FOREWORD RAYMOND PETTIBON
Marcel Dzama, like William Blake, works in the netherworld that lies between illustration and illumination. Both have the nerve, with their steely outlines, to illustrate or represent the “Word” and the world (whether passed down from Dante or God), beginning in the light of day and drawing into the night. “Sowers of Discord” is a quote taken from Dante, an author whose work is a challenge, even a rite of passage, to any illustrator who would make a name for himself. Let’s stick with the title. Dante enters the gates of Hell to the tune of “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” A more fitting line for Dzama’s exploration—and his is one that does not skirt the political—is another quote from Dante: “The darkest places in Hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.” Marcel’s muse? Like Marcel Duchamp—a primary influence on Dzama— Dante’s was also Beatrice. Dante did or didn’t find his Beatrice? His contacts with her, brief as wispy visions from afar and nine years apart, are enough to confound the poet and generate a muse and inspiration; but he does not return the glance in his opus. Dante’s Beatrice, like Petrarch’s Laura, is made up of words, and not so much descriptive ones; they are, like Laura of song and screen, “only a dream.” But unlike that Laura, whom Vincent Price murdered (and as so often is the case, collected), and for whom Johnny Mercer wrote the words while David Raksin filled out the background, and Otto Preminger directed the hell out of—the poor girl— there is a portrait, painted by some hack or unknown, and played by Gene Tierney. Does illustration diminish the written word? We’ve seen the blond, long-haired hippie Jesus’s mug and ministrations so often depicted in everything from the old masters to classics illustrated that only obfuscate the real and the imaginary alike. I sympathize with the Muslims, who resist vulgar caricatures of their spiritual master. I’m at a loss here myself. In a jam I’d reach for my brush as a hood reaches for his shiv. There is something about it that I cannot put down in words. And I’d like to finish as much as anyone else would like to finish: Ink spilt and walking away from the scene. But it draws us in like accomplices or walk-ons held tight in the spotlights, or crosshatches. The elegance and pageantry of the “big picture” that Dzama depicts is ultimately too big in scope and narrative sweep to be held in place by the confining frame. More than anything the book of Dzama, in part or in whole, reminds me of the Bayeux Tapestry, a work that John Ruskin (for whom everything illustrated something) was enamored of and Charles Dickens—whose despicable treatment of his own illustrators is noted here—despised. Much more can be written on Dzama’s work, and will be—but the work itself gives even so much more with each attentive reading.
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