john and jana

Tiger Lillies

Who are the Tiger Lillies? It depends

With 21 albums since 1994, elaborate and acclaimed stage shows, a collaboration with the late, great Edward Gorey, and a recent art book collecting all their lyrics, the Tiger Lillies’ singer Martin Jacques attributes the band’s artistic success to the shifting range of emotions they have been able to cover in their work over the years — and to the accordion and operatic falsetto that he utilizes to do so.

“It seems to work,” said Jacques. “I’ve been able to portray emotion and pathos and comedy and violence and all these different emotions through it and that was what was lacking before, I didn’t seem to be able to do it, playing guitar or playing piano and singing in a low voice. I think it’s mainly emotional power, a transparency in a way of expressing yourself and then being able to express all these different emotions.”

It’s hard to pin down the Tiger Lillies’ musical style. Often, it pulls from German cabaret sounds, other times it has been described as circus music. The band’s lyrical concerns float about the macabre and perverted — tales of pimps and hookers and criminals and misfits and violence. Their biggest success in the United States was a musical celebration of Edward Gorey, called “The Gorey End,” which was nominated for a Grammy. In England, they made a splash with “Shockheaded Peter,” their stage adaptation of the violent 19th-century children’s fables of Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann, which one two Olivier Awards in 2002.

The presentation of their work is equally shocking. Their stage presence with demented makeup and costuming conjures up thoughts of demonic clowns and silent movie zombies, playing arcane instruments, including a drum kit fashioned with kitchen utensils.

“I’m trying to create something interesting,” said Jacques, “trying to play at something less pedestrian. I’m just trying to make something you can look at, sit there and watch or listen to and say ‘Oh, that’s weird, that’s strange, that’s disturbing!’”

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Milk Teeth by Julie Morstad

As presented in “Milk Teeth,” there’s no denying the talent of Vancouver artist Julie Morstad.
Her thin and busy line work moves like a thread through her drawings, fashioning images witty and precious and grim and affected.

Morstad’s wit is a surrealist one of floating heads, millions of bees escaping from a girl’s ear, and children hiding from stalking tigers behind piles of books. She’s extremely interested in hair, it seems — winding around faces and on beds, bursting out of houses and acting as the stomping ground for various visitors on people’s heads.

It all, unfortunately, adds up to nothing.

One reason is that for all the obvious technical skill, the presentation in the book — part of Drawn and Quarterly’s Petits Livres series — accentuates the fact that Morstad’s images are not standalone gallery art and, therefore, isn’t well-served by the same translation into book form. Her work is illustration through and through. Illustration works best in a context as part of a collaboration with words but there are none in this book.

Though stories are implied, the illustrations don’t work as pantomime and the pages seem naked without the other half of the team. Whereas words or context might lend a power to the images, put in succession in book form, the collection seems more like a vanity press sketchbook.

One easy bit of text could have been something actually explaining who the artist is, actually talking about the artist’s work. As it is, the reason the work is there in a book is a bit of a mystery — the significance of the images aren’t very apparent and the book isn’t keen to divulge anything.

You are left guessing and the first impression you get is that the artist spent much of her time copying Edward Gorey with precision. With dozens of sad-faced art deco girls populating the pages, with grim and goth frameworks accentuating the morbid and absurd moods that underlie them, it looks like Morstad sat down with a pile of Gorey books and taught herself how to draw.

One thing that wasn’t learned from Gorey, though, was his presentation — Gorey’s art is easily the big draw in his books, but his narratives, usually spare, offer some structure to the presentation, particularly in a book like “The Ghastlycrumb Tinies.” Morstad’s illustrations are just as unrelated, with nothing to bind them but the fact that they were chosen to be in this book.

In the context of releasing books that are showcases for derivative work, Morstad is missing the important lessons of her apparent idol. Rather than copy his lines, it would be nice if she found herself and her own style instead — I would love to see what Morstad is capable of without Gorey taking charge of her drawing hand.