Dali House

Right down to his little goatee, Mark Ryden has stepped from an Old Dutch painting. From there it was apparently a stumble through Haight-Ashbury (a “trip”, I think they used to call it) and far, far too many hours in the museum of natural history with the fox skulls and the stuffed opossum.

We welcome almost anyone at Dali House, so open are our minds, but Mark Ryden, who we’ve given The Room at the End of the Hall for now, wants keeping an eye on, and not necessarily because he’s destined for great things, if you catch our drift.

He wasn’t born until 1963, so chances are his parents took care of all the love-groovy things while he was still growing up in Southern California. They obviously gave their kids some great books to read, though, as hippie parents always did.

Another bizarro act championed by Juxtapoz Magazine, like Banksy of the booming brick wall, Ryden is in a whole ‘nother universe, a “parallel universe”, as folks are wont to say about him. There are messages in his paintings, yes, and definitely a neck-twisting rush, but as for getting a headlock on the attention span, it’s all a little … too … cute.

Cute?!

“Cute”, for example, in the sense that it comes as absolutely no surprise that his fan club includes Stephen King and Danny Elfman. Elfman is by far the more creative of those two, but he’s no better than King in his efforts to climb out of his derivative, gimme-gimme, post-adolescent eclecticism. There is (thus far and don’t hold your breath) no breakthrough into the pure creativity of self-expression. It’s all recycling.

Kids of this generation, and Dali House’s proprietor is in there too, have never been able to get enough of Lewis Carroll and the 1,001 Nights, Frankenstein and the Wolfman, Heironymus Bosch and the Headless Horseman. We’re constantly transplanting all that fun stuff into our mundane reality, if not by beheading Barbie dolls then by deep-frying Colonel Sanders.

That said, our sources are impeccable, and Ryden is very clever at transcribing them. Some of the images reproduced here, by the way, are only segments of larger works, because that’s all you can copy from his overly self-important website. (He should see Banksy’s website if he wants to infuse more impact.) Ryden.com is well worth a visit, though.

It’s great how he evokes the 16th-century Dutch fad for wunderkammen – wonder chambers – which were private collections of natural curiosities like seashells, fossils and stuffed animals. These collections were sometimes put on public display as wondertoneel,or “wondrous theatre”, the forerunners of the modern museum.

Ryden’s studio in a Pasadena “castle” is evidently a wunderkammen, too, chock full of “trinkets, statues, skeletons, saints and old toys”. He loves medical and natural-history museums, of course, and even mentions the ghoulish little university curiosity shop in Bangkok that’s full of foetuses in formaldehyde and other bits of bodies. He doesn’t give the name, but this is the 80-year-old Congdon Anatomical Museum at Siriraj Hospital.

But clearly he finds his best ideas in the museum of the memory, and specifically his childhood memories.

“It is only in childhood that contemporary society truly allows for imagination,” he writes at his website. “Children can see a world ensouled, where bunnies weep and bees have secrets, where ‘inanimate’ objects are alive. Many people think that childhood’s world of imagination is silly, unworthy of serious consideration, something to be outgrown … Human beings used to connect to life through mystery and mythology. Now this kind of thinking is regarded as primitive or naive. Without it, we cut ourselves off from the life force, the world soul, and we are empty and starving.”

Serious stuff from a guy who never grew up.

He enjoys the night, as well.

“Daytime is for sleeping. Nighttime is the best time for making art … A few years ago while working very late one night, the distinct smell of walnuts in the air broke my concentration. It was very quiet. A strange breeze gently blew through my studio. I suddenly became aware of something on my shoulder. Surprisingly, I was not startled to find a wee Abraham Lincoln sitting right there on my shoulder. We looked at each other for just a moment. Then he very softly whispered in my ear ‘paint meat’.”

So, Honestly Able Lincoln as mentor and meat, meat, meat, all cuts. A vegan, right? Lincoln emancipating the henhouse? Not at all.

“Just like T-Rex, I myself am a passionate meat-eater. I feel that the consumption of animal flesh is a natural primal instinct just like sex and making paintings. But there is that paradox of knowing how that scrumptious porterhouse made it to my dinner plate. We have lost any kind of reverence for this.”

Ryden mentions the German court ruling a few years back that it was okay for an artist, namely Wolfgang Flatz, to drop a dead cow out of a helicopter because the cow, being dead, was legally mere food. And he notes the Catholic rite of transubstantiation during communion – bread becoming the Christ’s body – without actually using the word “cannibalism”. (A heads-up, by the way, quite literally: Wolfgang Flatz will be visiting Dali House soon.)

It all makes for pretty interesting viewing and reading but, bottom line, like so much art produced by post-’60s artists, we’ve seen it all before.

Mark Ryden checklists

Catchphrases: disturbing beauty, cultural connotation, dewy vixens, cuddly plush pets, primordial landscapes, slabs of meat, childlike honesty

Influences: Neon Park (right), Ernst Fuchs (below), Joseph Campbell, Ingres, David, PT Barnum, Ray Harryhausen, old photographs of strange people, Bosch, Bruegel, Italian and Spanish religious painting, children’s books about space and science, medical illustrations, Sinatra and Debussy, Jung and Freud, Ren and Stimpy …

yes …

Then there’s Nostradamus, alchemy, Freemasonry, Buddhism (!?), surrealism and, what do you know, our good chum Bouguereau.