IN THE MIND OF AN ARTIST
Guillermo del Toro’s show at the AGO includes a full-sized model of H.P. Lovecraft, who had a huge influence on director,
One morning this week at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the attentive would have witnessed the dystopian fantasy equivalent of a solar eclipse: There, emerging from the Grange, the gallery’s Victorian manse, was Margaret Atwood, passing so close to film director Guillermo del Toro, tucked into the gallery’s closet-sized green room for a slate of quickie interviews, as to touch.
With Atwood fully in the swing of a Hollywood renaissance, it would be fair to imagine them converging here for that very purpose. But no. “I’ve never met her, but I would love to,” says del Toro, every bit the wide-eyed fan. “She’s so important. Her work is perennial; it never stops being relevant.”
While it might seem a surprising affinity — Atwood has, at least to my knowledge, not written of angels of death with multiple eyeballs embedded in their wings, or of an amphibious man-thing with a taste for hardboiled eggs — think again. In A Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood’s monsters may favour three-piece suits or long buttonhooked gowns over scales and fangs, but they’re monsters all the same. And the radical tension of a world stretched to extremes, leaving a wasteland of human wreckage as it snaps, is their common ground. (So is Toronto, where del Toro spends most of the time now, he says. “I live in Leslieville, very bohemian,” he laughs.)
At the AGO, del Toro’s At Home With Monsters opens to the public tomorrow, and it’s an intense, overpoweringly completist view into the esthetic and philosophical fascinations of its maker. The show, for the most part, is a full transposition of del Toro’s Bleak House (after Charles Dickens’ Gothic tale) in Los Angeles, a sprawling pair of suburban homes transformed into an interior landscape of del Toro’s mind.
It is, very simply, a lot: more than 500 objects, from original Disney animation cells (think not of the mouse, but Sleeping Beauty’s dragon, or the demon presiding over a scene of Fantasia) to drawings and paintings, some gore-laden, some beguilingly innocent, by favourite illustrators and artists to hundreds of comic books, Victorian novels, production models (the aforementioned angel of death, Pan, the horned demon from Pan’s Labyrinth, a giant vampire’s sarcophagus from The Strain) and, in one faithful recreation of the library from Crimson Peak, a room with perpetual rain.
The obvious questions are what, if anything, separates At Home With Monsters from a new exhibit at Universal Studios, and what, exactly, is it doing in an art museum at all? The answers, or my answers, are: not a lot (at least at first glance) and I’m not exactly sure. But del Toro has his own answers.
“For me, for sure, there is no line,” he said, when asked about the traditional church-and-state division between culture, high and low. “Art for me is a spiritual exercise. And if you stay only on one side of that line, you’re a Victorian: you’re John Ruskin. You’re extolling virtues in art that it doesn’t need, that aren’t necessary. That limits you.”
It’s a reasonable argument and it helps that it’s made from so learned a point of view. Del Toro is impossibly well-read (Ruskin, a Victorian-era utopian philosopher, is a paragon of rigid one-note idealism), an obsessive’s obsessive on a vast range of cultural history and philosophy.
As a child, he says, he had comic At Home With Monsters books and encyclopedias side by side, and would toggle back and forth between Spider-Man and French Impressionism, and the division between things never occurred to him.
“The exercise, I think, is that any cultural consumption without a cognitive process is deplorable,” he says. “If you just consume pop culture and don’t process it, critically, or try to elevate it in your mind and make it your own, it’s just sad. But the same can be said of the sanctioned manifestations of art. If you go to an art museum just to check a box, to accept what you’re told, then what is the point?”
It’s been a busy few months for the director, as his new film, The Shape of Water, about an amphibious humanoid kept in captivity who becomes romantically entangled with one of his keepers, is already generating Oscar chatter. Such is the contradiction of del Toro: a genre-ish monster movie that transcends its parameters with the force of its emotional core.
It embodies its maker almost perfectly. Over a brief spate of time, del Toro ranges from H.P. Lovecraft (a cherished, fetishized favourite, to the point where he’s recreated the author’s library, not to mention the author himself, at his Bleak House) to Henry James and Oscar Wilde, from horror comic book virtuoso Bernie Wrightson to B-grade fantasy film director Ray Harryhausen to Francisco Goya (“What do you do with the most vibrant, terrifying, intimate period of his work, his dark painting?” he asks, excitedly).
In many ways, his fascinations are a mirror of cultural history and the countercurrents that animate them: the grotesque, a visceral, sensualist’s subculture running beneath the politely opulent beauty of the baroque, or the wave of Gothic horror that ran counter to the Enlightenment.
“When we talk about Victorian society being a moral and artistic corset, what is that corset holding? How big will the spillage be?” he laughs.
“When you read Mary Shelley or Lord Byron, the 1800s are really fascinating, because there’s a countermovement to the Age of Reason. What’s great about Victorian art is that it sublimates with the fanatasic. And the resurgence of the Gothic speaks, to me, about taking the urge to do something wild, something savage.”
It should come as no surprise that, alongside Lovecraft, Shelley’s Frankenstein is a central fascination and appears around every corner here. Its tale — of human hubris interfering with the divine, begetting violence and woe — could have been written by del Toro himself. At some point, it will be: a new film version is one of the director’s fondest hopes.
Woven into del Toro’s agglomeration of stuff are the occasional piece from the AGO’s own collection and they help blur the line he so steadfastly ignores. From a Goya — one of those dark paintings, natch — to Tissot to Piranesi, well-placed images coax the fantastic from across the border of the art-historical canon.
“Guillermo didn’t want to do a show that was all plastic and glitz and studio junk,” said Jim Shedden, the AGO’s curator on the exhibition.
The starry-eyed fanboys will find much to their liking: gloopy masks and production models from Pan’s Labyrinth, ectoplasmic explosions in quick-cut film clips from Mimic, Cronos, Crimson Peak, the monstermashing of the Hellboy movies and the splatter-filled Blade II. “What did Lord Byron say? If all else fails, shock them. That could have been said by a B-movie director,” del Toro laughs.
But the CBC hustled out a quickie online earlier this week, calling it a memorabilia show, and that’s not exactly fair. Del Toro’s esthetic may sit comfortably in the genre of occasionally shlocky horror/fantasy, but his narrative urge — toward allegory, parables of universal and timeless transformation from innocence to experience, and beyond — transcends it. In that way, he makes an opening through which almost all of us can pass.
“Ultimately, the nature of humanity is the fundamental lack of peace between two sides: the profane and the divine,” he says. “I try to speak about purity rather than innocence, because innocence is a construct, something that’s supposed to exist above reality, outside the real world. None of us can do that. But each of us embodies within us a state of grace. That, I believe.” Guillermo del Toro: At Home With Monsters opens at the Art Gallery of Ontario Saturday and continues to Jan. 7, 2018. Please see ago.net/guillermo-del-toroat-home-with-monsters