How does the narrative arrive?
I’ll have a
theme like a horror show, but that gets lost after five or ten drawings. I
prefer when things happen organically.
Jeffrey
Deitch commented that "today our understanding of an artist is
closer to a philosopher than a craftsman." Your work involves lots of
craft. Your hand is trained.
The last generation was involved
in philosophy, taking it as far as it can go. Now, people are getting back
to visually stimulating work. Jotting down a sketch is a big deal. Without
it, there’s no intimacy. At university, everyone said computers are taking
over art; I was fighting technology.
Is there a hero or heroine
in your work?
For the last show I was listening to James
Joyce’s works and would draw pictures of Joyce and Mr.
Bloom.
Joyce is up there on the shelf.
I drew him
with the eye patch. He’s eccentric.
James
Joyce in Dzama's studio
Photo:
Courtesy Cheryl Kaplan.
©Copyright
2006 Cheryl Kaplan. All rights reserved.
In
a way, your work is about folly, like a scene out of A Midsummer Night’s
Dream where there’s a constant mix-up.
It’s almost Beckettesque,
where a surreal comedy meets a sinister twist and irony. I’m in a trance
doing the work.
There’s a sense that your characters have been
somewhere else.
They come from way back, from some other time
period. I was also obsessed with Star
Wars as a kid. I altered action figures, putting plasticene on their
heads.
Marcel
Dzama, Untitled, 2003,
Courtesy
David Zwirner, New York
At the same time
your characters also get in deep.
I agree with that. When I
first started, I drew cowboy characters as revenge against the bullies in
my high school in Canada. It was a farm-based community, with these
macho-based cowboy guys. I was the little geeky guy in the library. They
wanted to pick on somebody like me, so it was me. My drawings were revenge
and punishment.
Marcel
Dzama, Untitled, 1997,
Courtesy
David Zwirner, New York
What kind of
punishment did you dole out?
I’d take them down by amputating
them or have animals slaughter them.
Loss of limb and life is a
good start. A Midsummer Night’s Dream also uses a naïve quality similar to
yours.
It’s the children’s illustration aspect with
expectations of a happy ending. Or like the Grimm’s
fairy tales, where you go through a lot to get there.
|
Marcel Dzama,
You
Gotta Make Room for the New Ones (Detail), 2005,
Courtesy
David Zwirner, New York
|
Is that the connection to Henry
Darger and Edward
Gorey? I’m also thinking about the appearance of animals in your work.
For
a while, the bear character was a mother or guardian taking revenge on the
cowboys. Being from Winnipeg and
having family with farms, I could see how animals have personalities that
are almost more interesting than people’s. My grandfather had this horse
that looked after the cows. Maybe that’s normal. If you have a house pet,
you notice all of a sudden when they’re playing rough, and you ask "what
happened?"
|
Marcel Dzama , Fades Away, 2005,
Courtesy
David Zwirner, New York
Do you feel
that way about your characters?
Sometimes they play rough, out
of the blue.
Do you get angry when you’re drawing?
I
take revenge on a lot of people that way. Michelangelo
put people in Hell.
Why render atrocity as playful?
After
I watch the news, I need to get it out of my system. It’s harsh.
How
did your film work start, particularly the collaboration with Spike Jonze
for Sad Ghost?
My parents bought me this Fischer Price camera
that used cassette tapes, like the old silent films; the tapes were cheap.
I used to make puppet shows for my sister and cousin, up to my last year
in high school. I made costumes; I bought masks and changed them. The
stories weren’t that exciting. I started using costumes for films because
the actors couldn’t act. I used my sister or dad, but now he’s gotten
quite good. She was 12 when we started, but she mostly knits now.
Marcel
Dzama, Untitled, 2005,
Courtesy
David Zwirner, New York
What was the first
film?
I was fourteen. They were playful. I had a token band in
high school and did arty videos, setting music to it. At university, they
supplied us with high-resolution cameras. I didn’t like the way anything
looked, so I used the old camera to shoot. The toy camera is a throwback
to surrealist films. I was happy with that faked age aesthetic. By the
time I used it again, it was so old it didn’t work properly. I couldn’t
move very much, because I only had a short cord from the VCR.
In
Marcel Dzama's studio
Photo:
Courtesy Cheryl Kaplan.© Copyright 2006
Cheryl
Kaplan. All rights reserved.
What was the
worst film plot?
There was a chess game for the end of the
world between a weird alien creature and a cowboy. If the alien won, the
world would blow up. If the cowboy won, he’d save the world. In the end,
the alien wins. I put a giant firecracker in a globe and blew it up. It
didn’t look very good, but there were sparks…
What
about your collaboration with Spike Jonze?
He came to my
studio. I was making 15-second films with a power-shot Sony camera, so we
thought up an idea of me painting this bear. Then a bear costume would
come down the stairway sideways and maul me. Basically, he kills me. He
gets mad and leaves. Then a worm crawls into the room and devours me. The
snake was on my head and we put it in reverse so that it looked like it
slithered into the room.
Marcel
Dzama, Untitled, 2000,
Deutsche
Bank Collection
Do you send the
costumes out for dry cleaning?
No, they’re pretty dirty. I
threw a bear off this building. The costume hit the ground, busting up the
mask. With Spike, we were considering using that as a sequel. The bear was
feeling so bad that he killed me, and so he was going to have a flashback
of all the people he killed. Instead, he commits suicide. Then the worm
was supposed to devour him.
Evil.
The film was
silent, but we made bear noises later. Spike screams when I’m supposed to
be screaming, because I wasn’t around for sound. He has a really
high-pitched scream.
[1]
[2]
|
