[   Click images for larger version ]

Interview with Todd Schorr

from " Mutant Kiddies "

Let’s start with a brief introduction that I hope will bring us a little closer to your work and that of the other three artists presented here.

You have often stated that your work derives from contemporary mythology and that your role as an artist is the same as that of the classic masters. They worked in a context that may not have included the masses but certainly did involve a wide ranging public. Past masterpieces, however, such as the classic Renaissance fresco cycles, were created for institutions, the church and public places. Their stories, figures and messages worked at different levels and even at the time they had a widely diverse public.
Your work can be defined as popular or lowbrow art, only in the sense that the images derive from a common heritage of popular culture (and are therefore shared by the entire community). In this way your subjects can be recognized immediately and can strike a note with a potentially widespread public. At the same time, however, their message is not easy to grasp as the range of interpretation is immense and may extend to worlds that even you, the artist, did not intend to portray...

Todd Schorr: The viewer of an artwork does not necessarily have to be versed in the symbols an artist has used from his or her culture to make an emotional connection with the work. When viewing the sculpted deities of Hindu India you don’t have to know anything about the religious significance of the piece to appreciate its visual power. Truly engaging art always strikes directly with one’s innate human curiosity. It’s in our genetic makeup to always pick out the different, the odd, the unusual. Certain symbols are universal, a skull for instance, but when mixed with reference points from a person’s own popular culture, especially when it is foreign to others, it only enhances the mystery surrounding the artwork. When a thing, such as a painting, is imbued with an element of mystery, that becomes much of it’s fascination. As a mystery becomes solved that fascination tends to diminish quickly. So if my work, which already has been carefully staged and planned out, retains an element of puzzlement for the viewer, I am delighted. My use of symbols from the popular culture I grew up in merely serves as a means to an end. I use this vocabulary to tell the tales that unfold on my canvas.

In 1994 Robert Williams founded “Juxtapoz”, a fundamental landmark for a heterogeneous group of artists and for their public. Many art-galleries display your works, such as the Merry Karnowsky Gallery or Luz de Jesus, in the U.S.A., and the Mondo Bizzarro Gallery in Italy and from December to February 2002 the Hollywood Art and Culture Center in Florida held a personal exhibition of your work.
Leaving aside the ridiculous uproar over the “violent and disturbing” nature of the “Clash of Holidays” exhibition, would you say that your work has now been accepted and has the snobby attitude that was typical of intellectuals and art critics until recently finally bowed to eclecticism and ever-widening taste?

Todd Schorr: Whatever doors have been opened with publications like “Juxtapoz” and the various galleries displaying “lowbrow” art, you have to realize that this work is still on the margins of the art world at large. There is an ever growing audience of like-minded individuals who have a deep appreciation for this work, but it is still very much outside the average museum/gallery goers sphere of reference.

Over the last few years, there has been a growing audience and awareness of the more commercially accepted forms of Tiki/Tattoo/Hot Rod/Surf Art. I feel, while this is related, that this is more of a fashion trend and has become further removed from the more idiosyncratic paintings of artists such as those included in this book.

There in lies the problems with this so-called “Lowbrow” art movement.

You have painters creating densely composed scenarios of social commentary lumped in with someone designing a tiki decal for a skateboard. It is a vast and multi-layered art movement successful in varying degrees. For myself, the term “Lowbrow” means little. I see myself more as a social commentator and cultural anthropologist, using the symbolism relevant to my time and place. It is my hope that the “gatekeepers” as you call them will understand this.

So while I was proud to have been given a retrospective show at a state run museum in Florida, I think we have little way to go before you’ll see a retrospective show of any Lowbrow artist at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Five O'clock Shadows in Disney-Dali Land, the picture you painted in 1996, says a lot about your aesthetics. It shows two geniuses staring r5ight into each other’s eyes. On one side, Walt (in the shape of a Mickey Mouse puppet) is depicted as a worn out toy hat is about to fall apart. On the other, Dali is in fine form, apart from his worm-like body, a typical “Todd Schorr” feature and similar to Dali’s own love of deforming bodies and objects. Could you say something about this choice of characters?

Todd Schorr: In my painting “Five O’clock Shadows in Disney-Dali Land” I was trying to convey a feeling of melancholy and nostalgia. Disney and Dali were two of my earliest artist heroes. But like all childhood heroes, as I became older and a little wiser, these heroes started to develop flaws and cracks. Their best work still remains unparalleled, but both sacrificed artistic integrity for commercial success in their later years. Disney, by moving away from his classic animated cartoons to become an amusement park entrepreneur and Dali, from an incredibly imaginative painter to jet set buffoon. It was only natural that these these two would eventually meet and take a stab at collaboration on the unrealized project “Destino” in 1946. A more successful collaboration may have been producing melting Mickey Mouse watches.

Your past work seems to be split into two parts. The first, experimental phase is heavily influenced by avant-garde traditions and combines, for example, surrealist atmospheres with cubist decomposition and superimposition. The second phase, on the other hand, has a more organic, synthetic style and your influences, even if still present, are firmly in the background. This leaves a lot more space to the exuberance of your imagination, which is depicted with a highly developed and unmasked artistic skill. Would you agree?

Todd Schorr: Back in 1970 when I was still in High School I went to Europe for the summer. Up until then I was heavily influenced by animated cartoons and old comic books. When I got to Europe and was able to see first hand the paintings of the great Old Masters a light bulb went on. If I could learn how to paint in the techniques of the old masters but use as subject matter my favorite cartoons I would have the best of all world. As a matter of fact it was in Italy that this notion really hit home. Italy has always had a love of classic cartoons and comic strips like Little Nemo, Popeye, and Mickey Mouse and was reprinting them in a magazine called Limus. Is this magazine still around? Anyway, I bought some of these magazines the same day I visited the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and the connection was made. Cartoons-Old Masters. It wouldn’t b until many years later that I would carry out these early intentions. The early paintings I began doing in the mid- 1980’s were influenced by the illustration work I was doing at the time. This was syle that gained popularity in the late 1970s and early 1980s and played off the contrasts of tow dimensional graphic art with three dimensional rendered art. Hence, realistic forms set against flat, often paint splattred backgrounds. So my early paintings still played with those notions and for a time I experimented with cubistic styled forms as well. Finally around 1990 I began to focus on the way of working I had envisioned years before on my trip to Europe and began to finally hone the skills needed to carry out that vision. I went back and really studied the methods and techniques used by the Old Masters and found the techniques used by Cennino Cennini in the early 1400’s particularly suited my needs. It’s basically a slow and careful process of building up color over a monochromatic underpainting of raw umber. The more I painted, the more I learned and thus the gradual evolution to the style of working I use today.

Works like “The Spectre of Cartoon Appeal”, “The Spectre of Monster Appeal”, and “Hydra of Madison Avenue” can be seen as a synthesis of your career. They also present visual encyclopaedias containing all your main influences, such as the cartoons created by the fathers of American animation (Tex Avery, Walt Disney, Max Fleischer, and the Warner Brothers), underground comics, the kaleidoscope of monsters and aliens from popular fiction, cinema (from A to B to Z-movies), thirties’ and forties’ pulp magazines, Ed Roth models and mascots from children’s commercials. There is no attempt to adapt or mould these figures and real magazine ocvers and vintage illustrations are reproduced wholesale, as in your painting with the title that says it all: “Verne to Vader: Noteworthy Highlights Concerning the History of Space Fiction as Represnted in Popula Culture”. Could you take us on a quick qtour of your imaginary would and show us all the different levels?

Todd Schorr: “The Spectre of Cartoon Appeal”, “The Spectre of Monster Appeal”, and “The Hydra of Madison Avenue” were created as historical documentaries. My personal visual inventories put on display as in a carnival with me acting as the carny barker leading the viewer into these make believe worlds. Just as the academic paintiners in the 1800s created vast historical dramas spread across yards of canvas, I felt it necessary to record my own historical allegories as documents for future generations. As far as I know, I hav not seen any other contemporary artist approach this subject matter with the same intent. My compositions are not all inclusive but they pick out my personal favorites within the various genres. This is an ongoing series with more to come.

Could you tell us something about the rest of the series? What will we see next in your visual encyclopaedia?

Todd Schorr: The next painting in this series will focus on Finks and Weirdos. This was sytle of cartoon character that became very popular in the United States during the early to mid 1960’s. Probably the most famour name associated with this type of art was Ed “Big Daddy” Roth who invented Rat Fink, but there were many other examples of this style around at that time. My painting will put into perspective the full range of these characters.

In the 60s, underground cartoonists, such as the ZAP brigade (Crumb, Griffin, Moscoso, Williams), overturned traditional comic schemes and became more “aadult-oriented”. This upset both the culture industry and public expectations, for example Williams’ use of “dirty” humour bothered art critics, but it certainly didn’t bother ZAP readers. Do you see yourself as doing the same thing in that the characters in your cartoon paintings (characters in the sense that your paintings are often almost a single frame comic telling an entire story) do things that one would not expect from a cartoon?

Todd Schorr: Yes, I am using this cartoon vocabulary that has been passed along to us by the cartoonists of the past, but uing this language to tell stories that address adult issues. The graphic quality of the cartoon has a tremendous appeal to the human eye and functions as the perfect catalyst in which to engage the onlooker. It also creates a somewhat unsettling undercurrent of nervous silliness hwen mixed with more serious notions of sexual or social behavior.

Communication seems to be the main purpose of your art. Transmitting and spreading ideas, in the shape of images, and bridging the gap between the artist and the public that has existed for centuries is clearly very important to you. It still seems that the public cannot do without the artist though and often you include at least some kind of reference to yourself in your paintings. I am thinking for example of the all-seeing eye that winks and overlooks, the scene in some of your paintings....

Todd Schorr: In many of my paintings I do see myself as sort of a carny barker on the midway ushering the viewer into my little worlds. I think with any artist there is that feeling of “Hey look at this!,” “Isn’t this interesting?” “I’d like to show you something!” That’s definitely at the root of being a visual artist. However, beyond those few times I’ve actually included myself in my paintings such as in “The Spectre of Cartoon Appeal” and “The Spectre of Mosnster Appeal”, my presence is solely felt as narrator of an allegory. Like most figurative painters, my presence is felt in the way I have chosen to stage my painted allegories. This is imparted wit the “players” (or objects) I have selected and how I choose to light them and in what sort of atmosphere This is the artist’s presence, not necessarily in the form of self-portraiture or symbolically represented, but by simple virtue of mind to hand to canvas.

Return to Todd Schorr Page