Tom Dean must be getting a little tired of accolades. First, in 1996, he was given a Toronto Arts Award. Then, two years later, he was chosen to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale, the ne plus ultra of international art gigs. This spring, he was granted the Governor-General's Award for the visual arts. And three days ago, he unveiled an ambitious new project for the Toronto Sculpture Garden's 20th-anniversary celebration, a field of bronze babies and enormous swans that will cavort under the dappled sunlight on King Street until the fall. In the precarious world of Canadian art, he is without a doubt the flavour of the month.
For Dean, this is new stuff. From his earliest beginnings in the art world as a student at Sir George Williams University in Montreal, where he made sculptures and created legendary performance works (and founded The Yellow Door coffee house), Dean has always been something of an underground phenomenon, the epitome of the artists' artist. Jessica Bradley, the Art Gallery of Ontario's curator of contemporary art, who served as the Canadian commissioner for Venice in 1999, attributes this to the integrity of his approach, an inspiration to younger artists. "Tom is completely irreverent about art trends," she says. "He's not tailoring his work to a mainstream art audience. Art students labour under the weight of what comes before them and what they think they're supposed to be doing. Tom does exactly what he needs to do."
Over the years, Dean's research has lead him into some fascinating, and disturbing, terrain. In an early Montreal performance at the Musée d'art contemporaine in 1974, he inhabited a succession of male personae: a romantic opera-singing swooner in a Byronic blouse and leopard-skin tights; a tap-dancing dandy (accompanied by a fleet of little girls); and a boxer, enduring three rounds with a professional in front of a confused audience. Montreal art dealer René Blouin recalls, "That really caused quite a commotion. There was blood in the museum."
Following his move to Toronto in 1976, Dean continued to pursue his own peculiar vision, constructing, in one notorious project, an enormous 24-foot-high wooden staircase to nowhere, which he laboriously decorated with painted polka dots and floated out onto Lake Ontario. Redeeming ritual labour became one of this trademarks, as he worked out his relationship to the Protestant work ethic imbibed from his father, a United Church army minister.
To Dean's surprise, the staircase developed a cult following, becoming, over the three years of its existence, the mascot of Toronto's yearning avant garde and a symbol for the futility of vertical striving. When, in 1981, the logistics of maintaining it overwhelmed him, Dean set it alight, later exhibiting its charred remains.
Sculptural concerns had always been his central preoccupation and his next project, the four-part Excerpts from a Description of the Universe, evolved as a madly comprehensive lexicon of sculptural form. Metal tables displayed enigmatic and scarcely describable objects in a smorgasbord of different materials: mysterious hats that turned into heads, snakes that became swans. Blouin, who along with Normand Thériault and Claude Gosselin showed work from this series in the landmark 1985 exhibition Aurora Borealis, remembers: "There was nothing like it in my imagination. There were all these shapes that you thought you knew, but when you started looking more closely they were not what you thought you had seen."
It was at around this time, in 1986, that a personal cataclysm threw Dean's life into upheaval; he and his wife Ann found they were expecting twins. (They subsequently had a third child.) While the drama of family life is an unusual subject for contemporary art, particularly art made by men, Dean plunged into unknown territory, exhibiting a flotilla of charred-looking infants attended by ominous sentinel dogs with improbably long, human hair tails. Bradley recalls, "On the one hand, there is a chubby, healthy plumpness about those babies, but on another level, this looked like a scene of infanticide," with the blackened surfaces of the babies pitted by sulphuric acid.
The family drama, raised to the volcanic intensity of a Greek drama, would be the subject of The Whole Catastrophe, a suite of bronzes that Dean exhibited at the Venice Biennale two years ago. A pack of female dogs, their muscles bulging with menace and their teats swollen with milk, stand and crouch amid a host of scattered objects -- disembodied penises in various states of tumescence from the dormant to the stupefyingly erect, peculiar hybrid phalluses with balls on both ends (looking unnervingly like dog bones) and mysterious turd-like coils. Amidst this detritus, the dogs play and watch, while one sniffs at a bronze cast fragment of a female torso and leg, in which the pelvis, carved open and revealed, is connected to a brain by a long spinal rope. A number of babies (or, rather, just their nether parts and plump little kicking legs) were clustered together, seeming to signal the potential for regeneration. In another area, a series of small, powerfully modelled nude bronzes of women in pinup poses raise the motif of male desire and female power.
To some extent, Dean created this suite of bronzes with Italian art in mind. (As he put it, "It sort of comes with the material.") Romulus and Remus seem to hover in the wings, and so does Michelangelo. Like the great Italian Renaissance artist, Dean likes to exaggerate musculature to the point of the grotesque. Having earlier in his career attempted an A to Z of sculptural possibilities, Dean was now taking on the masters in this most conventional of artistic media, cast bronze, running the gauntlet by working in the language of classical statuary.
In his current garden of male desire, a pagan glade beneath the spires of Toronto's St. James's Cathedral, Dean continues this foray, evoking in the figure of the bird, he says, the legends of Icarus, of the Phoenix who rises from the ashes, and of Leda and the Swan -- the fine-feathered bad ass of antiquity. Swans, an enduring symbol of the male member and fertility since the dawning days of iconography, have interested him for years. (He describes them as "snakes developing a vertical architecture.") Both Caravaggio and Michelangelo, he says, have been drawn to the theme of the marauding, raping swan. As well, in modelling the clay maquettes for his naked boy babies, Dean has borrowed poses from the works of Michelangelo, as well as from pornography magazines and family snapshots. Here, though, the babies are no longer fragmented. Instead they seem unnervingly capable of strategy and action, inviting our gaze, sometimes provocatively. The effect is uncanny and slightly menacing, for all the beauty of their modelled forms.
While castration and the struggle between the sexes underpinned The Whole Catastrophe, here Dean suggests a cycle of regeneration and fertility in which there is no female presence -- perhaps another primal longing from the depths of the male psyche. If the European art crowd in Venice had trouble dealing with The Whole Catastrophe, as they did, one wonders what they would make of this. Lurid, supernatural and hallucinatory, like so much of his art, it unsettles us, driving us deep beneath our skins to tangle with our most primordial motives.