Walking through the gaping monster mouth at the entrance to the third floor exhibit, you might be forgiven for thinking the clock at the Museum of Modern Art has been turned back to Halloween.
MoMA, the scholarly temple of classical modernism, home to Matisse, Picasso and Monet’s “Waterlilies,” has gone gaga for Burton. He’s all over the place: installations in the lobby, movies and posters downstairs, drawings and paintings upstairs. Why there’s even a film festival devoted to the horror movies that influenced Burton as a boy.
For almost two generations, artists have been drawing on the energy – negative or otherwise – of commercial culture: television, advertising, Hollywood movies, the media, etc. Given this incestuous relationship, it was only a matter of time, perhaps, before commercial culture – unmediated by a Cindy Sherman or a Jeff Koons — was welcomed into the museum.
I like Burton. When his “Beetlejuice” came out in 1988, I thought it was one of the cleverest movies I had ever seen, unusually imaginative and deftly satirical. It skewered yuppie greed, Goth morbidity, new age silliness, and artistic pretension. It was playfully macabre and – this is a key to Burton’s charm – sweet. It became a great family favorite.
I’ve seen others, including “Edward Scissorhands,” a portrait of the artist as an alienated adolescent, and good stop-action films like “The Corpse Bride,” which reminded me of “Beetlejuice” in its rendering of a zany afterlife, but none has ever done it for me like that one did.
A Burton film festival is perfectly consistent with MoMA’s movie standards and its interest in “auteurs” – directors who have a unique vision. But the rest, the serious-art-exhibit-with-curatorial-analysis-and-catalog treatment goes a bit overboard.
The fun of the exhibit is mostly biographical. I especially enjoyed the scratchy Super-8mm films Burton shot as a 13-year-old, enchanted with the magic of stop-action. With it, toy animals could chase and bloody each other, a beanbag chair could move like The Blob, and a fallen soldier could be vaporized into an outline of burning lighter fluid.
His depiction of suburban sterility in “Edward Scissorhands” might be grounded in his middleclass upbringing in Burbank, Ca., but without it, Burton would never have developed his particular sensibilities. Instead of being taken to museums like MoMA as a child, the young Burton was left to comic books, horror films (especially those starring his idol, Vincent Price) and Japanese monster movies.
His cartoons, with their doodling line and gross caricatures, were shaped by psychedelic art, the hot-rod cartoons of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, Mad Magazine’s Don Martin, Dr. Seuss, Gahan Wilson, Zap Comix’s R. Crumb and Ralph Steadman (the ink-splattering illustrator of Hunter Thomson’s pieces for Rolling Stone). Museum curators now call this culture pop surrealism or “lowbrow art.”
The exhibit is an opportunity to see drawings for projects that never made it, such as “Trick or Treat,” “Little Dead Riding Hood,” and “Romeo and Juliet” (in which the protagonists are personifications of land mass and ocean mass).
You can also see animatronic puppets from “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” costumes from “Edward Scissorhands,” and “Batman Returns,” and props such as the severed heads from “Mars Attacks” and Sandworm jaws from “Beetlejuice.”
Burton spent two years at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), then four years as an animator at The Walt Disney Studios. The drawings he did in his spare time show a penchant for sight gags: to illustrate a man undressing a woman with his eyes, he shows eyeballs literally jumping out of their sockets on stalks and unzipping the clothes.
But what set Burton apart from others with a similar humor, was his ability to engage his own vulnerability. You can see that in “Vincent,” the short film he did about a boy who idolizes Vincent Price.
What you learn from this exhibit is that when Burton has been most successful, it’s because he’s kept a taut tension between three tendencies. His macabre side is kept from becoming too gruesome by his sweetness, the sweetness is kept from becoming too sentimental by the humor, the humor is kept from degenerating into silliness by the macabre and so on. When he hasn’t succeeded, it’s usually because one of these has gotten the upper hand.
