Entrance designed by TwoSeven Inc.
Few straddle the ironic dichotomy of Outsider and Celebrity quite like filmmaker Tim Burton. His name is synonymous with the fantastically strange, humorously gothic, and stylized Victorianesque. Despite, or rather, because of, their unique vision and eccentric protagonists–which range from composite creatures to wide-eyed misfit fatales to heroic loners–Burton’s films have succeeded in drawing and captivating vast, multi-generational audiences. As the traveling exhibition “Tim Burton,” which recently opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art aptly demonstrates, the reclusive filmmaker is no less adept at drawing and engaging large multi-generational museum crowds.
Unlike the Southern California native, the exhibition bearing his name originated at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it was organized by Ron Magliozzi, Jenny He and Rajendra Roy, curators in the museum’s film department. “What immediately appealed to us was seeing the impact it had in New York,” explains Britt Salvesen, Curator of the Prints and Drawings Department, and the Photography Department at LACMA. Families explored the exhibition together, teenagers actually allowing themselves to be seen in public with their parents, “and if we can facilitate that…” Salvesen jokes. Another alluring feature may well have been success of the show’s 2009 debut, which brought over 800,000 visitors to MOMA, giving it the third highest attendance of any exhibition in the museum’s history behind only the likes of Picasso and Matisse. At a pre-opening book signing here in LA, over 700 people stood in a long line that stretched down Wilshire Boulevard in hopes of meeting the beloved director.
Tim Burton was born August 25, 1958 just outside of Los Angles, in the quintessential suburb of Burbank. He grew up a self-proclaimed recluse against a backdrop of cookie-cutter houses, and he credits the monotony of modern suburbia with having influenced his personal disregard of its outward artifice. Burton would parody this facade in the succession of films that first brought him fame in the mid-1980s, such as Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), Beetlejuice (1988), and perhaps most poetically/garishly in the 1989 social satire/tragic love story, Edward Scissorhands, which also starred the director’s childhood hero, Vincent Price.
Opening the exhibition at LACMA in many ways seems more like a homecoming than destination en route. “It’s great to bring [the exhibition] back to LA,” states Michael Govan, director of LACMA, who designates the expatriate filmmaker a “local boy” and describes his hometown as “a place of film.” Likewise, the exhibition caters not only to dedicated fans of Burton, but to those hard-wired into the popular culture of animation, comics, film and the process of making a movie come to life. The three-part exhibition showcases the wide range of ingredients that contribute to the filmmaker’s practice–original sketches, storyboards, concept artworks, costumes, maquettes, puppets and props–alongside Burton’s original art reflecting the director’s admittedly dark personal visions.
However much the “Media Capital of the World” seems to be the target of young Burton’s malcontent, the opening room of the exhibition, aka “Surviving Burbank,” reveals the other side of the coin. It tells the story of a teenage artist submitting work to numerous local organizations, and shows the letter of encouragement he received upon submitting his first illustrated children’s story for publication. Segue into the next room, “Beautifying Burbank” and an explosion of colors, paintings and pastels, are met with graphic black-and-white ink drawings covering Burton’s two years at CalArts and four years working as an animator for Walt Disney Studios. His ink drawings and watercolors disclose the merging influences from sources such as Gorey, Steadman and even Disney, and their digestion, as Burton’s signature style emerges.
Burton designed three installations specifically for the exhibition. The first work is the monstrous mouth-entrance complete with red-carpet tongue. The second is a black-lit carousel room, which serves as a transport between the salon-style installation of his early career to the virtual candy-store of paraphernalia from Burton’s full-budget “Beyond Burbank” releases. The third is the show’s finale, a collaboration between the director and his long-time composer Danny Elfman, which is unique to the LA location. But the exhibit is not merely an homage to Burton, it also showcases the collaborative nature of filmmaking. Drawings by Kelly Asbury, costume designs by Colleen Atwood, and maquette models by Rick Heinrich, are but some of the works by his collaborators on view, while the sound design features the pulsating music of Danny Elfman, who has been Burton’s film composer since Pee Wee in 1985.
Just as Burton’s imagination could not be contained by the uniformity of SoCal suburbia or his early employers, the impact of “Burton” on LACMA exceeds the Resnick Pavilion to permeate entire campus. A large topiary deer–a la Scissorhands–sits adjacent, in the open courtyard; a large inflatable weeble-style Balloon Boy gently rocks atop the stairs of the old Spaulding Street entrance; while mounted in the nearby Ahmanson Building is a companion exhibition, “Burton Selects.” While the solo show highlights his contributions to contemporary popular culture, the curated prints and drawings place his vision in the context of venerable art historical traditions.
“I wasn’t sure what to expect,” Salvesen says of the process, which included searching though LACMA’s digital archives with keywords such as “skeletons,” then paring down the results via email with Burton, who now resides in north London with Helena Bonham-Carter and their two children. The resulting exhibition is replete with heavy concentrations of German Expressionism and Surrealism, with icons such as Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (El steno de la razor produce monstrous) and Redon’s The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Mounts Toward Infinity and selected Japanese prints, including Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s triptych Mitsukuni and the Skeleton Spectator. A startling similarity between Burton’s young claymation recluse Vincent and a linoleum print by Mexican artist Leopoldo Mendez, must have caught even Burton by surprise.
While some critics’ eyebrows may rise over the Salon-style exhibition of Burton’s sketchbook style drawings and watercolors, costumes and movie props, the audience appears entranced. Small children gasp as their vision fills with fantastic creatures, teenagers consume the didactic panels, and adults walk through with bemused looks, as if recalling their first introduction to Burton’s besotted characters. And though they revel in the limelight of popular culture, and reap the financial blessings of Warner Bros., Disney, Fox and the like, Burton’s macabre characters and mega-films ironically share find common ground in many of the same themes and methods–fractured identity, pastiche, isolation, and notions of the other–that dominate contemporary practice.