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- - - - SECTION: v.22(3) Ag'03; ISSN: 0831-2559 CBCA-ACC-NO: 5841180 LENGTH: 2651 words HEADLINE: Winnipeg on the Hudson (Record in progress) BYLINE: Trainor, James BODY: As openings go, it was a successful if somewhat industrious one. On a particularly bitter January evening at The Drawing Center in New York, the current members of the Royal Art Lodge managed to destroy a suitcase-load of their own drawings, collaborative works on paper deemed just too awful to be allowed continued existence in the world. This vandalistic bit of public housekeeping was presided over by a big brown bear (Marcel Dzama in a none-too-fearsome grizzly costume) who, with the solemn, ritualized violence of a circus sideshow act, invited guests to feed the bungled sketches to a obliging platypus with a paper shredder in its duck bill, all to the accompaniment of a masked duo on guitar and drums. The Royal Art Lodge knows how to do failure right. In fact, this wry art collective has been so good at attracting attention in far-flung places, without the appearance of really trying, that they seem disinclined at present to abandon their beloved hometown of Winnipeg for the sake of career or cash. While in the minds of some Americans, their deadpan name might summon visions of dandyish Mounties armed with sable brushes and ensconced in comfy armchairs, the six current RAL denizens--Michael Dumontier, Hollie Dzama, Marcel Dzama, Neil Farber, and Drue and Myles Langlois--are actually a group of 20-something friends and siblings who decided to band together after finishing art school. In conversation soon after their arrival in New York, Michael, Neil and Marcel admitted to a degree of common bashfulness and ambivalence about art scenes, conditions eased by patenting their particular kind of art at home, just down the street from their families and long-time friends, with occasional jaunts into the wider world as necessary. The sudden squall of drawings, collages, sculpture, paintings, puppets, dolls, music recordings, costumes, performance videos, books, 'zines and assorted ephemera at the RAL's epitaphic mini-retrospective, ''Ask the Dust,'' at The Drawing Center was one of three shows by both former and current Winnipeggers that discreetly descended on New York this past winter. The incident with the non-placental mammal was preceded by an exhibition at 303 Gallery of watercolours by Tim Gardner, another son of Manitoba who now lives in LA, soon followed by a show of sculpture and collage at Friedrich Petzel by Jon Pylypchuk, a founding member of the RAL who pulled up stakes for Los Angeles a few years back and has been working on his own bestiary ever since. The simultaneity of these three shows, coincidental in itself, says something not only about Winnipeg as a germinative location for young artists, but also about the making of art now, in a globalizing world experiencing collapsing perceptions of distance, place and centrality. The new transnational realities made possible by the ease of air travel and the Internet have changed the dynamics of how art is circulated and translated across borders and cultures. While Pylypchuk's and Gardner's relocation to two art world mega-centres may be the more familiar model of the artist migrating from province to metropole, the example of the RAL may suggest a new reality in which old notions about what is local and what is global, what is important by accidental virtue of geography, have already begun to shift. That a lingua franca has emerged in the art world, just as in the broader popular culture as a whole, is made clear by the growing number of ''global artists'' from Ankara to Bombay to Beijing sharing in an artistic nomadism made possible by the proliferation of biennials, triennials and art fairs worldwide. What constitutes regionalism in such a world, in which the hierarchies of proximity and influence are more fluid than ever, is hard to say. While they make things that can be said to have purchase globally, the RAL, Pylypchuk and Gardner all make work that has a lot to do with where and how they grew up. Childhood, juvenilia, memory and autobiographical arcana are their common staging grounds. For the RAL, something of the camaraderie and communal codes of play, fostered by having come of age within a stone's throw of each other's backyards, has followed them into their adult lives. There is a treehouse ethos of intense purposefulness to their Wednesday-night art-making get-togethers, which, since their founding in 1996, have given them an excuse to work on each other's drawings and objects. Drawing has always been their home base, the place where they can swap narratives, carry on conversations and develop the evolving cast of characters that turn up in other media. Most drawings have been matter-of-factly rubber-stamped with the date of completion, an aesthetic disregard (or attention to archival rectitude) recalling both the specificity of On Kawara's date paintings and the way that Old Master prints were once routinely dressed down by being perfunctorily stamped ''Bibliotheque Nationale.'' Fondness for collaboration, for not having to go it alone on any one piece of paper, dovetails neatly with a penchant for mismatched styles and serendipitous associations. One Lodger's rendering of a tiny infant (to select one of a nearly infinite variety of examples) is irrevocably hijacked by another's ink sketch of a twin engine propeller plane overlaid on the first, giving the impression that the baby is piloting the aircraft. An admonishing truism typed at the page bottom, ''children shouldn't fly,'' seems rather beside the point, since this particular kid appears quite adept. The RAL's menagerie of mascots, totemic animals and hybrid creatures is committed to posterity in a low-key, do-it-yourself kind of way with draughtsmanship that can be comical, awkward and lovingly refined--often all at once. Their ''it's all good'' approach shows the percolating, encyclopaedically inclusive influence of slapstick, Aesop's fables, low-budget monster and sci-fi flicks, Surrealism, absurdist theatre, '30s picture books, thrift store ''outsider'' art, shoddy puppet and magic shows, outdated textbooks, crude vernacular signage and Saturday morning children's programming--to name just a few things that come to mind. They also crack each other up. Like brothers and sisters (which, of course, four of them are), they share a well-developed shorthand humour and a lingo peppered with confidences and non sequiturs. They also have their fights and rivalries, which often get folded back into something useful via typed apology-drawings or declarations of remorse. In fact, texts--in the form of captions, suspect aphorisms, quotes and impromptu notes--are everywhere, suffused with both parodistic earnestness and genuinely tender emotions. Even their hand-stitched puppets come with their own self-deprecatory boasts: ''My intelligence is compromised by my imagination,'' muses one creature with an hourglass-shaped head. Each of the Lodgers has their strengths--Marcel has a keen eye for the kind of well-mannered horrors and incongruities found in early children's book illustrations and Boy Scout manuals; Michael, with his exquisite painterly studies of plywood or a bullet's trajectory, is the group's lyric minimalist, and Neil brings toddlers into disquieting contact with domestic hazards--which find their legs collaboratively before gaining the field in solo work made outside the group. Jonathan Pylypchuk, who was perhaps the group's master of melancholia, has, since his departure, taken that gift for crude pathos and made something downright virtuosic out of it. Where some would see a dead end in the look and feel of ''failure,'' Pylypchuk sees the conditions of woeful inadequacy, epic overreach and unfounded hope as windows of opportunity left wide open. His motley cast of creatures, many little more than sentient bits of fur, fabric remnants, wood scraps and wallpaper, are endowed with enough of an inner life to know that they are miserable. When I first saw Pylypchuk's work at his New York debut two years ago, his mixedmedia assemblages, feverishly cobbled together with liberal amounts of hot glue and screws, brilliantly suggested how the tropes of 19th-century Romanticism could be taken to absurdist heights via a precise amateurishness, as if retooled by a kindergarten arts and crafts class. His most recent show finds many of the same anguished passion plays unfolding, except that what once hung safely on the gallery walls has now been granted an inescapably tangible three-dimensionality. Having left the nest of the flat picture plane, his ragtag coterie of mopers and brooders--sometimes monurnental, more often just scuttling underfoot--are now free to roam. Well, free to a point, anyway. Now How Will We Get Around, 2002, is the title given to two, knee-high, rodent-like creatures with beaks who, having no legs to speak of, sit anxiously on rather poorly constructed dollies with castors. The mystery of their predicament deepens when the viewer notices that the ruddy carrot-like snout of the larger animal is tied on with a bit of old string, suggesting a hastily improvised disguise. Adding to the sense of clumsy intrigue and subterfuge are the strange lavender protuberances that emerge from under their smock fronts and roll out onto the floor. Their self-pitying query now seems like a coy invitation to the viewer to pull them around by their members. In one of his most ''epic'' works to date, ''hot dog'' based on the motion picture for tim gardner, 2002, we see one of pylypchuk's figures in an uncharacteristically recreational setting, enjoying a day on the ski slopes (most of his sad-sack creatures seem too engulfed by remorse and abjection to contemplate exercise). Having paused midway down a steep, rickety plywood mountainside that seems just barely holding together, the insect-like stick figure--its dowel limbs are approximately the thickness of the ski poles supporting it--is quite the bon vivant, looking pleased with the fabulous view and his place in it. With a cape slung debonairly around his neck (again a bit of an old bed sheet), he's a rarity in Pylypchuk's universe, a smug ski bum. Such figures are in no short supply in Tim Gardner's world, where the protocols of fun are described in painful detail. Whereas the main touchstones for the RAL and Pylypchuk are the psychological bugbears, inky night terrors and childhood's obsessive trains of thought, for Tim Gardner it is the trappings of a numbingly average adolescence. Gardner is a painter of delicately nuanced photo-realist watercolours, who, with each show, demonstrates remarkable technical mastery of a medium associated with expressive spontaneity and brevity. While his style is straightforwardly academic, his subject, the exploits of young, white, middle-class males, is anything but. The scenes he paints--youths goofing around in backyards. carousing with forced bravado at parties, or standing in front of natural wonders during spring break--are all based on photographs, selected snapshots taken by his brothers, his friends and himself. Watercolour has often been the medium of the traveller and ethnographer, documenting in quickly rendered scenes some exotic locale, its inhabitants, their dress and customs. In his paintings, Gardner also carefully captures the trappings of a culture--his own--as if from a unbridgeable distance. In particular, he documents a youth culture in whose rituals of fun and recreation can be glimpsed the homogeneity of North America; this could be Manitoba or New Jersey, it really doesn't matter. One work, Untitled (Guy with Girls), 2002, shows a bare-chested dude in swimming trunks (his head conveniently cropped out of the frame) surrounded by what appear to be his favourite things: beer and women. Just as though they knew the scene by heart from magazines and movies, the girls play their roles by leaning forward to giggle and gossip, acting as bookends for his tanned, anonymous torso. In other paintings, we see guys bonding, passed out in dorm rooms, horsing around by a motel pool, or flicking birds at the camera as if they didn't know how else to deal with being looked at. In Untitled (Red Sky), 2002, three boys on a basketball court, bodies bleached out by the automatic flash of a camera, stand awkwardly like deer caught in a car's headlights, their backs to a blazing and liquid twilight sky. It is a scene both banal and heartbreaking. His brush may say Winslow Homer or Thomas Eakins--his studies of thunderclouds seen from a passing airliner are breathtaking--but his eye says Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans. Like those contemporary photographers, Gardner's chronicling of the lives of those around him offers little narrative order to the succession of incidents, excesses and non-events that pass before the lens of the picture taker. Neither does he indicate any greater or lesser importance between one image and the next. The snapshot long ago became a way to reassure ourselves, to confirm what we already know, or think we know. In minutely examining and then transposing with loving care every detail of these off-the-cuff Kodak moments, Gardner's enterprise may be an attempt to excavate some underlying truth from beneath the inert surface of the photo that will redeem, or at least clarify, the lives of his subjects. Not long after ''Ask the Dust'' was up on its feet, having appeased the platypus and averted untold misfortune by purging itself of past graphic sins, the RAL jetted back to the safety of Winnipeg. But I suspect they'll be back. For artists who cultivate a reclusive group image, they have more than a few drawings that describe faraway places and modes of travel, at least of the armchair variety. One world map reorganizes the globe with Canada and the USA playing bit parts as two insignificant islands sharing a sea with bigger, better places like the ''Island of Dreams'' and a continent named ''Howl Howl.'' A collage stamped ''June 6, 2001'' finds two little figures, one clutching a suitcase--perhaps stuffed with drawings--strolling into the sunset over what looks suspiciously like a wide amber prairie. The caption, a fortune-cookie slip glued to the sky, sounds encouraging: ''You will travel far and wide for both business and pleasure.'' The RAL's menagerie of mascots, totemic animals and hybrid creatures is committed to posterity in a low-key, do-it-yourself kind of way with draughtsmanship that can be comical, awkward and lovingly refined--often all at once. Dzama has a keen eye for the kind of well-mannered horrors and incongruities found in early children's book illustrations and Boy Scout manuals. The Lodgers share a well-developed shorthand humour and a lingo peppered with confidences and non sequiturs. Dumontier, with his exquisite painterly studies of plywood or a bullet's trajectory, is the group's lyric minimalist. JOURNAL-CODE: 0733 LOAD-DATE: October 20, 2003 - - - -
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