OPINION
NATURE|Vol 461|3 September 2009
Pop artist displays primitive instincts
A retrospective of Todd Schorr’s huge oil-painted comic-book visions features his garish image
of a hunter-gatherer. Is it a deliberate allegory of consumer culture, asks Martin Kemp?
Sci-fi comics have a look of their own. Their bizarre organic inventions, Jerome Bosch. The A laughing Mohican is dressed in the
style has changed over the years in response competition is therefore tough, both techni- uniform of an Atlanta Braves baseball player.
to new print technologies, but they display cally and inventively.
The palaeolithic Willendorf Venus dances
recurrent visual characteristics that are easy
How far does Schorr’s loving transposition of with a stubbly and lecherous Mickey Mouse
to list. Alien creatures have monstrous heads, lowbrow modes into art for galleries transcend on a disco platform cut from the bloody leg
leering eyes, savage claws, snaking tentacles his ‘vulgar’ sources? The professional illustrators of an ungulate. Another mouse in the ape’s
and scaly skins. Mechanized organisms do of comics, pulp fiction and animated cartoons grip, presumably Minnie, plays the part perbattle with anthropomorphized machines. did their work with precise skills and superb formed so tellingly by Fay Wray in the 1933
The paraphernalia and costumes are oddly draftsmanship. Looking at Schorr’s retro- film King Kong. Fronds of primitive equiseta
Gothick; galactic spaces plunge and swirl; and spective exhibition in the San Jose Museum of spiral upwards into a vortex that is reminisphosphorescent lights compete with devour- Art in California, there are times when it seems cent of Paul Signac’s pointillist portrait of
Félix Fénéon from 1890
ing darkness. All of this is
rendered in lurid colours
(at the Museum of Modwith exaggerated outlines
ern Art in New York).
that shout of violent action
At one level, Schorr is
revelling in the look of
and rude excitement.
There seems to be little
lowbrow culture. Yet once
here to align with ‘high art’.
this is portrayed on the
heroic scale of a historiHowever, in the mid-1950s,
cal painting on the walls
American and British artof an art gallery, we are
ists in the pop art moveinvited to adopt an ironic
ment, such as Andy Warhol
manner of viewing. Like
and Richard Hamilton,
imported imagery and
all pop artists, he is having
techniques from the comhis cake and eating it too,
mercial world and from
only to spit it out at the
‘lowbrow’ sources including
end. We may intuit that the
comics and cartoons. Lowhunter-gatherer in Schorr’s
brow art became a movepainting suggests that the
ment in itself, centred on
apeman’s primitive instinct
Los Angeles in California
for acquiring material
from the 1970s onwards,
trivia still drives our conadopting the cartoon style
sumer culture today.
as its major characteristic.
However, to formulate
too fixed an interpretaNo one has gone to more Todd Schorr’s Hunter Gatherer depicts cartoon icons that are rich in surrealist symbolism.
tion is wrong. Unlike a
elaborate lengths than the
painter Todd Schorr to transfer lowbrow modes that he is achieving little more than a collage of frame from a comic-book cartoon, the narof representation to the ‘high’ technique of oil pop motifs in a stock surrealistic mode.
rative is not spelled out by successive images
painting on canvas — often on a very large
On other occasions, however, the narrative and strings of words. The painting acts as an
scale. Schorr, who is based in Los Angeles, has and symbolism move to a different level. This inviting field for interpretation.
a background that is perfect for this end.
is particularly true of his recent series of ape
Will Schorr be regarded as a major visual
Starting out as a drummer in rock bands, paintings, which range across chronological allegorist of our age, as was Botticelli in the
Schorr was captivated by the culture of psych- territories from the remote past to the sci-fi Renaissance? For my part, I find it difficult
edelia before training as an illustrator at the future. Hunter Gatherer (owned by Leonardo to get past the unpleasantly garish renderPhiladelphia College of Art in Pennsylvania. di Caprio) garishly exemplifies how Schorr tells ing and unsubtle storytelling. But that is the
His career flourished: he produced album his stories and enriches them with intricate point. The lowbrow artists are attuned to a
covers for AC/DC, film posters for Francis symbolism. We need to decode the whole and major facet of our visual culture. And they are
Ford Coppola and covers for Time magazine. the parts in much the same way that a historical very Californian.
■
But, like Warhol before him, he progressively iconographer would tackle a Botticelli painting Martin Kemp is emeritus professor in history of
detached himself from commercial work to on a classical theme.
art at the University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
pursue a career as a fine artist.
A humanoid ape emerges from a bubbling
Schorr characterizes his paintings as an swamp, apparently amazed by the sight of
Todd Schorr: American Surreal
American variety of surrealism. His heroes are a toy space robot. On his back, like Santa
San Jose Museum of Art, California
Salvador Dalí, that most technically polished Claus, he carries a roughly stitched sack of
Until 16 September
of surrealists, and the Renaissance maestro of cartoon character toys, including Batman.
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