Upon entering the David Zwirner Gallery containing the Marcel Dzama exhibition, Une Danse des Bouffons, I was immediately drawn to one area. The gallery has standard white walls containing several pieces of art, but what stood out to me was a curious entryway with no indication of what it led to. It is guarded by mysterious beasts and covered by a bland curtain.
This entrance caught my eye because of the strange looking faces on the beasts, as well as the large vase acting as a sentry to the portal behind the drape. What are they guarding? The beasts and the vase are each holding an assortment of dark flowers. For some reason this is where my attention kept returning, even though it may not have been a piece that was for sale, it did seem like a focal point in the room. Each time I look at the picture of the beasts, their glaring eyes unsettle my brain and are almost hypnotic. The vase with its two sets of staring eyes appears to be keeping watch.
The blue flowers are and obnoxious addition to the piece, adding a sense of uniqueness to this installment. Dzama has two installments of this piece that are identical except for the color filter he uses, red and blue. In this case the blue represents good, rebirth, and lost love, in which the beasts and the vase appear to be protecting. These of which can be related to the film.
Before walking into the David Zwirner’s gallery today to see Jason Rhoades’s PeaRoeFoam, I attempted to mentally prepare myself to see art that would inevitably make me question: this is art? Yet even after hyping myself up, looking at the seemingly messy array of foam, glue, disks, yellow boots, chairs, peas and frankly things that just looked like garbage, I still could not help but think, “this is art?”
I have always thought the most important thing about art is the statement that the artist is trying to make. So, after Professor Eversaly explained an amazing point of view of the art, everything really came together for me.
This art was dada; it was meant to make me feel dumb. These sculptures are a thoughtful disarray of garbage, and they are being sold. If I think its crazy that one would spend money on the art being displayed, then actually, I am really getting the whole point. We purchase meaningless products all the time! Moreover, we are happy to spend a ridiculous amount of money on those products too! Jewelry is a prime example. What is a diamond? It’s a rare rock. Though its obvious to everyone that we are clearly not really paying for the rock, rather we are paying for the status and the meaning of a diamond, maybe regardless that purchase is still a little ridiculous! The dada was telling us we should feel dumb for wasting our money on meaningless things- on garbage.
I think Rhoades makes a valuable, and usually glossed over point. People do not generally consider this because nobody wants to admit that the shopping and purchases they love, are also a bit ridiculous.
In addition, I love the way the artist chose to make this statement. After understanding the backdrop, the “stuff” really does come together as art. It shouts in your face, “you think its absurd that someone would pay for garbage? Well you do it all the time.”
However, when watching the film of the art being created, something began to bother me. I watched the artists work with the tremendous amounts of supplies and having already been put in a “money” mindset, I could not help see all their supplies as a (for lack of a better expression) “waste of money!” I thought to myself, “wow, that much glue is probably expensive, look at them just pouring it everywhere!”
Thus, though I appreciate the message the artist was sending I am left a bit perplexed. If it is such a bad thing to throw away money then I wonder, was buying all that supplies the absolute most meaningful way for that money to be spent? Was there truly nothing more worthwhile to give this money to?
I was left with a new question: Wouldn’t it be ironic if the art making the statement “you waste your money” was a waste of money in and of itself?
Hours after watching Marcel Dzama’s Un Danse des Boufoons at the Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea, it still resonated with me. Sitting on a foam cube watching this peculiar (to say the least), 35-minute video projection made me question myself, what I knew, and even my surroundings. I personally did not like the video, and could not wait to get out once it was over.
Marcel Dzama is a Canadian-born artist, who has had his work represented by David Zwirner since 1998. His art is held in museum collections worldwide. As for the video itself, it is described as a “Dadaist love story”. It depicts a fictionalized account of the romantic affair between a man and woman. There are constant themes of good versus evil, death and rebirth, love gained and love lost, and very obvious tension.
It seems as though Dzama is well known and his work is held in high esteem. However, after walking through the curtains to exit the dark room, I found myself feeling oddly uncomfortable. I then realized: I did not like the video at all.
Throughout the video, there was music playing. At some points, the music was very high pitched and dissonant; I would have felt awkward listening to that without the peculiar images in front of me.
Very few characters were just regular people. Many wore masks, or even costumes, that made them seem foreign (but at the same time human and familiar). This familiarity in something so confusing and foreign is part of what rubbed me the wrong way. It was the line of characters wearing costumes that troubled me, as well. They applauded, and had mannerisms unlike many people do.
Just as I thought the video could not get weirder, in trots a human cow. It was majestic in its movement, but at the same time did not resemble a cow in the slightest besides its unconvincing plastic head. A particular character that stuck with me was the one wearing the flippable mask that went form happy to sad. This made me think about human emotions, and what they show about a person.
One of the only characters that did not have a mask, was a man with eyes painted on his face. He wore make-up and had an oddly shaped smile that reminded me somewhat of The Joker. Regardless, this character was equally as creepy as the rest.
As the movie concluded, the oddest thing of all occurred. This reborn man-cow opens its cloak to reveal an enormous vagina on its chest. Out comes one of the characters from earlier in the video. What disturbed me most about this, was that a full grown man was being born. Not only that, but this man was coming out of the birth canal fully clothed with facial hair.
Basically, everything was wrong about “Une Danse des Bouffons.” Nothing made complete sense, and there was no time during the video in which I felt content about what was happening. The short film kept me on my toes, and didn’t allow me to relax and guess what was coming next.
It was this combination of the atmosphere with the video in itself that made me feel very uneasy. The purpose of the video was to make me question traditional beliefs, and to make me feel as though there were things I did not know (or even that things I did know were just wrong); it definitely succeeded in doing just that.
For further reading, you can go to the press review here
All pictures were taken from a preview of the video here
In some regions of Ghana, it is typical for coffins to be shaped and styled to make a personal statement about the traits and interests of the deceased. However, I was unaware of this fact when I first came across this coffin during our night at the Brooklyn Museum. I simply saw it as this extremely small coffin in the shape of a Nike sneaker.
I became especially confused when finding out that this piece of art was in the Arts of Africa collection. As a result, when I first came across it, I tended to focus more on the aesthetic traits of the piece. I was immediately captivated by the amount of detail put into this object made out of wood, metal, and pigment. Perhaps the only two things separating this coffin from an actual shoe from Nike was the size of the coffin and the actual texture of the piece, which seemed to look more like plaster.
The piece caught my eye not necessarily because it was large but because it was not large enough. The coffin seemed to be less than four feet long and three feet wide (and definitely had less space than that inside of it). That pretty much indicated that this coffin probably was not intended to actually serve its original purpose but be more of a piece of art.
In terms of what the coffin itself represented, the sculptor, Paa Joe, said that it stands as a symbol of status and modernity in the late twentieth century. According to Ghanian beliefs, the coffin represents an object of interest to the deceased so that it can serve as comfort for the deceased to pass on to the next world. However, for me, the coffin is more of an aesthetically pleasing piece rather than an object that serves as a bridge to the next world.
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