Issue 03
THE ROYAL ART LODGE
By Caleb NeelonPhotos By Two Tall Jamal
Message to young artists: rent some big space with your friends, and give it and your new crew a name. It’s an important lesson, especially for young people living outside the big cities, and it’s a lesson best acted upon sooner rather than later.
The Royal Art Lodge emerged from Winnipeg, Canada in the late 1990s. They formed in 1996 as undergraduate art students at the University of Manitoba, sharing a large studio clubhouse in Winnipeg’s Exchange district and promptly stuffing it full of their favorite artwork and musical instruments. Since then, the group’s membership has included Michael Dumontier, Neil Farber, siblings Hollie and Marcel Dzama, brothers Drue and Myles Langlois, Jonathan Pylypchuk, and Adrian Williams. Together, they have paired their friendship with group and individual art projects and have met with a great deal of success. The Royal Art Lodge approach bears similarities to at least two other groups that emerged in the same late 1990s time span. The sadly defunct Providence-based Fort Thunder collective-studio-quasi-nightclub threw the weirdest robot-boxing-indie-death-metal-bicycle parties that I ever attended in my undergraduate life, and rode them to the Whitney Biennial. Inspired by Fort Thunder, Philadelphia’s very much alive Space 1026 surges with a developing reputation as a launching pad, both for the artists who work in the 1026 studios and those who come from out of town to show at their newly-renovated gallery. Most inspirational of all for the blessed contingent of young artists who don’t choose to flock to Los Angeles, Brooklyn, or the Bay Area to seek their fortunes, these clubhouse-based groups show that it is possible to make it happen in cities such as Philadelphia, Providence, or—even more unthinkable—Winnipeg.
Dumontier describes Winnipeg as a city of “600,000 people, and being very hot in the summer and very cold in the winter.” The Royal Art Lodge’s formation was originally an organized way to be social in the climactic extremes. With below-zero temperatures common in the winter, it was important to make plans to stay social and sane. The group began Wednesday night collaborative sessions in 1996, starting in the early evenings and going late. Dumontier recalls, “We never had a clear goal. We admired each other’s work and we had a lot in common, so we decided to try to work on something together. It was private and social. We didn’t intend to show people what we were doing.” According to Farber, making art wasn’t their primary focus at first. “My thought was that we should form a group and meet once a week. I imagined it more like a regular lodge. Someone would take minutes and we would think up weird fundraising projects or maybe just play poker. I guess I wasn’t sure what we would do. I didn’t expect that we would make so much art together, but that quickly became the most fun.”
The Royal Art Lodge members would hole up in their Winnipeg studio clubhouse and work on collaborative drawings and artwork. The hundreds of drawings that resulted were the work of the Royal Art Lodge, regardless of whose hands were involved; rather than being signed with names, they were rubber-stamped with the date of their completion. As Dumontier puts it, one of the best things about making art with the Lodge was the opportunity to “be anonymous within a finished work.”
Not every drawing is ever a winner, of course, and so the Royal Art Lodge developed an editing and storage process comprised of four suitcases. The best drawings went into the suitcase with a radiating sun on it; the second best into one with a heart. The losers of the bunch headed to a suitcase with a sad rain cloud, and the real terrors went to what they called their “social emotional gallery,” a suitcase marked with a skull and bones, reserved for work so bad that it must be destroyed. Never limiting themselves to the graphic realm, the group was also involved in music. “Early on, around 1996 or ‘97, we formed a group called No Pirates, which would record music in the painting studio at the university,” Dumontier recollects. “The building was infested with mice and they would be in the room with us while we made songs. I have good memories of that.”
After several members had graduated from the University of Manitoba, the group began to look for places interested in showing their work. Some members of the Lodge had previously shown in galleries, but the group aspect quickly took off, as Farber explains. “When we started the group, we would send drawings to galleries as a way of building up a stack of rejection letters. Beyond that, we’ve been lucky enough to be approached by galleries.”
The Royal Art Lodge recently filled the two stories of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art with an overview of their work, spanning from their early collaborative sessions in 1996 to the present, including an entire wall filled with the best of their small drawings over this time period, arranged chronologically. Filled with a sense of fantasy and macabre, the wall generated an impression of the nuanced mutual world of imagination that the group shares. The rest of the work on display belonged to individual group members, ranging from drawings to videos, music, felt animals, paintings, and small shrines. The most individually successful member of the Lodge, Marcel Dzama, displayed a selection of small drawings in his signature palette of greens, reds, and a distinctive brown, made from root beer concentrate that he got from his grandfather. Looking back and forth between the individual and group works, what seemed especially compelling was how the refined personal styles melted together into a style in which no particular set of hands was even identifiable.
While the Royal Art Lodge initially referred to itself as a “self-serving secret society” in which “no one gets in and no one gets out,” their ranks have thinned a bit over time. Adrian Williams and Jonathan Pylypchuk left Winnipeg early on, with Pylypchuk leaving to get an MFA at UCLA. Currently, the group numbers just three: Marcel Dzama, Dumontier, and Farber. “The group has changed a number of times, most notably as people leave,” Farber explains. “Right now, there are only three of us, and Marcel has recently moved to New York, so the amount of things we can do is becoming less. We usually just focus on making work for shows now, and we are starting to have to turn some things down. What has always been hard with the group is trying to keep things organized, which is actually a bit easier now that there are only a few of us. Michael and I answer the e-mails generally, and he pays the rent. We often will clean together. Michael and Marcel have done a better job of documentation than I have, and since we started making little paintings, Michael has kept scans of most of them.” For Dumontier, their friendship has sometimes been the hardest part. “The hardest things are making decisions and having people leave. We are polite and we don’t like to disagree.” Spoken like a true Canadian.