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- - - - TODAY'S PAPER The power of the playful In an anxious time, the whimsy of the Winnipeg's Royal Art Lodge collective could seem like loser art. But it turns out to be quite irresistible, SARAH MILROY writes By SARAH MILROY
TORONTO -- For several years now, the art-world jungle drums have been beating about Winnipeg's Royal Art Lodge, the artist collective made up of Michael Dumontier, Hollie and Marcel Dzama (brother and sister), Neil Farber (their uncle), Drue and Myles Langlois (brothers), and, originally, Jonathan Pylypchuk and Adrian Williams (both no longer in the group). The production of the Lodge, since its inception in 1996, has been copious -- puppets, videos, dolls, musical performances, costumes and heaps of drawings. Ever since their first forays in togetherness while still students at the University of Manitoba, the name of the game has been collaboration. Their drawings, which lie at the heart of their production, are the result of now famous weekly Wednesday-evening sessions in the group's Winnipeg warehouse loft, where drawings and collages are passed around for permutation. The results are charmingly edgy: Hieronymous Bosch meets Paul Frank meets Duchamp meets Marvel Comics meets Ant and Bee. In one drawing, we see a revised map of "New Earth" with its landmarks -- Slime Province, Torment Cavern, Little USA, and Gobot Isle of Manufacture. In another, a penguin surfs across a white page on its tummy, while below him letters spell out "There Is No longer Any Excuse," and above, "Start Your Own Revolution!" -- the texts charging the image with unanticipated irony. (Penguins, after all, must be nature's most absurdly complacent-looking creatures.) The Lodge's drawings and collages are woven from these sorts of finely crafted miniature observations, startling us with intimate little epiphanies of recognition or pure pleasure -- like their gorgeous little watercolour of a baby sitting upright in his washtub, attended by a scarlet songbird (which came first in the creative process, one wonders, the baby or the bathtub?), or a little girl who inflates giant seed pods shaped like Japanese lanterns, setting them free to float across a brilliant yellow sky, or the tender stag (rendered in the softest of brown watercolour strokes) who holds a mouse gingerly by the tail and carries a saffron-yellow cat on its back. (The inscription: "At the end of the day, the deer takes everybody home.") Heavenly. While collaboration has been the group's raison d'être, a few solo careers have inadvertently sprouted on the side. The Lodge's most prominent member has been Marcel Dzama, whose quirky and elegant drawings in root beer, pen and ink and a host of other curious stains first cropped up at a Los Angeles art fair in 1996 (his favorite subjects: flapper girls, dancing alligators and bears, tree men, bats with baby faces, soldiers, pipe-smoking hippopotami) and he has gone on to have hot-selling commercial shows in New York, Toronto, Sao Paolo, Rio de Janiero, London, Vancouver, Cologne, Berlin, Paris and Milan. Other Lodge members, like Farber and Drue Langlois, have also emerged from the shadows to assume the solo spotlight. But the current exhibition Ask the Dust, which was mounted first at The Drawing Centre in New York this winter (to great critical enthusiasm and record-breaking attendance -- more than a thousand visitors on its last day) and has just opened at The Power Plant in Toronto, offers the first chance to get a really comprehensive look at the group as a whole, and to come to terms with the meaning of their wildly creative output. For the critic, the show presents a most unusual challenge: How to withstand the blast force of the work's sheer adorableness. It's hard to keep your wits about you. I went to see the show in a bad mood, after reading some particularly gruesome coverage of the war in Iraq, and subliminally annoyed in advance at the idea of so much silliness from the Manitoba contingent. As one war-saturated newspaper colleague of mine said, "How many sock monkeys can you stand to look at?" In fact, there are no sock monkeys in the show -- just a sock-donkey puppet -- but I knew exactly what she meant. This is loser art, a celebration of futility. Or is it? Within minutes, my attitude had been turned on its head. With my headphones on, I entered the video world of Jeffrey and Humphrey, two snaggle-toothed hand puppets with long fanged beaks and mysterious Eastern European accents who preside proudly over their hubcap collection and belt out their instant classic "Doggie ain't got no bone!" I defy anyone to remain immune to their charms for more than 25 seconds. I met Sneaky the Snake and Weiner the Worm (a low-rent video parable about sharing). And I saw a lot of drawings: Neil Farber's darkly comic cartoons of children engaged in very bad deeds, like lighting each other hair on fire (I know it sounds sick, but there is something about the cartooning style that makes them irresistibly funny); Drue Langlois's hilarious comic strip The Chocolate Factory Robbery, which concludes with imaginary beings capable of spontaneously growing candy out of their bodies; and a raft of collaborative drawings evoking marvellous hybrids of human and animal beings. I saw photography, like Dumontier's polaroids of Drue Langlois's performance costumes (Langlois arranged to be photographed leaning out of his studio window on the first Wednesday of each month, each time wearing a different homemade mask -- coquettish kitten, hooded menace, kite-face, scary skull). I saw Dumontier and Langlois's endearing felt dolls, little technicolour aliens to which quotations have been attached on cardboard tags ("Sharing beautiful things with someone can sometimes take the life out of them" or "Don't wake him. Your world is his dream") and Farber's handy-dandy wall chart of the "Animals of the Depression" (Hopeless Turtle, Bad Provider Salamander Bird). The Royal Art Lodge menagerie is an inventory of the human soul -- happy, sad, lonely, comforted, hopeful and sometimes desolate -- lovingly described in every artistic medium the artists can get their hands on. At the opening of the show, a woman turned to me with her eyes wide with enthusiasm and said, "I don't know what all this means, but isn't it wonderful that something like this can happen?" What she meant by "something like this" was, I think, something so full of humour and creativity, something so genuinely guileless and playful in this decidedly unplayful moment. For all their art-world success, the impulse behind the Royal Art Lodge remains remarkably modest and innocent -- a gang of twentysomethings who like to hang out together and draw and make each other laugh as an alternative to, say, "wanting to have babies, or buying matching dishes to get rid of the panicky feeling." The more I think about it, the more I believe she hit the nail on the head. Wonder is the word I would choose as well. The Royal Art Lodge: Ask the Dust continues at The Power Plant in Toronto until May 25 (416-973-4949). - - - -
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