, costumes and drawings. What happened to the Royal Art Lodge?

MD: It still exists. It's in a small form now that there's only three of us. It's Neil Farber, Michael Dumontier and me. We still collaborate but it's mostly through the mail. We've gone global. It's changed the dynamic a little bit. It's not as much fun as it was because I have to do drawings by myself and mail them. It's nice to see what they do with them though. We've kind of evolved in separate ways in our solo careers which is healthy and we can still go back to where we used to be when have meetings of the Lodge. We meet every time I go back to Winnipeg and we usually play music together. I play the guitar and Neil plays guitar and Michael plays drums.

MR: Would you ever start another artist collective?

MD: I don't know. It just happened organically. We just happened to have a similar aesthetic and taste and we just meshed together really well. We had a lot of free time and space was very inexpensive to rent in Winnipeg. I think it's harder to do now that I'm in New York because everybody is so busy.

MR: Your work has a very consistent aesthetic that allies folkloric and cinematic references to the menagerie of childhood stories. The result is an assemblage of disquieting characters all wrapped up in the same surreal narrative. The constancy of this imagery is in sharp contrast with your changeable choice of medium. This exhibition contains collages and drawings, but also a film (Lotus Eaters), paintings, photographs, installations and life-sized sculptures. In 2003, you collaborated with They Might Be Giants on a collection of stories and songs called Bed, Bed, Bed. In other words, you're a bit of a renaissance man. How would you qualify your aesthetic?

MD: I don't know what it's based on. It's just little things that catch my attention. I store them in my head and they become part of my world. It's an accumulation of little things that interest me for some reason, I don't know why. It might be something as mundane as a label on something and I just really like it.

MR: Your drawings and collages have a very specific aesthetic: they're flat and show very little texture whereas your sculptures are highly textured, fuzzy and tactile. Do you have a very different approach for two-dimensional works and three-dimensional ones?

MD: Yes, I find it freeing. It's more of a messy process whereas drawing is very neat and with collage I have to be careful about cutting everything out perfectly. I'm a little bit of a perfectionist when it comes to drawings and collages. I'm kind of looser in paintings. But with sculpture for some reason I feel that anything goes. There's more freedom, I feel that I can get away with more.

MR: Do you accumulate things?

MD: Yes, constantly. I keep a scrapbook and every time I see something I like I'll take it or write a reference to it. I also draw in it and do little storyboards for films.

MR: You moved from drawings and paintings to film. Does your choice of medium change because it has to adapt to whichever project you wish to do or because you want to experiment with a certain medium and think of a project that will let you do that?

MD: I'm usually intrigued by something about the medium or sometimes I'll just get really bored of doing drawings and I'll want to do paintings and then I'll get bored of painting and I'll want to look into doing films or sculptures. It's about just keeping it exciting.

MR: Although you've established your reputation early in your career on the basis of meticulous small-scaled drawings and collages, your work seems to be turning more and more to film. You had a retrospective at Ikon [in Birmingham] not so long that gave an overview of your still very young career. What does this show mean to you?

MD: This time, the show is more articulated around the film (Lotus Eaters). All the drawings had to do with the characters in the film, all the paintings had to do with filmmaking. There's a mention of the film in every piece of the show.

MR: You've been doing film for a while?

MD: Yes, film has always been an influence in my work. I've been influenced in the creation of narratives and characters and things like that. I also did short films before I did Lotus Eaters.

MR: Are you going to play the score of the film yourself?

MD: No, there's going to be a piano player at the opening who will play the theme. After that, the pianola will automatically play the theme. I tried to appropriate the theme from the movie The Third Man but I changed it a bit. It will be an homage created by poking holes in the partition of the pianola. The holes make drawings on the scroll as well as the theme.

MR: Do you have projects in the works?

MD: I would actually like to do a more narratively based film. I don't know exactly what yet but my wife is actually working on a screenplay at the moment so maybe collaborating with her at some point would be very fun to do. We've collaborated on paintings and drawings and things like that and we did short videos before that were shown in Winnipeg a long time ago, in the late '90s.

MR: You seem to be an artist because you enjoy it and not because you wish to gain a certain status. A good illustration is your discreet approach to success and was perfectly illustrated in the fact that, even after having sold works to the likes of Jim Carrey and Nicholas Cage, you were still interviewing for a job at Wal-Mart (the American department store). You were rejected... thankfully. Have you stopped interviewing for jobs at Wal-Mart yet and started to believe that you can make a living as an artist?

MD: [laughs] Yes. I think I could get a better job now if I ever decided not to be an artist anymore. Maybe I could go into film but that's still art. Maybe I could be a musician... but that's still art. I don't know what else I could do.

(6) Francesca Gavin, 1 juni 2006: War, dismemberment, bast, monsters, blood. How can such violent imagery be so enticing? In the hand of Marcel Dzama the mental detritus of living during wartime, the background of all our everyday lives, appears to be transformed into an innocent children's fantasy.
His delicate line drawings are filled in with a subtle palette of reds, greys and pale browns - the latter made from concentrated root beer used like paint. At first they seem like pages from an Art Deco children's book until the very (post)modern violence in the images begins to make itself known. There is nothing twee here. The Canadian artist explains nothing in his work. Here is no clear narrative - though often characters resurface and repeat themselves or die off throughout the prolific images. We repeatedly notice people dressed in tree costumes; large bears, little girls with scout-like uniforms and gusn. Together the works tells some obtuse tale of war, revolution and reprisal. Like a fairy-tale Goya.
Thirs large show at Birmingham's Ikon Gallery devoed to Dzama's work, focuses on the past three years - bringing together his signature single-pag ink drawings and watercolours as well as the larger graphic pieces (made of single pages put together like mosaics). There are also fryy, human-sized costumes of Dzama's characters displayed like sculptures, and the unusual short films (including a collaboration with Spike Jonze) the were created for.
This body of work resonates so much in a modern climate. The violence of contemparary media and experience is distilled into such quiet fantastical forms. Here the war in Iraq, totalitarian communist posters, comic strips, Enid Blyton and the outsider art of Harry Darger all meet. And, despite of the delicate approach and the violent content, there's a lot of humor in these bites of stories. Who knew the futility of human experience could be such a delight to observe?

(9) Deborah Solomon, 4 september 2005: When you first see the art of Marcel Dzama, you may feel you are looking at illustrations from some quaintly antique childeren's book. He specializes in pen and ink drawings in which pale, slender women routinely meet up with rabbits and talking trees. Yet Dzama isn't making art for children.
He uses his innocent-looking style to capture a savage contemporary universe, a place that is grimmer than any Grimm's tale. It's as if you have wandered off the proverbial path to grandmother's house and stumbled upon some secret internment camp where bossy personality types (men with rifles, flying bats) oversee the wounded and the weak.
Dzama is a Canadian Wunderkind, and his lugubrious fairy-tale sensibility in some way exemplifies the latest drift in contemporary art. Call it cute tragedy or tragic cuteness: either way, it refers to the impulses of a post-Warhol generation that uses the popular art forms of childhood to express a strartling array of adult feelings. Dzama's audioce extends well beyond the art world, and he has lately become the illustrator of choice for any number of contemporary writers and musicians. He has provided drawings for CD by Beck, o collection of music essays by the novelist Nick Hornby and a gothic history of the American presidency by Sarah Vowell. His democratis instincts have also led hem to design household items, including salt and pepper shakers in the form of crying ghosts, blue tears streaming down their procelain cheeks.
''I like the idea of making products that my family can use,'' Dzama commented with apparent earnestness when we met not long ago in his studio in SoHo. At 31, the artist is tall and lanky, with dark hair and a quietly charming manner. His studio is an extension of his work, an inspired space where normally uninteresting objects -- a battered suitcase, an electric fan -- possess painted-on expressions that convey their apparent displeasure at being trapped in their inanimate bodies. Even the artist's name sounds slightly invented. Wasn't Marcel reserved for hypercreative Frenchmen, for Proust and his cronies? '''Marcel Duchamp' was the first art book that I took out of the library, but I'm not sure that I really got it back then,'' said Dzama, whose Polish last name is pronounced with a silent d and rhymes with llama.

Of all his undertakings, Dzama's most memorable are surely his stand-alone drawings, a cache of which will go on view at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York this week. The new drawings -- whose colors are mostly restricted to olive greens, vermilions and fuzzy-looking browns made from a root-beer base -- are reminiscent of the illustrations that filled books and magazines around 1900, when three-color printing was considered a novelty. Yet here the Beatrix Potter style is put in service of a 21st-century tale about violence and its sorrows, a cryptic narrative that seems to touch on everything from the prison abuses perpetrated by soldiers in Iraq to the private and largely psychological arena where children are wounded by careless adults. Here, childhood, too, is a country all its own where unspeakable events occur and there are no flights out.

The same characters appear and reappear from one drawing to the next. The men are mostly blustery, virile types -- there are old-time gangsters and big-band musicians, a posse of cowboys with ample mustaches aiming their rifles at a descending front of bats. The women also inflict cruelties or endure them. They variously carry pistols, wear blindfolds or hang limply from the branches of a concerned-looking tree with a human face. ''When you're alone in the woods, you always see faces,'' Dzama told me, making it sound as if even his most surreal drawings have their roots in autobiography.

Born in 1974 in the isolated Canadian wilds of Winnipeg, Dzama grew up in a working-class family, the oldest of three children. His father, a baker, worked behind the cake counter at a Safeway supermarket. (''I made friends with the cake decorator, and she would give me gingerbread all the time,'' the artist said.) He recalled himself as a tense, dyslexic youth who had trouble decoding basic sentences and dreaded the pressure of having to stand up in front of his classmates to read a passage from Shakespeare aloud. Early on, he took refuge in drawing; he started a comic strip about his teddy bear, ''whose name happened to be Ted,'' he said.
He earned his first fame in 1996 as a senior at the University of Manitoba. There he founded the Royal Art Lodge, an ironically named collective that can put you in mind of hunters and wild boar. But this lodge's members wielded colored pencils, and they sat around late into the night, often working on one another's compositions; in coming years, they would exhibit together as well, locally at first and then at galleries in Los Angeles, New York and London. Two years ago, Dzama started a second collective, the Royal Family, a touchingly homey enterprise for which he enlisted his sister Hollie; his uncle Neil Farber; his future wife, Shelley Dick; and even his mother, Jeanette, who has designed and sewed many of the furry, life-size costumes of bears and alligators that appear in her son's video productions.
Last November, just before another long winter set in, Dzama decided to leave Winnipeg for New York. It was the first time he has lived away from home, and one of his recent works refers directly to his departure. ''Snowman Canisters,'' as it is called, actually consists of a set of usable kitchen canisters, mass- -- or at least semi-mass- -- produced in an edition of 2,500 by a Philadelphia-based company called Cereal Art.

The canisters acquaint us with a fetching snowman -- or is he a penguin? -- in four different incarnations, each a little smaller. With his lopsided black ovals for eyes and his inky nose, he is a figure of pathos, melting from robust and dignified manhood into a shapeless lump of snow.

Dzama spoke of the piece as a personal farewell to chilly Winnipeg and his entire Canadian past. Yet even the past is never really past, as that other Marcel, the author of ''Remembrance of Things Past,'' was always reminding us. You can see the canisters as a tribute to Dzama's baker father and perhaps also to the countless pairs of anonymous hands that measure out cups of flour and sugar every day, making homespun birthday cakes and preserving one of the sweetest rituals of childhood.

In his art, Dzama tries to keep that world and its enchantments alive, even though he knows that the candles were long ago blown out.

(12) Sarah Vowell Questions Marcel Dzama About Canada and Colour:
On a page of Marcel Dzama's sketchbook, monsters play baseball beneath a Winnipeg weather forecast predicting a high of 25 below—Celsius, but still. The understandably indoorsy Dzama has put down on paper an entire Manitoba of the mind, a great and terrible territory in ink, watercolor, and root beer, populated by lady-biting bats, waltzing bird-headed men, and adorable, gun-slinging little girls. In this place, Dracula's house stands next to an Internet café. A teacher writes the word "decapitation" on a blackboard—a word, by the way, which will come in handy here. All very mysterious, and yet the real mystery of Dzama's art is the elegance of all these demons, all this gore. There is a delicacy. This guy can make a knife fight between a lion and a bear seem endearing. An amputee, in Dzama's hands, somehow bleeds nothing but charm.

Born in 1974, Dzama attended the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, where he continues to live. In 1996, he was one of the founders of the Royal Art Lodge, a group of six artists (including Dzama's then-12-year-old sister Hollie) who got together every Wednesday night to draw. While each of the Lodgers mounted solo careers, the band still gets back together once a week to mark and write on shared drawings, stuffing the embarrassing ones into a Sad Cloud suitcase; a Sun Face suitcase contains the ones they like.

SV: This drawing inscribed "Count Dracula sends his message of damnation to the people of Canada": To me, it's funny because why on earth would Dracula ever even notice Canada, much less go there or care? I just never pictured vampires in Canada. No offense, but traditionally they favor jazzier spots—Central Europe, New Orleans, Southern California, Paris, etc. Maybe I'm just xenophobic, but what does Canada have to offer the undead?

MD: In the winter we have less daylight than most places, probably a lot less than those jazzier spots you mentioned. I do think that he would have more time to do nighttime things, although he may die of frostbite doing them. I do enjoy putting Dracula in atypical environments. I like the idea of him having frostbite too. As a self-deprecating Canadian, I really can't imagine him ever really caring about us, but I can't help it if I wish he did.

SV: I'm very keen on the tree people. Anything you care to divulge about their origin? I can't quite decide whether they're benign or not. I mean, they're trees, which a person tends to think of fondly and less suspiciously than your other monsters, but then again they're slightly menacing.

MD: I wish I could tell you that the tree people came from the seventh circle of Hell, those who had committed violence on themselves, but the truth is that I grew up with them. They were ominous and dark figures in my favourite stories and fairy tales that I loved and loathed in equal parts. They are slightly menacing, but at the same time they are trees, so they must be wise. Later, when I read The Inferno, I was very interested to read about the seventh circle of Hell, and I've adapted some of that feeling to my own tree people. Perhaps earlier on they were more pleasant, but lately they have become more dangerous.

SV: About the root beer: When did you hit on the idea of using root beer to color your drawings? What's its appeal?

MD: A long time ago I was visiting my grandparent's farm in Fosston, Saskatchewan, and we had gone to the general store to buy some root beer base. We had just planned to make some homemade pop with this brand called Old Fashioned Home Brew. It was then at my grandma's kitchen table that I spilled some of the root beer syrup on to my sketchbook. It was a very rich brown, and since I was already drawing bears quite a bit, as an experiment I used it like a watercolour on a drawing. I liked it so much that I went back to the store and bought more. I still use it because I haven't found a watercolour or ink base that compares.

SV: Do the drawings smell like root beer?

MD: The drawings do smell slightly of root beer, but I think it goes away after about a year's time. The root beer dominates quite a few of my drawings, because I tend to use mostly browns when I paint.

SV: Your palette is rather melancholy, colors that are found in nature and/or army textiles. Is this just some intrinsic preference of yours, or something more? For someone who seems inspired by cartoons, you seem to have no truck at all with the usual candy colors of animation. Why?

MD: Bright colours have never really appealed to me in my own work. I prefer the muted tones of brown and green. They are more subtle and less obtrusive. I enjoy comics and cartoons, but somehow a limited palette appeals to my more sinister side.

SV: When I was an art history student, I always liked writing about the groups—Dada, Fluxus, de Stijl. I liked the art, but I was also drawn to the idea of a bunch of mismatched people hanging around each other and being together and drinking drinks and coffee and doing their own thing but always coming together once a day or year or whatever and designing a cafe or hacking up a piano together. Do you, with regards to the Royal Art Lodge, feel any kinship with those groups? Romanticize togetherness?

MD: I like and am inspired by Dada, Fluxus, and de Stijl. But I'm just not sure if the comparison quite befits the RAL—mainly because somehow we seem so much more low-brow and unsophisticated than any of them. We are definitely a tight knit group of friends whose form of social interaction is largely art-making. We don't have an agenda per se, but somehow drawing with other people is so much more fun than doing it by yourself.

SV: I'm going to stereotype your whole country, but Canadians seem to talk up the collective spirit as a nation way more than we do, we the individuals. Do you think your group bears out this national bent?

MD: If there is a Canadian factor in our togetherness, perhaps it is borne out of the isolation of living in a small city like Winnipeg, and the cold weather. We are not able to go outside too often because right now your skin will freeze within minutes. We like to huddle together to stay warm.

Links en verwijzingen

1. www.davidzwirner.com
2. www.sieshoeke.com
3. Marcel Dzama Artwork represented by Richard Heller Gallery
4. Marcel Dzama - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
5. David Zwirner: Marcel Dzama
6. BBC - collective - marcel dzama interview Filmpjes, rondleiding door Dzama zelf en een interview
7. Marcel Dzama on artnet
8. Tate Collection | Marcel Dzama
9. Drawn to Trouble - New York Times
10. Kultureflash ::: Artworker of the Week ::: Marcel Dzama
11. Biennale de Montréal 2002
12. McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Marcel Dzama