Tim Burton: Hailing Filmdoms Oddest Artist - ARTINFO.

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Tim Burton: Hailing Filmdoms Oddest Artist

By Marina Cashdan
Published: November 1, 2009

To see more of the works included in the Tim Burton retrospective, click here.

In his version of Hansel and Gretel, the gingerbread man threatens to eat Hansel limb by limb while Gretel fends off a drag-queen witch with kung-fu.
For over a quarter century in Hollywood, Tim Burton has made weirdness good box office. Now his darkly comic sensibility is penetrating a temple of high culture. This month a retrospective including hundreds of the quirky auteurs works of art paintings, watercolors, Polaroids, pencil drawings, and amateur films will take over the third floor and theaters of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The show offers a fresh perspective on the inspiration behind his many iconic movies among them, Beetlejuice (1988), Batman (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), and most recently, Sweeney Todd (2007).

Like what you see? Sign up for ARTINFO's weekly newsletter to get the latest on the market, emerging artists, auctions, galleries, museums, and more. When we meet, in an office overlooking the sculpture garden at MoMA, Burton is dressed in his usual attire: black jeans, a loose navy button-down shirt, a black blazer, black boots, and black sunglasses hidden by his explosive mop of black-gray hair. This look is his trademark. Burton, at 51, is still a happy-to-be-left-alone teenager at heart, more aware of his wildly imaginative internal dialogue than of any external analysis. He never quite completes his sentences. It takes sentences cutting back and forth with animated hand gestures for the big picture to unfold. And when it does, he comes across as refreshingly open, unpretentious, and unaffected. Asked about his start as an animator in 1979, straight out of the California Institute of the Arts, on a Disney fellowship he says, "I couldnt draw the Disney characters, and I couldnt draw foxes to save my life. But I got lucky, because instead of firing me they let me just draw concepts for The Black Cauldron [an animated feature ultimately released in 1985]. Then I got to draw other things for other projects, so it was really just a time for me to explore ideas." For a kid who felt "foreign" growing up in Burbank, California where Warner Bros. and NBC Universal had their studios and he lived with his parents in a house down the street from a cemetery Disney was an unusually sunshiny path. Yet it turned out to be his creative incubator. "It was great, because no one was really telling me what to do, and I was left completely alone. But at the same time, after a couple years it got to be like working in a vacuum. I did all this work, and I realized none of it was going to be used in Black Cauldron," he says. "I felt like this weird creature that was lucky and could do whatever I wanted to do, but as long as I never left that room." It was during this time that Burton created a few barely seen shorts, such as Hansel and Gretel (1982), a dreamlike live-action version of the Grimm Brothers fairy tale in which a demonic gingerbread man threatens to eat the Japanese Hansel limb by limb while Gretel fends off a drag-queen witch with kung fu. When Gretel finally pushes the witch into the burning furnace, the bulging walls of the candy house spurt Technicolor blood (fast-forward to the museum scene from Batman), and the siblings escape. From the outside, the hand-drawn house deliquesces like melted ice cream into the ground. Its twisted, perverted fun animation come to life. The 15-minute work is an embryonic Burton gem, rich with stylistic choices that would later become his hallmark: intricately textured set decoration and visually compelling, often surreal scenes that always have an element of cynical humor. Even early on, you can see his gift for making the preposterous seem entirely plausible. "Its hard to imagine that it was aired on the Disney Channel," Burton says now of Hansel and Gretel. "I think they showed it once at 3 a.m." Also while he was at Disney, Burton developed his black-and-white short Frankenweenie (1984), about a boy who revives his dead dog. It was Frankenweenie that turned Paul Reubens (a.k.a. Pee-wee Herman) on to Burtons work and led to Burtons first feature, Pee-wees Big Adventure (1985). He was bringing his fixation with "bad films" monster, horror, and sci-fi movies into the mainstream. Like those of a few notable moviemakers before him including Federico Fellini, Sergei Eisenstein, and Pier Paolo Pasolini Burtons films are extensions of his drawings. Even in preparing his live-action pictures, he communicates mostly through his artwork: explanations in the form of drawings, Polaroids, and watercolors. Many of his movies are born from an image of a spindly boy, a giant-brained extraterrestrial, a bug-eyed

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Tim Burton: Hailing Filmdoms Oddest Artist - ARTINFO.com

http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/33011/tim-burton/?printer_f...

creature. "I dont write things down. I just sort of draw them out," he says. "And then I look back, and I go, Well, yeah, I kind of remember what that was. But its more of a feeling. I just prefer that. I never had that kind of structural mind, so I prefer leaving things somewhat cryptic." A production team that includes set decorators, costume designers, special-effects experts, and Danny Elfman, who has composed the musical backdrop for nearly all the moviemakers features, along with a core group of actors particularly Johnny Depp and Burtons partner, Helena Bonham-Carter helps bring his original artwork to life. Burton always carries his dense, pocket-size sketchbook with him. As he riffles through it, I catch glimpses of his spidery drawings of children with big heads, staircases leading to ominous places (like the gaping mouth of a rather friendly-looking monster), and voluptuous goth women. One image is a scratchy pencil sketch of a devious Cupid sending an arrow through a kissing couples heads, the womans eyes bulging from her tonguelocked face. Another shows a hollow-eyed creature with wildly applied red pigment emanating from its body. They resemble Alfred Kubins disturbing, semipsychotic drawings, though with less severity. Burton isnt a suicidal, self-afflicted figure like Kubin; hes just a guy who had a "weird childhood" in a "weird environment," yielding an equally weird imagination. I ask how he would describe Burbank. "Have you ever seen Dantes Inferno?" Burton quips, then grins widely and continues, "No, its a very nice place. Youre always at odds with your environment, and I think thats the spur you want. Its very suburban, and the weathers always the same, so I always felt like when I was drawing or making movies or things like that, it was a form of escape or a form of therapy. And so that kind of thing where you dont have seasons or culture of any kind forces people to go inside and explore their own artistic thing." Nowadays Burtons artmaking usually takes place in his home studio, in North London, or in a nearby caf where he takes his sketchbook and a petite watercolor set. When I ask if it was cathartic to go through so many decades of his work in the process of putting together the retrospective, he thinks for a moment and answers, "I had never done it, so to go back and reconnect with yourself in a way, its like having a child; it reenergizes you. It gets certain nerve endings going again, so its been really good that way." Burton let Ron Magliozzi, an assistant curator of film at MoMA and chief curator for the exhibition, go through his studio and archives, from which he selected more than 500 works that had never been shown before. What was it like to be approached by MoMA? "You know, I didnt grow up in a real museum culture in Burbank. I think the first museum I went to was the Hollywood Wax Museum, so its very surreal," he says, chuckling. In the exhibition, Burtons oeuvre will be grouped chronologically into "Surviving Burbank," juvenilia from the 1970s; "Beautifying Burbank," works dating to his time at CalArts and at Disney; and "Beyond Burbank," representing his filmmaking from Pee-wees Big Adventure to the early stages of Alice in Wonderland (set for release in March 2010). Overall the show comprises more than 700 works, including 17 amateur and student films, commercials, music videos, and digital slide shows, as well as a complete set of features and shorts. Also on display is "The Lurid Beauty of Monsters," movies by Ray Harryhausen, Don Chaffey, Ishiro Honda, Jules Bass, and James Whale that influenced, inspired, and intrigued Burton. "Theres no other filmmaker, and no one primarily from live-action feature films, who has produced as much work offscreen using paper, canvas, and camera as Tim has," says Magliozzi. "For that reason, this is something different from the traditional gallery exhibition of the cinema. This is an exhibition of art." I ask Burton if he would consider himself a fine artist, or more specifically, a "Pop Surrealist," as the MoMA show calls him. He fidgets with his hands, shifts in his seat. "Pop Surrealist? . . . I leave that to the experts," he responds. "My art has always been a very private, kind of quiet, and extremely private process. . . . And now Im going to show it to everybody." "Tim Burton" originally appeared in the November 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' November 2009 Table of Contents.

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