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| A tortured artist casts off his demons |
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Apr. 24, 2004. 01:00 AM By PETER GODDARD In the film Drawing Out The Demons, showing at the Hot Docs festival next Friday, things go really wrong for Attila Richard Lukacs, the documentary's subject, when a husky hired guy freaks out over something that he's been told to move out of the Canadian artist's New York studio. "There is no way, no way, I'm touching it," the guy says as the camera is rolling. "No, no, no, no, no." Make that things go really wrong because of Attila Richard Lukacs. But by now this might have been expected. As the spectacularly talented kid from Calgary, who became an internationally known art rascal, collected by the likes of Elton John, he's played out his life as a sort of anti-Peter Pan, finding his Never Never Land in Berlin in the late '80s. Neo-Nazi skinheads played the role of the Lost Boys both in the artist's life and in his spectacular paintings. He's always worn his "bad boy of Canadian art" tag as if it were a primo Boy Scout badge for advanced paddling. The art mover sort of understands this. Sweating in his Junior Seau San Diego Chargers sweater, the guy has already moved out a truck's worth of Lukacs's vast canvases, their surfaces roiling in neo-Nazi imagery, full of posey images of bare-bottom, penis-waggling, snickering skinhead punks. These great paintings, grand and rough like ancient frescoes, are no picnic for first-timers to Lukacs's world, with their garlands of swastikas, blotches of what looks like spit, semen and blood, patches of gold leaf for God's sake, and who knows what else if you only looked close enough. And the mover has looked close enough. Besides, Lukacs at this very moment in the film is putting on the floorshow from hell — think of Cabaret, only with Dennis Hopper playing the emcee. Emaciated, his eyeballs about to pop out of their sockets, Lukacs looks like the poster warning boy for abusers of crystal meth, his drug of choice during the period in 2001 when this section of the documentary was being shot. He's bitchy with a departing boyfriend. He's trying to keep his mom Helen happy. He's trying to make nice for the camera, too. But the boyfriend splits. Mom starts losing it. Lukacs starts losing it. Then it's the mover's turn. Maybe all of this could be accepted in the grand scheme of things, as just another whacked-out artist having a very bad day. But it gets worse. Lukacs finds a way to push exactly the wrong button. In one final patience-snapping, deal-breaking coup de grace, he declares that everything he has in his sprawling, messy studio, and not just the paintings, must be considered artwork. And that includes the very thing the mover won't touch — a stuffed but still nasty-looking German shepherd. "No, no, no, no," yells the mover, flinching at the sight of the ratty-looking carcass. He's not touching that dead dog. David Vaisbord, director of Drawing Out The Demons, has a thing for rough characters up against formidable odds. His first documentary, Mischa in 1996, was about the tragic life of his violin-playing uncle, Mischa Weisbord. Juicy Danger Meets Burning Man, in 1997, dealt with death-defying performers who love extreme cabaret. Britannia Beach (2002) looked unflinchingly at a tiny British Columbia town rotting away due to some of the worst pollution on the planet. Dealing with Lukacs started out as a catastrophe on an entirely different scale. "When I walked into Attila's New York studio in 2001," Vaisbord says — he'd first approached the artist in Vancouver two years earlier — "I knew I might have two films. But I knew one would end after I walked out of that studio. My leaving would be the end of the story. The next thing I'd be doing would be attending his funeral." For a good part of Drawing Out The Demons, it would seem we're watching the artist attend his own funeral. So when the film arrives at Lukacs's transfiguration instead of his death, we also get what could pass for a happy ending for the artist if not for his several dealers ditched along the way. Having quit New York and its multiple intoxicants in 2001, the artist, now in his early 40s, emerges looking the perfect picture of health after many therapeutic months painting, beachcombing and boy-watching in Maui, Hawaii. There's even promise of a family reunion as his father, Joseph — Attila's life-long financial support and one of his leading collectors throughout his career — announces on camera that he's about to build his son a wonderful new studio out on the family's hobby ranch near Calgary. "A new beginning" could be the subtitle here. The documentary closes with the painter showing work in Vancouver last year after a long absence. The first show was at Belkin Satellite gallery, exhibiting his new, life-affirming, colour-drenched "stained glass" paintings, which, we are informed, reveal that he's gone back to drawing again. "The Basement Show," which opened last fall, was held in a sub-sub-basement of the B.C. Hydro Building in Vancouver. It reunited Lukacs with his pals in the "Young Romantics" brat pack of '80s B.C. art — Graham Gillmore, Angela Grossmann and Derek Root, along with Douglas Coupland as the "fifth" Romantic — all cultivated early by Diane Farris for her "Futura Bold" show at her then-new Gastown gallery. All this combines to make the "second" film Vaisbord was talking about, a familiar one in Canadian filmmaking terms, upbeat with redemption, hope and a patch of land to call your own — Attila of Green Gables. But there's still another movie here, which keeps making its presence felt. It's not about sex but about the other great theme in Lukacs's life and work: success. Right out of Vancouver's Emily Carr College of Art and Design in 1985, he aimed for the big leagues. You can see it in his paintings, which are, after all, about society, albeit one that's rejected. He headed to Berlin, where his early reputation was established by 1990. Berlin made him hot. Canada was soon agog at its profligate prodigy. America was fluttering in anticipation. Yet his career move to New York from Berlin in the mid-1990s proved to be a near-disaster, personal as much as professional, and the film goes to some small lengths to find out why. Why wasn't New York really up for such "luridly resonant myths of masculinity's infernal underside," according to Ken Johnson in Art In America? How could he have missed making it in a city where, as the Village Voice's always-perceptive critic Richard Goldstein noted in 2000, "being an evil genius is the second oldest profession?" The few answers offered are crushing: He was spotted as a usurper Canadian trying an end-run via Berlin to fool unsuspecting New Yorkers; his excess Nazi imagery offended Jews, a powerful group in the New York art world; he peaked too early in Germany; he peaked too late in Germany; he never peaked at all; he was too Canadian — the unkindest cut of all — because if you peak in Canada who'd ever know? In a filmed interview not included in the documentary, Thomas Sokolowski, one of Lukacs's earliest supports now with the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, suggests that bad timing might not have been the only reason for Lukacs's bad New York moment. Vaisbord: "What did he do for painting?" Sokolowski: "I think he tried to show that Canadians could be more than people with good manners...you know, it's the school of eight thing." V: "The Group of Seven?" S: "The Group of Seven. If I were to fault Attila and Diane (Farris), they sort of wanted to play with fire but they weren't willing to get burnt.... You just can't take loaded symbols and say, `Oh, I'm just play acting.'... You know, Saturday afternoon Sodom and Gomorrah." pgoddard@thestar.ca |