Just beyond the Monster Mouth entrance, a black-lighted, goblin-festooned carousel turns hypnotically to dorky horror-movie music.
At New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the exceedingly lowbrow Tim Burton, a cramped retrospective of the popular filmmaker’s drawings, robot sculptures and animated shorts, makes it easy to forget that this is the home of Monet, Matisse and Picasso, not Disney.
MoMA has even replaced Rodin’s Balzac in the lobby with a 6.4m-tall, blue-and-white balloon character that looks like a cross between a giant light bulb and a boy’s wide-eyed face — at least for opening week.
While guaranteed to create a new generation of young art viewers, the exhibition spins the museum in a whole new direction — away from sober modernism and closer to funhouse carnivalism. This is either a refreshing change of pace or a bald capitulation to commercialism. Or both.
There’s no question that Burton is a wildly imaginative and entertaining filmmaker. From Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice to Edward Scissorhands, Batman and Sweeney Todd, his antic humor and gothic sensibilities have given movie audiences plenty of reasons to guffaw.
As a fine artist, however, he has a way to go. Still, he is nothing if not prolific.
The show, which marks the museum’s acquisition of 11 Burton films for its collection — they are being screened in the museum’s theater throughout the run — puts no fewer than 700 items on display in just a few small rooms. While it feels comprehensive, the spread delivers mainly minor amusements in the form of sight gags and puppets.
OBSESSIVE CARTOONIST
Among the hundreds of inked illustrations, sketches and pastels are grimacing stick figures with exaggerated lips, electrified coifs and stitched limbs, as well as horribly deformed monsters aching for love.
Burton, 51, is essentially an obsessive cartoonist and an animator of the very first order, though his drawings and illustrations owe a big debt to Roald Dahl, the source of another Burton film, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
They also recall Aubrey Beardsley’s fashion illustrations and Hillary Knight’s Eloise drawings, absent the wholesome attributes.
Expressionistic, film-related drawings and dolls (created by collaborators) as well as metallic robots created by Burton’s own hand appear in the show. A nearly life-size model of Edward Scissorhands is here, as well as maquettes for Beetlejuice, a diorama and video episodes from The World of Stainboy (a series of animations made in 2000 for the Internet), drawings for unrealized projects, and amateur movies Burton shot with high-school pals in suburban Burbank, California — an inspiration for several of his feature films.
REINDEER TOPIARY
All of this adds insight into Burton’s vivid imagination and gives MoMA a populist profile, but it hardly qualifies as consuming art. The outstanding works may be a 30-second animated commercial for the show and a reindeer topiary (as Scissorhands’s fingers might have fashioned it) in the sculpture garden, which isn’t usually given to satire.
In the show’s catalog, Burton writes that as a child growing up in the cultural wasteland of Burbank, he went to horror movies, made drawings and embraced the local cemetery as his playground. Later, when he started going to museums, he says, “I was struck by how similar the vibe was to the cemetery.”
His first show in a major museum may bury Picasso in la-la land, but it does so with a liveliness that could prove contagious -— if only that weren’t quite so unhealthy for the cause of art.
On the Net: www.moma.org
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