The Laboratories of Laure Drogoul;
History is a Fickle Thing

SCENE ONE: On a sweltering night in a weedy dirt lot behind a string of rowhouses, two tall men dressed in little girls' dresses with big bows in their wigs clutch in mock horror at the dashboard of a beat-up 1965 Dodge Dart. Five hundred watt tungsten bulbs melt their chalky pancake make-up as tiny gnats flit in and out of the spotlights. Someone bounces up and down on the car's fender to simulate a speeding vehicle careening through the dark. Nearby, a wind-up 16mmBolexmovie camera hums and clicks on a tripod. Film shoot for the theater piece "The Two Janes" (1997) .

For the past twenty-five years, Baltimore-based artist Laure Drogoul has set in motion a remarkable body of work, stitched together from diverse sources and released into the world with an expansiveness of intent that enhances her complex and peculiar themes.

History is a fickle thing. I offer you, reader, a series of vignettes, strung together on a thin thread of ideas and facts.

CABARET AS WORKSHOP.

SCENE TWO: Black light in a dark room; a pair of giant hands pointing to the time: it's 14 o'clock!; tarot card readings in a bank vault; a cigarette girl selling candy cigarettes; naked tap-dancers with bags on their heads; the stale stink of tobacco smoke; a special orchestra performance held during a snow storm during which the conductor's magic wand is passed from person to person. A collection of moments from The 14Karat Cabaret.

As exhibition curator Gerald Ross explains in his introduction to Follies, Predicaments, and Other Conundrums: The Works of Laure Drogoul at the beginning of this catalog, Drogoul has been the central figure in Baltimore's 14Karat Cabaret since its founding in 1989. But how does the Cabaret work? What principles are brought to bear?

The general model has been to mix genres, creating each evening as a multi-media "variety show" that in many ways holds true to the traditional European cabaret paradigm of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At The 14Karat Cabaret, art performances are juxtaposed with film, music, poetry, drag queens and kings and more. However, Drogoul has helped bring a crucial new element to this structure. As art historian Kathy O'Dell describes in her essay, "Golden Gutters: Notes on The History of Cabaret" (1996), in Baltimore's LINK arts journal, "Drogoul introduces each performer in a faux French-Polish accent. Introductions are extemporaneous, reminding audience members that what they are about to see is extemporaneous as well. Indeed, while some pieces are more polished than others, The 14Karat Cabaret is an environment in which a piece can be 'workshopped.'" The 14Karat Cabaret, as set-up by Drogoul, functions as an artistic laboratory.

The generosity of this model falls wholly within the broader space of Baltimore's informal moneyless economy of gifted ideas and donated labor. If Baltimore has sometimes been an inhospitable place, being in a vise grip of economic dislocation caused by global forces beyond the city's reach, in recent decades it has also provided safe-havens for particular communities. The 14Karat Cabaret has been one of these refuges.

And although Drogoul has been committed to permitting as wide a range of voices as possible, The 14Karat Cabaret has a "house style," a tradition whose lineage would follow through the "flaming creatures" of Jack Smith, the Ridiculous Theater of Charles Ludlum and the "trash" aesthetics of Drogoul's fellow Baltimorean John Waters. The content of many performances at the space seems lurid, colorful, sexualized, gender-bending, morbid, garish and transgressive by turns, but they are also characterized by a kind of play-acting doubleness that winks at the audience. Rather than imposing an Aristotelian catharsis where an audience identifies with a theatrical character and experiences an emotional release during a performance, many performances follow a paradigm that could be better described as a Brechtian distancing that allows the mind to step back and analyze the paradoxical elements being presented.

A perfect example of this is Drogoul's signature role at The 14Karat Cabaret, "La Hostess," as described in the quote above by Kathy O'Dell. "Costumed," O'Dell points out, "in anything from gold lamé to thrift store lace to a loosely crocheted bodysuit rescued from a dumpster," the character is a kind of mod "mistress of ceremonies." "La Hostess" deadpans her commentary, flattening her fake accent with an American twang, her voice frequently rising at the end of sentences in a tentative question-making tone that puts a comical edge on the night's proceedings. Drogoul, as artist, comments on Drogoul, as emcee/hostess, thus allowing the audience to be in on the "fakeness" of the whole shebang. She's only pretending to be an old-world cabaretist from the 1930s! This produces a kind of resolute disbelief in authenticity that is shared between Cabaret goers and Cabaret performers. No matter what is going to be on stage next, the audience is ready to both jump into the festivities AND step back and evaluate.

THE CORPSE ON THE DISSECTION SLAB.

SCENE THREE: An aroma of searing meat wafts through the air near a food booth, where burgers are being grilled for visitors at a ramshackle outdoor arts fair. In a pen next to the barbecue, a lowing cow and her small calf watch with large, sad eyes. Ha Hay Hay Hamburgers (1983).

Smells, sounds, medical imagery, roadkill. Although Laure Drogoul's work as a whole is shaded by a sense of wry humor, there is a certain brutality to her approach to representing and commenting on the body. Her "cool" style of performing around "hot" topics seems analogous to a doctor's detachment when faced with a mutilated living body, or, taken to an extreme, a corpse on the dissection slab.

Enter Victor Frankenstein. Mary Shelley's gothic cautionary tale of scientific ambition run amok, Frankenstein, makes a good touchstone for Drogoul's paradoxical embrace and mockery of science and technology and their connection to living (and sometimes dead) bodies. Courageously, Drogoul does not spare herself. "Due to circumstances beyond my control," she writes on the website for The Nipple Project (1999), "I have found myself in need of new nipples, including areolae. The technique used to recreate the nipple itself is surgical. The areolae will be created in a later step, using a tattoo technique. I AM INVITING YOU TO HELP DESIGN THE AREOLAE."

Using her own body in a strategy that both shares and challenges the artistic territory investigated by French artist Orlan, who famously experimented with plastic surgery as part of her art in the early 1990s, Drogoul tackles what is a deeply personal physical condition - cancer - and transforms it into something collaborative, uplifting, and even, amazingly enough, funny.

So too, the mad scientist's laboratory is a good metaphor for the set of artistic tools Drogoul has developed, first with her workshop paradigm at The 14Karat Cabaret, and also, at the same time, with her series of large multi-media theatrical presentations such as Victor's Workshop (1989), The Workshop of Filthy Creation (1996), and The Two Janes (1997), which brought together groups of performers, artists and technicians to create a kind of experimental theater that developed over many years in a - well actually, yes - an experimental fashion.

Drogoul has used a similar approach, a labor-intensive, analytic model of testing torn from the confines of science and sewn into an art world context, to create what has become perhaps her most remarkable group of works, her "follies," the monumental public sculptures that have earned her new audiences.

DR. O'GOUL'S MONSTERS.

SCENE FOUR: A roaring fire burns brightly in a woman's virgin breast. No. A cold, flickering TV set breathes life into a mannequin's chest cavity. Video Virgin (1987).

By her own count, Laure Drogoul has participated as an artist in at least eight different years of Artscape, Baltimore's annual summer arts fair. The weekend long event brings in more than a million visitors to hear big name musicians, eat street food, and see art, drawing its viewers from a remarkably diverse set of communities. Rich, poor, black, white, young, old, urban, suburban, rural, art world insiders, and people who are just setting foot in an art gallery for the first time in their lives, Artscape provides artists with an excellent opportunity to learn about their own work.

Drogoul has spent the past twenty years using these festival audiences to do what is essentially a beta-testing of her public sculptures, and the results are nothing short of astonishing. It's instructive to go back and look at her quasi-scientific "breeding" of the creatures that have led to the large-scale works of recent years such as the gloriously evocative, living and breathing, room-filling devil's head, The Root (blue-eyed) (2006), that helped her win the coveted Janet and Walter Sondheim Prize.

For example, early works exhibited at Artscape, like Garden of Shadows (1989), two cartoonish, papier-mâché mannequins with googlely, videotape eyes that unnerve viewers by staring back at them, and Video Virgin (1987), each make innovative use of video in a sculptural manner, but these works only hint at what is to come. By the mid-1990s, Drogoul makes the jump from gallery to outdoor spaces and fromthe human-scaled to the monstrous. The first works of this period, such as, Tower of Babel (1993), a turquoise skyscraper beamed into the middle of Artscape from its home in Whoville, allowed her to create the literal nuts and bolts of her style: a fabric skin stretched over wooden ribs, wheat-pasted with a wallpaper of tinted copy-machine imagery and illuminated from the inside at night. But she really hits her stride in the late 1990s when she takes these architectural forms and gives them personas. Dolly (1997), a giant Kewpie doll - pink, rotund, twenty five foot tall - that loomed over festival goers in the midst of Artscape's pandemonium like a genetically modified Godzilla with a terminal cuteness gene. The wood and paper construction, at once hefty in form but rather flimsy in fact, is reminiscent of "folk tourist attractions" such as Lucy the Elephant, the six-story wooden house/pachyderm covered with painted tin on the Jersey shore. So to, there seems to be a rhyming affinity to Mortville, set-designer Vince Peranio's Potemkin Village of Trash culled from Baltimore's back alleys for John Waters' film, Desperate Living (1977).

Drogoul's monsters - children's toys become large and otherworldly - seem magical and alive as she takes these fragments and assembles them into iconic creatures that appear ready to stride across the landscape. Behind this effortless magic is several decades' worth of experimentation - time well spent in the lab.

- Peter Walsh is an Artist and a Founding Editor of Baltimore's LINK Art Journal (1996-2006)