Marcel Dzama's work to date has been heavily defined by a prolific series of figural drawings produced in graphite, pen and ink, watercolor, and root beer wash. Equal parts macabre and mischievous, these illustrations have created a host of oneiric characters. In this world, guerilla ballerinas can be found both shooting and suckling orgiastic mystery cults, on the same page as anthropomorphic animals and Bauhaus puppets arranged in ceremonial chaos. Bradley Bailey describes one of Dzama's drawings in the monograph Marcel Dzama: Sower of Dischord as "a grandiose scene of majesty and spectacle, as if the Revelation of John were directed by Busby Berkeley." While the artist has been working in film for years, it has only been in the past decade that these personalities have jumped from paper to video performance. In Une Danse des Bouffons (A Jester's Dance), Dzama conceives of a "Dadaist love story" between artists Marcel Duchamp and Maria Martins. Awakened by a trickster from sculptural stasis as Duchamp's Étant donnés, Maria (played by both Kim Gordon and Hannelore Knuts) finds Marcel trapped and tortured by chess. She confronts overgrown puppets and quadruple-eyed judges to rescue her lover with the trickster's assistance (or hindrance). Commissioned by the Toronto International Film Festival in 2013, Une Danse des Bouffons makes its U.S. premiere alongside related two- and three-dimensional work by the artist at David Zwirner Gallery.
Dzama led Interview on a tour of the in-progress installation for his solo exhibition in Chelsea.
RACHEL EGAN: I was first consciously exposed to your work in the form of the exhibition catalog for The Last Winter. I remember it quite vividly—my uncle had given the book to me for Christmas.
DZAMA: Oh—awesome!
EGAN: I'm from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and while the winters are nowhere nearly as harsh as the ones in Canada, it was snowing profusely while I read it. This was around the same time that I saw Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World. On top of that I was a teenage girl, so the net effect gave me a very romanticized view of Winnipeg and its artists. Back then I thought of you as a draftsman, drawing as a really intimate, insular act, but now there is an outpouring of multimedia—ceramics, dioramas, and film.
DZAMA: I was always doing films, but the ceramics didn't come until later. I did take ceramics in university, which gave me an appetite for the medium, but I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do with it yet.