Canadian Club

Drawings collection of the Royal Art College

The Royal Art Lodge may be a "self-serving secret society," as one member put it, but whatever secrets they hold are currently all over Los Angeles, on display at three concurrent shows.

If you want to get a better sense of what the Royal Art Lodge does, imagine Salinger’s Glass family as a kind of ad hoc commune holed up in a decrepit building in Winnipeg, partying indiscriminately with lotus root, armed with many sharp drawing utensils, guitars and video cameras and abiding by no curfew. Their images are of pirate ships setting sail for hospital islands, flapper women mingling with tree-headed people, femme fatales frolicking hand in hand with skeletons, boys with heart-shaped torsos, octopi cuddling with cute girls or holding multiple lamps over computers, lone penguins stranded atop mountains gazing up toward the heavens. Bare-bones text frequently further develops and often subverts what appears to have been the obvious and/or initial intent of the imagery.

What makes the RAL so good is that the cleverness exists within an ostensibly simple context; sometimes even the words will be oddly redundant to the pictures. Somehow the obvious text of Animal Diets brilliantly finishes a drawing of an eclectic array of animals ambling past a row of food-filled bowls.

The RAL consists of eight young Canadian artists — Michael Dumontier, siblings Hollie and Marcel Dzama, Neil Farber, brothers Drue and Myles Langlois, Jonathan Pylypchuk and Adrian Williams — who began Wednesday-night collaborations back in 1996. Since then, the RAL has produced a formidable body of predominantly surreal figurative work, much of which is currently on display at MOCA’s oft-overlooked Pacific Design Center satellite.

I’m told the RAL sessions typically commence between 6 and 8 p.m. and often continue on into the early hours of the morning. Says Marcel Dzama of RAL’s organic collaborative process, "Working with the RAL has allowed me a certain freedom in that there is no authorship to any of our work. We just date stamp the front and do not sign. Even if someone doesn’t contribute to a drawing, there would be no way to tell."

Usually one artist will start a drawing, throw it in a pile, and then others contribute, amend, appropriate, thus embarking on an ongoing dialogue until either a work reveals itself or is appropriately disposed of. "At the beginning of a meeting, I generally like to start drawings or paintings and then later on when my mind is working better I switch to finishing them," says Farber. "For me, there’s definitely more satisfaction in finishing. The works develop in a lot of different ways, but usually it is a lot easier to start a work than to finish one."

At the end of each session, the pieces are sorted into a set of suitcases that denote ranking and prospects. As the public has become more aware of the RAL and their work has begun popping up in galleries around the world, the editing process has become more rigorous. Says Farber, "I think we have a more carefully thought-out approach these days. When we make embarrassing work these days, we hang it in our Social Emotional Gallery, which is a small piece of wall over by the costume chest."

One of the people very much responsible for blowing the lid off the RAL is the curator Wayne Baerwaldt, who co-curated the Pacific Design Center show along with Joseph R. Wolin. Speaking recently at MOCA–PDC about the RAL, Baerwaldt admitted that his initial support was not entirely without reservation: "I was very concerned about the ‘cuteness’ factor of the work of the RAL, and I always assumed that they would sort of outgrow that and go in another direction. But, in fact, they went even more in that direction, but in a way that was ultimately entirely convincing, due at least in part to the fact that there was this kind of incredible subversion going on."

After first appearing in 2003 at the Drawing Center in New York, the RAL has been traveling continuously. None of the pieces on tour date further back than 2002. The primary expression of the RAL has always been drawing (with elements of collage, too), although all RAL members work and collaborate in various other media, including music and video and crafts such as costume, kite and doll making.

Since the group’s inception, several RAL artists have begun enjoying individual success and are now showing internationally in solo exhibitions, including Pylypchuk, Farber and Marcel Dzama. Dzama, who so far has attained the most individual acclaim, has recently relocated to New York with his wife, Shelley Dick, but he doesn’t plan to let the move tamper with his RAL membership. "I love Winnipeg and plan to visit there a lot," he says. "I still share a studio with the RAL and will send unfinished drawings in the mail for them to collaborate with." Below the 48th parallel, it was L.A. gallerist Richard Heller who first discovered Dzama: "I did a group show with Wayne Baerwaldt in 1997 and although Marcel was almost like an outside choice, he ended up the hit of the show. We sold his drawings for 40 dollars, although initially he was like, ‘They’re five dollars so can we charge 10 so I can still make my five?’"