Marcel Dzama

JZ

How did the music and punk scene shape who you are when you were younger? Do you still feel engaged with that? What sort of influence does that have on you at this point? And were you already making artwork at that time, even in high school or before?

MD

When I discovered the punk scene, I was still in high school and kind of felt lost compared to my classmates. It spoke to me and reinforced that disillusionment I was feeling, but didn’t yet have an outlet for. So then I was in a few punk bands in high school, which I think is probably normal for most teens in the late 80s early 90s, but I was writing poems and drawing before that even, comic books and children’s books as well. My sister is ten years younger than me, and so I’d make books for her age group.

JZ

Do those exist anywhere still?

MD

I had a house fire and a lot of them got wrecked, but I think she has one about her pet rat, Sadie. I have two sisters, and the older one had pet rats. But the sad thing about rats only live like a year or two. My parents had full-time jobs, so I would babysit my youngest sister. I was part of this art group called the Royal Art Lodge, so I would bring her to our drawing meetings and she would drawing with us. She then became a member of the group, and my other sister, who was just a year younger than me—she was much more mature than me. She had a job at 14, and was married and had kids in her early 20s. She was popular in high school.

JZ

Do you remember the first year or the first phase of your life that you were starting to draw? Or what attracted you to it?

MD

My parents would buy me coloring books all the time, and I filled them up too fast, so I started drawing instead of just coloring. So it was—I don’t know how old I would have been, probably six or something like that, seven, because I was obsessed with monsters, and would draw Dracula and Frankenstein and the werewolf. And of course, Star Wars was very popular in the 1970s and ’80s. I was drawing a lot of that.

JZ

Speaking of monsters—I couldn’t remember if I was imagining this, but I thought I recalled you being a part of the movie for Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, with Spike Jonze?

MD

I did a bunch of behind-the-scenes things; I did some animations. Spike had problems with the studios heads, so for some of his meetings he would just send them fun animations that I drew with Maurice’s monsters—they’d be causing havoc on the set, eating cameramen and smashing equipment. [Laughs] Later McSweeney’s published it in their DVDs series. The best part of being part of the Where the Wild Things Are project was that I got to go visit Maurice Sendak with Spike a lot, and we would all do drawings together.

JZ

Wow. What was he like?

MD

He was amazing. He was like a Guru-curmudgeon. [Laughs] We’d be drawing together and I would just be thinking to myself, “Just take this in,” and was having nostalgia for the moment I was in. He really liked my wife a lot, too. They bonded over having problematic relationships with their mothers. Maurice would tell stories of old New York. He had this one terrible story—when he was very young, he was playing catch with his friend, and he threw the ball, and his friend went into the street to grab it and was killed. Maurice was just carrying that guilt with him, and later, he and his brother started making all these beautiful sculptures together. He’d say his brother was like, ten times more talented than he was. They would make little wooden sculptures together, but then his brother died in World War II. So there was a lot of loss there.

JZ

His world definitely reminds me of the dance project The Most Incredible Thing a little bit, really the creation of an entire microcosm. I was wondering if you and Joe [Gordon] had interacted on that project at all?

JG

[Laughs.] I was in the back of the room and was sort of coming up in the company at the time.

MD

Which costume were you in?

JG

I understudied the King, and then also the Creator. I would watch from the house a lot, which was the perk of being the understudy, you get to see these performances. And it felt to me like such a relationship, a visual language that was shared between The Most Incredible Thing and Ballet Russe. Was that a point of inspiration for you? And the mixed media that was going on in that zeitgeist? That felt like a real part of what you did with collaborations between music and dance.

MD

I was also obsessed with Oskar Schlemmer, this Bauhaus teacher who did a few ballets. He had these costumes that made the dancers almost unable to move. [Laughs.] So there’s that King costume—for The Most Incredible Thing, I got Justin Peck to write out how much dancing each character had to do, so then I could give the elaborate costumes to the dancers that didn’t need to move that much. The King got the craziest costume; you could tell he’d do a couple spins and it would be “Where am I?” And it was made up of two people playing one character.

JG

It’s funny, I do see the Bauhaus in that dance.

MD

And the character of the Destroyer used to have a strange costume—he was the main villain that had this baseball bat arm, and a big mask. We got rid of the big mask but kept the baseball bat arm and he killed the other characters with it.

JZ

And the choreographers are thinking, “He can’t move in that thing.” It’s going to become a legal issue. [Laughs]

MD

Exactly, one of other costumes had these bigger wings, and then we figured out they were just too heavy and adjusted them. Justin gave Tiler [Peck] an insanely fast dance. So the costume really needed to be simplified; the mask just became a type of hat, so she could move her neck more easily, and the wings got much lighter.

JZ

[To Joe] Do you get a certain amount of input in that process, when costumes are being designed? We’ve talked about how certain dances are being choreographed on you, but with the costumes, do you have some say creatively?

JG

Yes, if I feel like something is not flattering. [Laughs.] I will then say something. You want to feel your most embodied, completely comfortable. But most of the issues arise with our fashion collaborations, because I think a lot of the designers don’t really know—they want to create something that is fashion, but also, there’s the body, right? And we work so hard to attain this line, and this form. How do you marry an artistic vision that’s about the sculpture of a dress, to the sculpture of the body?

MD

It affects you!

JZ

And it has to really look good in movement.

JG

Some designers just intuitively get it. But it’s always interesting to see when those different media have to meet and reorient themselves. Which is the nature of collaborating, it’s all part of that process.

JZ

Marcel, I wanted to ask about your collaboration with Raymond Pettibon—or really that sequence of collaborations, I suppose. Have there been especially fruitful and exciting moments? Looking back at that work now, what stands out to you?

MD

There’ve been many great moments. One that comes to mind: our sons are basically the same age, so we brought them with us to work when we were working in the gallery and they would draw together. And then we drew on those drawings, too, so then all four of us would do drawings. That was a nice moment. I think the gallery still has one of those drawings somewhere. There are a few photos of the boys dancing in the middle of the space. I think Bo was doing break dancing? Or maybe hip-hop? He was showing Willem how to do the moves. I have them on video dancing in slow motion. [Laughs.]

JZ

And do you have a bunch of projects lined up now, or is the end in sight for the moment?

MD

I have this show in Antwerp—I only had two months to make the whole show. So I was kind of cramming, and it ended up being quite a lot of work. I worked a little bit earlier, but I did this stage performance with Performa. I went straight from that to working on this show. I performed the music on it live with friends. I guess that part of being in punk bands as a kid came out, although this of course was more soundtrack music. It also has a Spanish feel because the performance was all about Federico Garcia Lorca.

JZ

How did that project come about?

MD

The Lorca Foundation asked me to do that project maybe 12 years or so ago, and originally, the foundation was going to fund it and put it out, and I was going to perform it in Madrid. And then they got a grant to build the whole museum in Granada. So they used all that money on the new museum. They couldn’t do the project at that time, but I always had it in the back of my mind. It was basically this screenplay Lorca wrote that had never really been turned into a film. And then when I started the Performa piece, I found out that it had been turned into a film since the idea was first introduced, but the Lorca foundation said, “Well, that one doesn’t really count because we didn’t fund it. We’re fine with what they did, but it isn’t the authorized version, so you could be doing the authorized one.” So I thought, well, maybe I’ll make my own spin on it and only loosely base it on that screenplay but mix it with Lorca’s life and death.

The original screenplay was pretty hardcore—like a lot of early surrealist films—and there were two rape scenes and a lot of killing of animals and it was just super aggressive. So I thought, “Oh, I could do the scenes that I liked in the screenplay and mix it with Lorca’s life experience with it entering my world of characters and chaos.”

JG

Because Lorca died in the Spanish Revolution, right?

MD

He did. He was killed by Franco’s nationalists. So he did this screenplay, Trip to the Moon, in 1929, when he lived in New York, in Harlem for a little bit. It must have been based on the old film by George Méliès [A Trip to the Moon], that imagery of the rocket and the eyeball. I put some of that in there, too. And his writing was also in response to Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s film, Un Chien Andalou. There’s a character in the film who wears a maid’s uniform and is supposed to be Lorca, and they’re making fun of him. And so this film that Lorca wrote was the reaction to Chien, where he basically kills the Dalí character in it, puts a blanket on top of him, and paints a mustache on it, Dalí style, and the characters have sex on top of him.

JG

And weren’t Lorca and Dalí lovers?

MD

They were lovers, and then Buñuel kind of came and took Dali away.

JZ

So there was some resentment.

JG

[Laughs.] There were some layers.

MD

And there was some other betrayal. I can’t remember what it was, but you know, they were all friends at the beginning, there was a big group of artists from this time who went to the same college in Madrid and ultimately formed the Generación del 27.

JZ

Were you a longtime reader of Lorca’s?

MD

Yeah, I read a lot of his poetry books early on, but I had never read his plays until recently.

JZ

I wonder in terms of the world of dance, do writers ever come into the process of choreography at all?

JG

I feel like dance—it kind of abolishes language in a way, when it’s good, you know?

MD

Yeah. Was it Afternoon of the Faun, that was based on a play of a poem by Stephan Mallarme?

JG

Yeah, and a lot is taken from the Ballet Russe, too. I really like how in a lot of your work, it feels like there’s so much dancing and movement, these figures and bodies moving in a way that feels very spiritual. For me that’s similar for the act of performance and the space you create, both for yourself, but also in that shared environment with the audience. There’s the recurring figure of the moon in your work, and then there are always these figures dancing and orbiting around the sun and the moon. I guess it makes me wonder, how spiritual do you find drawing? Are you a spiritual person?

MD

Definitely, I notice it as a zone where time disappears, and it definitely has that spiritual feeling or quality. And since the pandemic or earlier, it felt like things were getting so hopeless and depressing, but art was this nice escapism. Usually, my work is more cynical and darker. But when that was happening, I was trying to look for kindness and beauty and hope.

JG

Yeah, kind of the gestalt of nature and the solace it gives us.

MD

And we’d moved to Long Island for that period, so I was around nature much more. Also, my son wasn’t in school, so I just got to spend all this time with him. Which was really nice.

I bring him here to the studio, and he makes different things. He made some great masks and some of those drawings.

JZ

Joe and I were talking a little about these really strikingly violent moments, figures holding weapons, and motifs like that in your work. Do you find that there’s a certain headspace in which you generate that kind of work, or does it feel more like a reaction?

MD

It was weird, during that time in the pandemic, I did either these straight-on political works, or I just went with escapism. For the political works, often I read what was going on in the news that day, and I would draw the event that was bothering me and put some commentary on it, and it was like therapy.

JG

Yeah, that was very similar for me. Recently, I did the most intensely political ballet I’ve ever been in, called Solitude. It was dedicated to the children of Ukraine—Alexei Ratmansky was the choreographer. It felt intensely personal for me on a number of levels. But then I felt like I really experienced this ability of art to transmute and transcend that kind of pain and turn it into something else. I see something similar in your work, when you create these escapes and this childlike wonder, but also this intense personal and political commentary. Is there a real catharsis when you make that work? Or is that part of just processing the pain of the political crises we’re in?

MD

Yeah, it helped me a bit—it felt like, well, at least I have an outlet, and I would try to do something with that negative energy. It was such a bleak time.

JZ

It reminds me of one of the most profound moments for me in Solitude, which is just your stillness. You’re sitting up there not moving for a full ten minutes, and it’s right at the front of the stage. And the rest of the cast is dancing around you. You’re looking forward with your hands in your lap, and it’s really provocative and builds this massive tension.

JG

Yeah, that’s a piece that shows how much power there is in stillness.

JZ

I wonder how that comes into play, Marcel, with some of your more dioramic works, because there is so much movement, there’s a full world. But then how do you conceive of it in the beginning, I guess?

MD

Well, when I lived in Winnipeg, I made these very minimal drawings that had no background and just a few characters. And then when I came to New York, I started drawing a lot characters, very claustrophobic, and I wanted to put order to this chaos of characters. I found these little ballet magazines from the 1970s and ’80s at a stoop sale in Williamsburg.

JG

Yeah, they’re the best. They’re really fun.

MD

I was like, “Oh, all these poses are amazing.” So I started putting figures in these poses, and then I became obsessed with ballet from there on. I think Justin saw my show in 2014 or 2015? Then that year or the following year, he asked me to work on the sets and costumes of what became The Most Incredible Thing.

JG

Funny, I didn’t know—now I see it so clearly, the balletic influence, but I just assumed that that was maybe coming out of working with New York City Ballet. But this was actually much, much earlier. Hearing you speak about growing up in Canada, I wanted to circle back to these drawings that encompass nature. There seems to me to be an animist quality, and even sitting here with this work, it’s everywhere, these iterations of the spirit world. Everything has sort of a face on it. I’ve always felt so connected to those animist beliefs. I’m wondering if that’s something that you always felt was an influence?

MD

Yeah, and my wife is Ojibwe, and her grandma used to tell great old mythological tales. But before that, even, my grandparents had a farm with a forest near it, and I had that Wizard of Oz idea where the trees had faces [Laughs.] I kind of always had that idea in my head. To make faces out of the bark pattern. Winnipeg also has one of the largest Inuit art collections, which is really amazing to see, these simple figurative line drawings with a lot of humor. And they call back to mythological stories. I didn’t realize Winnipeg had such a great collection until university; I never went to a museum of art with my parents or on school field trips. But once I was a student, I got free access to museums.

JZ

Going to school in Canada, did you did you feel the urge to get to New York, to get out of Canada? How did that idea first come to you?

MZ

My wife Shelley was ready to move. Her family wasn’t in Winnipeg anymore, but mine was still there. And I also had that group, the Royal Art Lodge, which was starting to fall apart at that point. Winnipeg had this really cold winter that was maybe 50 below for a week and a half—so cold that the water mains were blowing up. Your eyeballs would freeze if you stayed out too long. And we had this pile of garbage and recycling that I didn’t bother taking out for so long because it was so incredibly cold. I thought, “I better take this out. It’s starting to smell.” I went outside and soon as I stepped outside onto the road, I slipped, and all of it came down on top of me, and broken glass from the recycling hit the solid ice road and I just came back in. Shelley was like, “Oh, you did that really fast!” And I was like, “No. I fell, let’s move.” [Laughs.] It even snowed in July that year. So the cold winters were a big part of the move, and then through different visits, we started to see New York as small villages, all connected. Before that, the city felt so big and crazy. Later, when her father was sick, Shelley’s parents moved to a town near Winnipeg, so we were going back there and visiting the last few years.

JG

Did it feel like there was an art scene in Winnipeg?

MD

There’s a small art scene, a handful of people. I was really lucky; this curator came to my thesis year university project, where I had a bunch of drawings on the wall. He was asked to do a show of Canadian artists in LA. And he saw this work and asked me to be in the show. And so I was in a group show in LA—all the work sold, and I got a great review of my work in the Los Angeles Times, so then the gallery showing the work asked me to show with them. That led into art as a career.

JZ

Had you thought about it as a career before then?

MD

I thought I’d have to be probably a teacher and then have it just on the side, or an illustrator, or something like that.

JZ

Joe, are you dancing in a project right now?

JG

I just finished a season, and then it starts up again in April. It sort of felt like a breakthrough season, which was cool. And Solitude, the piece that Alexei made, was just really special. I’ll be dancing in some pieces I’m excited about in the spring season.

JZ

Will there be new pieces?

JG

Pretty much all new, because NYCB is in their 75th year. Usually, they’ll bring back some older pieces, and this isn’t entirely new work, but we don’t dance in the same pieces as we did this winter. There’s a Jerome Robbins piece called Other Dances that I’ve always wanted to do that was originally made on Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova, which is beautiful.

JZ

Marcel, how do you feel about Jerome Robbins and George Balanchine, and some of the choreography at the New York City Ballet, now that you’ve done some work with Justin?

MD

I didn’t know too much about them until I came across those dance magazines from the ’70s, and I saw how much they mentioned Balanchine and Ballet Russe. I only knew a little bit about ballet from a friend of mine, this filmmaker from Winnipeg named Guy Maddin. He did a version of Dracula with the Winnipeg Ballet. So I’d seen his work, and that was about all I knew.

JG

It’s funny, I’m thinking about your roots in punk and your aesthetic—even though it’s very wondrous and has that childlike imaginative element, there is also this punk energy. I think about Balanchine, whose was sort of the punk of the ballet in his era. He took the classical form and thought, why don’t we try turning in and thrusting our hips—making it sexy in a new way. A little off kilter, which just feels very punk to me in its essence.

JZ

And he really had such a long and successful, prolific career of his own, where he could discover and explore.

JG

He had such an extensive foundation. And the classical vocabulary—he couldn’t have been more classically trained. It’s that thing: you have to master the form to disrupt it.

JZ

For you, Marcel, what do you feel is the definition of a punk sensibility, or how does that resonate with you?

MD

I just felt that freedom to do it yourself, even if it’s sloppy and messy, as long as it’s authentic. And it’s also backed up by a more left-leaning political view.

JZ

And then you’ve gotten a different angle into the music world with album covers for Beck and a bunch of others, can you speak a little about that?

MD

Yeah, I did one for They Might Be Giants, and one for this new band called Shame, and for Will Butler’s new band. I’m forgetting some, but those are the first ones that come to mind right now. The cover for Beck was exciting; it was in the time when people still bought CDs.

JZ

Are you still in touch with him?

MD

We talk on Instagram. [Laughs.] He sent me images of some old drawings that I had done for a storyboard for his album. I’d forgotten about them. That’s how we started to communicate. I was asked to do a music video for him, and I did this whole big layout and storyboard. They said, “That’s a really big budget, we don’t know about that.” This was before YouTube and MTV wasn’t playing music videos anymore, but then they said, “Oh, we really like these drawings. Can we use one for the album cover that he’s working on now?” I said, “Sure. But could I make some new drawings specially for that?” And they ended up using a lot of storyboards for the inside material of the album and a few singles as well.

JG

You’ve done a little bit of animation, right?

MD

Yeah, really simple animations for Spike and Where the Wild Things Are, and then I did something for Arcade Fire where they were advertising a bunch of shows at Madison Square Garden. I did a short animation for the first film I worked on, which was the worst kind to do—that flipbook style. Whereas the other ones, I drew almost everything and then some moving parts and then I got someone to put it together on a computer. The flipbook—that’s why I never did animation, because that was just this dancing bear who turns into a tree, and even that took a couple of months or something. Drawing every single still. I had just watched My Neighbor Totoro for the first time, and I was asked to do Artforum’s Top Ten and I put it on there.

JZ

Do you remember what else was on that list?

MD

There was this writer, David Berman, who just died. He had written this book Actual Air, and he was in a band called Silver Jews that I was a big fan of. I named my latest show Wild Kindness after a song that he wrote, and that Willem sang a version of. I included this comedian Gregg Turkington, who went by the stage name of Neil Hamburger, who was really funny.

JZ

How did you come across the Arcade Fire folks initially?

MD

Through Dave Eggers, actually. They had done something for McSweeney’s, for the Music Issue, and I did some drawings for the issue. And then Spike had the opening for Where the Wild Things Are here in New York, and they were there because when they did the trailer for the film, it used one of Arcade Fire’s songs. And then just being Canadian, really. [Laughs.] They asked to collaborate on some things that never happened, like a video and an album cover. And then Spike did a short film for them called The Suburbs, and I did the costume design on that. And acted in it. I get shot in the forehead by some military police. I think they put it out on DVD. It’s probably on YouTube now. I met Spike through Dave Eggers, also; they were writing Where the Wild Things Are together. Spike had bought a bunch of my drawings and was telling Dave he liked my work. Dave said, “Oh, I know him. If you want more, you can probably trade with him.” So Spike wrote to me, like, hey, you want to trade photos for drawing? [Laughs.] I got these really cool photos of Catherine Keener on the set of Being John Malkovich. My first date with Shelley, we went to see Being John Malkovich. So that was 1999, and Spike and I met each other for the first time in person at Maurice Sendak’s show at the Jewish Museum when we moved here in 2004. And we just hit it off.

JZ

The way you practice feels truly multidisciplinary. You’re pursuing so many different threads in so many different forms—is that something that you are consciously thinking about? Or is that just what comes naturally?

MD

It kind of comes naturally. Right now, I’m quite bored of drawing since I had to cram for the last two months. So I would probably be into doing a film again. But when I got off the last film project, I was so tired of doing film. So basically, I get tired out and I need to switch mediums.

JZ

Is there a form that you’re curious about that you haven’t touched?

MD

I was writing a children’s book for a little while, after I finished the ballet. Justin and I were talking about doing a kid’s ballet, and I had written this short story about these children who get turned into a moth by this wizard when they’re picking in his garden. And then I just forgot about it, I think.

JG

When I look at a lot of your work, it reminds me of the illustrations in The Little Prince. I see some of those fairytale, Hans Christian Andersen qualities in your work. Especially in the ways that fairytales play with a child’s imagination and then also with these darker themes that are teaching us about the harder aspects of life. I could see that being a really cool marriage with your work.

MD

Yeah, I thought I would do a children’s book, and then Willem got too old. [Laughs.] That’s what’s hard. I took too long. It was actually the career I was going to go for—if I couldn’t be an artist, because I didn’t know any artists in Winnipeg who weren’t professors, I would have been an illustrator. Or teach younger kids, if that hadn’t panned out, and then just have lots of free time. Because the art teachers that I had were all artists. Canada has a good grant program, or at least they used to in the ’90s.

JG

Did you ever imagine you would have this kind of career blossom from drawing into so many different parts of the world?

MD

I couldn’t even imagine having, like, one show of my actual work outside of Winnipeg when I started. [Laughs.]

JZ

Is there maybe one especially political piece that you’ve done?

MD

The one that got a lot of attention was a drawing I did on top of the New York Times. There was a list of the people who’d died from COVID, and Trump went golfing that day, so I just painted Trump golfing on top of this list and posted it the same day. That post blew up. And then CNN wanted to do interviews, and a lot of crazy platforms and Trumpers were really mad about it. It’s funny, the New York City Ballet initially asked if I could start an Instagram to promote this collaboration. I thought, I don’t want to do Instagram, but then I fell into it, because there are so many shows I don’t get to see in person, and it’s so nice to see what’s going on in other parts of the world. Before that I was very anti-social media.

JG

Yeah, you’re definitely talking to two to curmudgeons here who feel the same. [Laughs.] And of course I see how visual art can translate well in that framework, but dance, to me—it always felt a little bit like social media sort of defiles the form, flattens it. Do you ever compose on anything other than paper when you’re drawing?

MD

Always on paper, even if I’m supposed to do it on something else. I’ll do it on paper first, and then translate it. I think I’m the last of a generation that remembers the time before computers.

JZ

I love these archetypes that show up in your work, the mythic quality of them, and then watching how they’re juxtaposed with political elements. How do these specific figures and animals occur or recur for you?

MD

I’ve been drawing certain ones since the beginning. A lot of them have weird childhood resonances. The bear—I was just in the woods with my cousins, and these two black bears were walking towards us. I’d seen them at the garbage dumps before, but I never saw them in the woods. We were young, probably eight or so. And then the bats are kind of funny because my friend and I—our school expanded quickly and they took all these trailers and started making those part of the school, and then they got this meshing so the kids wouldn’t go underneath these structures. My friend and I started tearing the meshing off, and then bats came flying out—probably one two, but I thought it was much more. So that definitely stuck. Especially since I was also raised on reruns of the 1960s Batman. [Laughs.]