Provided by explosiveskull https://twitter.com/kaboomskull
Thank you, thank you.
Our country...
Come on, start already, I'm bored.
I just do it, I don't plan it,
I don't draw it out.
I just take a brush or a spray can on a white canvas and...
I feel... I don't feel it's from a particular source,
I think it's from all sources, and...
It's just a mixture of everything.
And most of the time it's just out of my head,
I just imagine this image and just paint from there.
Sometimes I get ideas from other things,
but basically it's from my imagination.
I'm just expressing... inside,
just try to, I guess, make great things.
I'm an artist... I don't really think I had
much of a choice, I just am,
born that way, I don't know what else I could've done.
That was the serious art world,
and at that time any kind of goofy, whimsical come into
the art world and sort of shake it up.
Mad-Glad-Man?
- Glad... and Mad... - The Mad-Glad-Man.
In the early 1980's, Kenny was a major force
in the East Village art scene.
They effectively changed the language of the arts here
in New York in a matter of two or three years in the sense that
they created a tremendous variety of imagery
and characters that have appealed to a vast audience.
Malia!
They're playing "White Christmas".
Look up here.
Check it out.
That was good, right?
You know, when you're...
you're studying to be a plumber, you're a plumber for life.
You study to be an airplane pilot, you're that,
you don't go back to school.
But artists keep... they have to re-discover endlessly,
they can't just go forward, doing what they're doing,
they have to extend it, and I think Kenny
is a brilliant example of that.
He puts, like, the... things happening in the world,
everything that's happening in the world he's willing to, like,
funnel it in, put it in the Mixmaster, it goes into
his paintings, and it's like his life as an artist
and his art is inseparable.
All of my favorite artists embody their art... the way
they look, the way they live.
Spending some time with Kenny
is like immersion into his whole aesthetic world.
I think all great art, to me, has to have some element of...
humor to it.
Kenny was very, very influential.
Anyone that had any knowledge of... '80s culture
had to know of that group of graffiti artists, that they...
they left an enormous imprint in the culture.
I think artists,
a lot of artists come from dysfunction.
There's always an exception.
I don't know Kenny's background, though.
I don't know his history at all.
I mean, personal life, yeah.
You use everything.
Not wasting... precious plastic.
When you can turn it into...
Bathroom sculpture!
I mean, who would've thought that a straw and a cup top
would make such fantastic sculpture?
In my opinion, it's fantastic.
Many people think I'm crazy.
And I think that's okay.
I grew up in Los Angeles,
and a lot of people, you know, would see where Los Angeles
is in a work, you know, very Pop.
The place, especially growing up in the '60s,
and I grew up in the Valley,
and everything is pretty plastic and Pop and bright
and there's not too many old things or traditional things.
You know, I didn't know anything else, so I would say that
that has something to with what I do.
I remember once I was watching him paint
and he took a paintbrush with paint and he drew a perfectly
straight line, like you put a ruler in and would draw,
and I said to him, gee, I could never do that, and he said,
you don't have to, and it's true.
I sometimes wonder, where did he get the talent?
Because I really don't know.
I never thought he was gonna...
be a professional... no, really and truly.
Growing up in the typical suburban setting...
dad working, mom home... my dad was a sweet man,
but I don't really feel like he was there for me.
Oh, he had parents?
No, anytime we had a meal, I would see the family,
but we rarely saw them.
He started to get his aesthetic back then, 9th, 10th, 11th,
10th grade, and there was always an irony in his work, I mean,
there was always something kind of sinister or kooky-sinister
behind the veneer that was trying to be normal.
I always felt a little isolated.
I never really belonged to any particular group or clique,
and just... I felt different from everybody.
I was kind of an outsider.
I think, you know, that has to do with
being an artist, as well.
Kenny Scharf was a young boy, of course, but as a young boy,
he was watching a great deal of television,
it must've been very interesting to see him, to see this
young boy in that circumstance, what impact that had on him,
and suddenly all of that became material for him to use
in his fantasy art making.
Like, sometimes I'll dream things, you know,
cartoon imagery or something, like stuff I've seen on TV
that's now it's part of my subconscious.
Kenny Scharf was very self-conscious, even as
a student, of being an artist that's working off of
the television culture.
That, to him, I suppose, is what theology and cathedrals are
to a medieval artist, and so the question's
what do you do with it?
You live in it and it seems to me is what he's done is
to try to encourage some kind of intellectual appreciation
of what's at stake here, in this culture.
It was totally dull '70s going on in LA and I start
really getting into Warhol and the Factory and New York,
I was like, this is just the most fun thing ever,
and I want to go there, so that was basically my fuel
for moving to New York, it was learning about Andy
and how he made art fun.
Reporter: Kenny Scharf first came to the attention
of New York in the early 1980s when he made paintings based on
the Jetsons, the Flintstones, and other cartoon imagery
found in popular culture.
You've lots of religious paintings.
Yes, I do, I found that in the trash, that one, there.
- You found that in the trash. - I found most of them,
the religious things, in the trash.
I don't like to make any distinction between my art
and my life or my surroundings.
I try to just be myself, and if this was this kind of thing
which... I don't know, I don't know what you would call it...
decoration or just my apartment, I don't know.
I applied to all arts schools,
and the only one that would take me was SVA, which took anyone.
I happened to be wandering around in the hall
and I heard the Devo music.
♪ ...whip it good ♪
♪ I said whip it ♪
And so I kind of followed it and then I came upon
Keith, painting to the beat of the music, in this room,
and he was almost finished except for the corner where
he was standing, so he had painted himself into a corner
and I just stood there and I remember thinking
when I saw him, this is the person I've been looking for.
This is what I imagined when I went to art school in New York.
What's the story with Andy Warhol?
What do you think of... of what he's doing today?
I mean, since I came to New York,
or even when I learned about art history,
it was like that was like the figure for me.
He was like my hero, and then I remember I met him,
the first time I met him was at the Peppermint Lounge
when they opened the Peppermint Lounge in Times Square,
and he just thought I was this cute boy and he was taking...
he was taking feathers out of this girl's hat and putting them
in my hair and I remember I said to him, I said, you know,
we're in the same show together,
and he's like, "Oh, really, what's that?"
I go, "New York/New Wave," he goes, "Oh, yeah?"
And I said, and I told him my name and I said, and you'll,
you'll hear me... you're gonna remember that name,
you'll hear it again.
I knew Kenny was going to be famous
from the minute I met him.
- Really? Why? - I don't know, I...
You know, I just...
I just knew he would be.
There was a short period where you and Kenny
were hanging out together, very brief period...
- No, no, no, not that brief. - Not that brief?
- But you had a falling out. - No, we never had
a falling out, I don't know, you know,
I don't know what happened.
I mean...
Well, he said he went tagging with you once around the city.
- Did he? - He had never tagged before,
but he borrowed the spray can from you.
- No. - And he did a TV set
and he wrote, "Flintstones" inside it...
- this was long before anything... - I don't remember this,
but I was on heavy drugs, I don't remember.
Sounds good, though.
Three artists... Scharf, Basquiat, and Haring...
it's kind of one of those quirks of timing, I think,
that they all kind of came together at the same moment,
and it was kind of fascinating that they all three came from
different parts of the country, and they all seemed to have just
found each other, some kind of magnets drew them together.
They brought a vitality and an energy to art
that just hadn't been there.
The importance of those three artists, they just seemed
to bring the '80s alive, really.
Their engagement with the streets, specifically,
making that... anyone can see that, right, you didn't
have to go into a white cube, you didn't have to go into
a museum... anyone could experience that, and even
just their deciding that this is art, this is art as much as,
you know, a framed picture on the wall of the Whitney Museum.
All of that... the streets, these spaces,
the use of their imagery... felt about this idea
of making art less precious and making it more accessible.
Can I talk about sex and drugs and rock and roll? No.
When I came to New York in the '70s, New York was a...
great place because it was bankrupt, it was
a bankrupt city, so you could move in, you didn't need
very little money to survive and so all the artists came,
of course, I mean, everybody came to the East Village and,
you know, you'd invent yourself.
Well, I created the fantasy person that I wanted
to be, and I called myself Jet Scharf.
Kenny used to live in the back of this building
gave to the back of Klaus Nomi's building.
I'm Klaus Nomi, I'm from the planet Nomi.
So you'd hear him rehearsing.
There's a lot of... roof parties at the time.
Summertime was roof party time.
There was a lot of hanky-panky on the roof.
I just have this image of New York
in the summer on the roof, I mean, God.
I arrived in '77 and I came straight
from England and I was 17.
It was... it was just
a completely different city than it is now.
Downtown was... was very empty.
That's the one thing I remember most about New York
at that time, is you could walk downtown at night
and it was absolutely empty,
and it was really, really beautiful and really romantic,
you know, really mysterious and wonderful.
It was, probably, the most creative place
in the world at that point.
What those guys were doing and what we were
all trying to do as artists is be individual and have
our own lifestyles and our own flavors.
It was a fresh, new idea to this broad canvas
which was New York City.
We were all trying to get into the doors of the art world,
but also trying to hold the doors open
for some other people to come in.
I think Kenny was, he was really,
really making video art then.
I remember meeting him one night with Bruno going over there
and he was editing or something.
Me and Kenny went to Scotland to visit Samantha McEwen,
but then Kenny decided to make a vampire movie,
me being the vampire.
And Samantha's father said, "You can film anywhere you want
"except in the cemetery because the whole family's
in the cemetery," of course, the one place that Kenny
wanted to film was in the cemetery.
...bind her! Bind her!
Every day there'd be, like, 200 things he'd have to go
and do, but they weren't like normal people's things
he had to do, it wasn't like go to the office and post
the letter, it was like you know, take the vacuum cleaner
for a walk, you know, like...
really unexpected.
Most appliances and telephones, et cetera,
are really pretty boring and I transform them
into something different.
It just changes an average person's life... you're using
the telephone, everyone does it all the time,
you don't think about it.
Every time you use a phone, if you can like, put your finger
on the jewels and, you know, you pick it up and there's, like,
pretty things to look at, it helps, you know,
it improves the quality of life.
He paints on everything and anything and he always did,
you know, always, and customizing... back then
it was customizing TVs and toaster ovens
and telephones and...
Yeah, there's no separation between Kenny and his art.
What else do you have?
The broom even has a ribbon on it... look at this...
even the broom.
Every single thing that Kenny did was not what
you expected... you never would've imagined anybody would
do that, and I think Keith also was, you know,
when he started doing the subway drawings and stuff,
I mean, it was completely out of nowhere, I think that was
the most amazing thing about them, was that they were both
completely sort of unexpected.
Also, the other thing was very, very, very real about them
was that it was their generation,
it was their work, their life, their idea.
It had absolutely nothing to do with what was going on
in the galleries at that time.
- You love this song? - It's beauty, Popeye.
- I wrote it. - You did?
- Yeah, I wrote this song. - You wrote this song?
This song... among others, but yes.
- Ooh... - Yeah, that looks cool, yeah?
Okay, so living with Keith, being with Keith,
I was just wondering, because I know that there was
a really beautiful relationship
but then an undercurrent sometimes of...
Well, it was hard for me, when Keith and I were roommates,
that's when he started doing the subway drawings and it just
kind of exploded for him, like, really exploded and I remember
the first couple of times people came over,
it was like my work was invisible,
I remember the feeling of, like, what am I gonna... you know,
so yeah, it was hard on the ego, for sure.
It didn't even really sink in that, yeah, here I am, like,
four years later doing drawings at the Whitney and you have all
these new things heaped on top of you that you're supposed to
deal with and be responsible for and supposed to become
this sort of role model for all these other people.
It's sort of a big responsibility, to be the one
person that is singled out because every... all these
other people, I mean, hundreds of other people that supposedly
would like to be in your shoes but they are not given a chance
because at any one time there's only a handful of people
that get to do it.
He and Keith were absolutely like brothers, you know,
and, and, you know, but fiercely competitive, I mean,
very seriously competitive, and I think Kenny's process
wasn't there yet, I mean, I don't know what
Kenny's feelings are about that era, but I do know,
I do remember it being... witnessing this incredible
struggle in himself to sort of become the next thing
that he needed to become.
I remember going to Club 57, like we just went there
and hung out and listened to the jukebox and drank...
This crowd was the first crowd to really
completely embrace popular culture, right?
- Mm-hmm, I guess so... - First downtown, hip scene
to really get into it.
You guys weren't aware of it at the time?
- Hmm? - You weren't conscious of that?
Sort of, yeah, because we were doing it because it was fun.
It was what we grew up on too.
It was like summer camp, it was fun dressing up...
Yeah, every night was a new channel.
It was very mysterious,
it wasn't exactly clear what Club 57 was.
It was completely under the radar.
I became Kenny's girlfriend for about two years.
He eventually took me down there because...
Finding it was very difficult, it was in a church,
so you could actually look for it and not realize
that that's where you were supposed to be going
for a long time.
It was a petri dish for... experimenting
with an audience that was supportive,
and you didn't have to worry about doing something terrible
and then you'd get bad reviews or ruin your career
because there was no career, there was no money.
I'm just so excited... ever since I came to New York, well,
I... I just never thought I'd find myself here
while back on the farm I used to always dream about being
some kind of animal, but I never thought I'd be a bunny!
We'll have wonderful entertainment
for all you friends out there.
Well, the great thing about Club 57 was that it really
was this incubator of talent and that there were no boundaries
and the whole punk aesthetic of "do it yourself
and you can do anything" prevailed.
So people ended up taking to the stage like a duck
takes to water and creating performance art
kind of in the style of the Dada-ists that everyone studied
in art school but also with a nod towards Andy Warhol
and the Happenings of the '60s and then just incorporating
other elements that made it our own.
Kenny was always in the middle of that.
♪ We've got an uncontrollable urge... ♪
♪ I've got an uncontrollable urge... ♪
That was our whole life, it was party all night,
go out all night to the clubs, you know, and then we'd get up
somehow in the morning and go to school and then, you know,
do the whole thing all over again.
We went out every single night.
We just created a family where we felt
we were understood and accepted for who we are.
Kenny was very, very much part of the New York club scene,
and that club scene evolved into an art scene.
That was a very important move that happened,
that the club scene become an art scene.
To boil Kenny down, the word would be compulsion.
You could not take Kenny away from the paint.
You go to the studio and you can see
he's fucking compulsive, you know?
And you can see that in Kenny... some people call it genius,
and a lot of people like to pass that compulsion off as genius,
and I guess you could say, in Kenny's case probably,
that he is a genius.
Sometimes I start with an image and then work
around that, and sometimes, like on these paintings over here,
I'm just cleaning my brushes and I let the drips and I let them
form a background or maybe I let them... I make a weird shape
and then it looks like something else
and then I make it something else.
There's a few different ways I start a painting.
Everything just naturally evolved by itself and...
It's just a mixture of everything.
I really thought that all of Kenny's stuff
was not of this earth, like his stuff came from another planet.
Kenny had his own unique, unique world to present to us.
I know our...
I know our viewers are really anxious,
they're all writing in, they want to hear about Jetsonism.
What is Jetsonism?
Well, um, Jetsonism is a part of the whole religion
of Hanna Barbarism, and the Jetsonism section
is the Nirvana part, the really fun Heaven part
where you get to go.
Uh-huh, and that entails, I understand...
I read your thing and it's something about...
The nuclear holocaust about to consume us all.
Well, it's on our minds, definitely,
definitely on the minds of everyone.
We live in a world in which the great powers have poised
and aimed at each other horrible missiles of destruction,
nuclear weapons that can, in a matter of minutes,
arrive at each other's country and destroy...
virtually the civilized world we live in.
There is no substitute for victory, Mr. President...
A lot of the artwork, particularly Kenny's,
was obsessed with this concept of nuclear annihilation.
The feeling of me and my friends and the New York
club scene was that we're just about to explode
and so it was actually,
let's party now and just have as much
fun as we can because it's all gonna be over tomorrow.
I don't know what to do.
I have nothing to believe in.
Just stop! Are you confused?
With Club 57, with some of those energies
going on downtown, there was a lot of infantilism.
There was a lot of regressive, really childish behavior
that really, you know, you could push it so far but...
in ways where absurdity could be embraced
beyond just experimenting.
I think that there was a reason for that, it was sort of,
you know, we were promised a great world and then
all of a sudden it was like Ronald Reagan and there was
all this... it wasn't the Jetsons.
A lot of people don't take jokey art seriously.
It's not what he's depicting so much as
the style of the depiction...
I suppose you could say is a little adolescent or nostalgic
for adolescence or a different time when things were
a little less troubled or complicated,
you know they're fantasies,
it was fun, it wasn't meant to be
taken seriously but it was done very serious, I mean,
they were serious about what they were doing,
it was communicating to a lot of people.
You can't beat abstract expressionism for being
a beautiful decoration in a bank lobby or maybe the waiting room
in a hospital, you can't beat that because it doesn't say
anything... it's calm and it's tranquil and it... it doesn't
violate the environment like one of Kenny's paintings
or one of mine would challenge the environment,
so it'd be very challenging to an environment.
Oh, look, another heart.
Ooh...
Ooh, there.
That's good, right?
Oh, maybe that. That looks good right there, huh?
Yeah, oh, yeah.
There we go.
I knew that hole was meant for something.
So what do you consider serious art?
This is serious art... to me, it's all serious.
I wouldn't be doing it all the time if it wasn't serious,
and some people don't like that,
because I've always had that thing, I'm like, people thought
I was obnoxious because I probably was.
But, you know, sometimes you just have to be yourself, right?
And if you're screaming out all the time... and that's who
you are and you do things loudly,
then what are you gonna do?
This particular generation of artists,
these were individuals who could dance...
who could dance, whereas generations of artists before,
they couldn't dance for jack shit!
Big difference.
And the first thing that happens,
Jean-Michel became very rich and successful and all that,
Kenny and him always had this weird thing going on.
It was sort of love-hate, but he would sometimes have a bit
of an attitude or, like, Kenny just had a very unique kind of
fun-loving, effervescent, happy-go-lucky personality,
and perhaps that rubbed Jean the wrong way.
And then Keith made it very, very big and all of a sudden
he became rich, which was great for him,
we were so happy for him, you know,
but Kenny was moving heaven and earth... he was obsessed,
he had to make it or otherwise, you know,
he'd be the one who didn't.
They just had this incredible energy,
they were just absolutely hellbent on making
the next piece or making the next picture, and that drive,
in a way was really, really about their own life,
it wasn't anymore about the group or the...
it stopped being so playful.
I mean, everyone became, like, career... everyone that was
doing things then just did started doing it
more professional and started...
You got tired of not having money after a while, too,
people just...
Yeah, when you see other people that are in
your same group that are going places, you say, you know,
I want to go there too, so everyone got real serious.
Graffiti was so monumentally significant when you were
in New York when it was really happening, when it was happening
on the trains and when some of those artists who make
the effort to get their work out on canvas, where they weren't
just writing their names anymore, they were really
trying to be artists... it was so, it was such an insanely
powerful moment that any other artist
was going to be affected by it.
So Kenny, Keith and few other artists became inspired
and started doing work on the street.
Now, it wasn't graffiti, it was like something which now
we that have Banksy and Shepard Fairey and stuff
like that, we can call it street art.
It's all part of the philosophy
that we all believe in, this whole group of us,
that art was not only for the gallery wall, the museum wall...
art should be for everybody.
With this generation coming along, they're already
finding themselves in a landscape in New York
whereby the streets were littered, and yet within that,
they had the energy, the need, the desire, the original drive
and also their motion, their ability of flexibility
of working in the streets.
And then Kenny, I'm working with him, the response
was extraordinary, and more importantly,
even the Whitney Museum immediately responded
so positively that they purchased one of
the largest paintings that Kenny Scharf did.
The main way to communicate was to get out on the street,
and the message got out there and of course the attention came
and then, then it started to unravel a little bit.
When the success, the money, the fame, when the uptown world
started paying attention to the downtown world,
some of that wonderful, naive idealism was lost.
Times change a lot, and to deal with success is not
an easy thing, you know, people trade you
so you become a commodity.
The '80s became a very, you know, dark.
The drugs were getting very heavy,
everybody thinks of the '80s as this happy,
crazy fun... it was none of that.
Bruno was my good friend, still is.
He was going down to Brazil and so I said, "Oh, you know what?
That would be perfect, I'm going to go down to Brazil,"
and then we took a plane from Rio to Salvador,
we were going there for Carnival,
and we got on the plane and I saw her sitting in the front,
and I looked at her and she looked at me and I smiled
and she smiled back.
And that was it, I met her on the plane.
Bruno was really jealous because we were smitten.
The next thing I knew, I was off on a honeymoon with her.
I don't know, I abandoned Bruno and the two of us went
to this... incredible place in the middle of nowhere
called Canoa Quebrada, and then, like, oh, literally
two weeks later, she's like, asking me to have her baby
and I'm agreeing to it.
In retrospect, it's insane, and it is, but we have Zena.
So, no regrets.
With this young lady, in a hut on the water,
with the Amazon jungle creeping behind him,
no neighbors, no roads there,
no electricity and no telephone.
He bought that land.
It's important to know that background
because there's not too many artists did that.
And he went back there and he made many paintings there,
so there's a background to this adventure, there's a reality
to these colors and all of these things going on here,
and that is what is the magic with Kenny.
I'm in love with nature
and I'm embracing the...
the beauty of nature, and the beauty of painting,
actual paint, colors, that whole thing.
I love nature, that is my religion, really, I mean,
I think nature is God, I guess.
I seem to have a lack of warm colors, right?
- All greens and... - Yeah, it is funny...
I travel everywhere... from all over the world...
and I found the best trash,
that's the only reason I go there, yeah,
because it's the best trash.
- Where? - Bahia.
- You have a house there? - Yeah, I got it because
the trash on the beach is like no other.
I mean, really.
So, you went to Brazil and got... what did you...
- just gather? - I clean the beach.
I clean the beach, first in front of our house, and then
I start going north and south along the beach, and then
I go to, like, the riverbeds
where the rivers run into the water,
because that's where all the stuff comes out.
And I... I take a lot of the garbage.
I've been doing it probably for about...
30 years? Around.
It's like you're having a fight...
I am, actually, yeah, how's that look?
Does that look gorgeous?
There, that is gorgeous.
Wow!
Yeah.
One, two, three.
♪ Bahia Buddha Hotel ♪
♪ Where the family comes to play ♪
♪ Where sunshine comes your way ♪
♪ Bahia Buddha Hotel in Mission Bay ♪
- Yeah. - Yeah.
I think when Keith was around Kenny,
Keith was sillier than he was around other people,
as we all were, around Kenny.
I guess Kenny just brought it out in you.
They were both getting more serious because the whole
art world and their careers were more serious than they had been
when they started out, playing the whole art world game,
but Kenny helped keep the silly side going.
We all were at the tail end of the baby boomer generation,
so we had grown up with Vietnam
but we were too young to have been drafted into it,
so almost breathing a sigh of relief, wow, you know,
at least we didn't have a war,
and then the threat of nuclear annihilation was always
hanging over you, particularly after Reagan got elected,
but we never dreamed that there would be this microbe
that would be our Vietnam, our Hydrogen bomb
and it really destroyed the community.
Scientists at the National Centers for Disease
Control in Atlanta today released the results of a study
which shows that the lifestyle of some male homosexuals
has triggered an epidemic...
It is about health, about attitudes,
about looking at life in these United States.
For the first time the number of AIDS cases
passed the 100,000 mark.
There's a new AIDS death every half hour.
The federal government has been accused of
discrimination by a lack of funding for research.
The fact that it has taken the president five years to begin
to even address this problem publicly demonstrates that
this administration hasn't given it
the level of commitment that it deserves.
It was very, very scary because nobody knew how
it was transmitted, you know, on one hand you didn't want
to reject your friends who were ill,
but then you were thinking, well, am I going to get it
if I touch them?
AIDS killed off a good third of the creative energy
of that time and forced us all to grow up.
- ...say hi. - Hi.
Yeah.
God, it was like, a couple of years ago.
- Thirty years ago. - Thirty years ago.
1990, that's almost 30 years ago, it's like yesterday,
whenever I start to talk about it, you know?
Yeah, it's hard.
So he was lying there.
He couldn't talk, he couldn't open his eyes,
he was very agitated.
His whole body was kind of... he was fighting it, you know?
He was fighting... dying, and I sat... and I was alone,
there was no one else around, and I sat there with him
and I held his hand and I said,
you should... time for you to relax, you can just let it go,
I said you... everything you've done...
...everything you've done will go on and be more and more
influential and powerful and you have done an amazing thing and
you can really let it go and relax.
And he did... I could feel his whole body just relax,
and I knew he heard me, I told him I loved him...
...you know, I left, and then he died.
You know it was the end, and Kenny had babies, you know,
we all have children so, it was a very strange way of living.
Sometimes it would be just so harsh
and so cruel and so depressing,
and then you come home and then there are these,
these children, and they are innocent and full of life
and full of joy and really they help me, in a major way,
of getting through that horrible time.
We decided to move to Miami because Kenny was so sad.
He cried, almost every day he cried because he was so sad.
We just kind of, like, really made it, because Kenny
always managed to support his family from his work
and at that point it wasn't really happening for him.
My biggest source of stress was, I can't pay
the bills, what am I gonna do?
We had everything traded... I had my rent traded, my studio,
I had the dentist traded for art, I had that credit card
I had, which was pretty much our groceries.
You know, growing up with him working as an artist,
there were moments that it was really scary and we wouldn't
really know if or where we would be able to take care of things
and pay for things next time.
He clearly sheltered us from that, we never really knew
exactly what was happening when it was happening,
but I remember feeling that,
okay, things are hard right now.
I had this idea that once money came, that money
was always going to come, like if people were going to get
behind your paintings right away, like as soon as
that happens they will always be behind you,
you'll never get abandoned,
and I really believed that, so I just spent money,
I didn't save it, thinking that it was always there to stay
and then it stopped coming.
I think about sometimes what would've happened
if we had stayed in New York and kind of pushed through.
I almost kind of feel like it would've been more beneficial
for him to actually face some of the things that were coming up
inside of him instead of running away.
I have a balancing act between being a responsible
adult and the Peter Pan syndrome
because I just feel like life is so much about the moment,
so I want every moment fun and beautiful and the...
That's not really the way life works.
No, it's not, it's not reality.
That's the fear of growing up,
because reality is reality, so either you don't have to
give up the play in order for it to be serious,
you don't have to give up the play to grow up.
Kenny was so disorganized.
He could never find his checkbook, his passport,
you know, and it was getting to be a problem, and I said,
look, Kenny, I'll help you out, let me help you get organized
and he had gotten a studio, so he needed help, so...
During that time Kenny's... if you look at his work during
that time, there's a lot of dark paintings.
I'm into Pop Art but the reason I feel
it's different now than the Pop Art of the '60s is Pop Art
from the '60s was more of a stance, like, from far away.
What I'm doing is more taking these things out of my own
subconscious that I grew up on and so it's kind of...
surrealism, in a way... not surrealism but just natural,
organic, from my own imagination.
At a certain point those of us who are overly
identified with the East Village... look at all the stuff
that helped us, that was that '80s moment when we were all
pushed probably more than we should have been, you know,
we probably weren't all that great.
We got a lot of hype and a lot of love and it was very helpful
for us to have that so young in life,
but conversely, when that moment was over, it was passé.
And so what was once a badge of honor and recognition
became a stigmata.
So then he had to deal with a really, really rough period
where I don't think that guy could've gotten run over by
an ice cream truck on a nice day in Soho kind of thing...
he really, his market dried up, whatever, the interest dried up,
he was sort of like yesterday's news.
I remember someone once said, someone came down from
New York, and they were like, "Oh, Kenny Scharf,
I thought you were dead."
And I was like, almost like, "Not only did I thought
you were dead, but you're supposed to be dead."
I did internalize all these feelings of failure,
of being a has-been.
I didn't know, really, what to do, I don't really know
anything else, you know, I'm not like a great businessman,
so the only way I knew how to make money was making art.
Now, Kenny's in the same boat with me to a certain extent,
and here's the boat we're in.
After the second World War,
New York becomes the center of the world art capital.
The mode that it used to do it with was abstract expressionism,
see, it's a new, fresh world.
And Jackson Pollock was a premiere star
of that whole plethora of other characters
who pulled in on that, just like they did
the graffiti movement.
So this reigned for a long, long time, for 30 years or so,
this philosophy, and you would think, well, Pop Art
would be the breakthrough, but Pop Art immediately took on
the aspect of being appropriation art,
so you weren't free there either.
But with graffiti that Kenny was in, you could slip back
into a form of realism, a cartoon form of realism,
so me and Kenny have this brotherhood of being
cartoon oriented, and it's still to this day disregarded,
still to this fucking day disregarded
as sophisticated art.
Cartoony sometimes makes things
more accessible to more people.
You can get away with things in animation
that you couldn't with real people.
You can say and do and depict situations and people
and be very straightforward in your criticism,
in your social critique, but somehow confined to a canvas,
it loses a dimension somehow... I don't know, that doesn't
make any sense but that's how it feels.
It doesn't leave the viewer a lot of room
to exercise his or her own imagination.
I think all the things which make Kenny's work important
and attractive, they're also reasons for skeptics
to say, well, this is not important,
you know, it's not profound.
I think many artists whose work is... appealing,
superficially appealing, it's easy to take that appeal
and turn it around and use it as a justification
to dismiss the work.
I think I have a syndrome, it's the syndrome
where you see faces in everything,
you know, when I look at houses, the windows and then...
I just see faces everywhere, when I look at... flowers,
whatever, I'm always seeing faces... eyeballs, nose,
and mouth... I'm always making faces.
I think maybe, I think that everything is like a person,
in a way, so I think everything has a personality, and that's
why I see faces, like it kind of conveys the personality
and not only every living thing, but even that
inanimate object, to me, has personality.
Well, yeah, I came up with the idea I was going to do
an animation, and pretty much moved to LA to do it.
I thought, well, this is... I'm... it's not like I wanted
to stop being in the art world, I just thought
I need to branch out, so that was a big dream of mine
and I realized that I want to pursue it, and I did.
We moved to LA and he came here with that dream
that he was going to be able to make it happen.
He actually worked with Cartoon Network.
The cartoon did happen, he... I think he played a couple
of times on Cartoon Network, but it wasn't really, you know,
it didn't... it didn't really make it.
You know, you can hang on by your fingernails,
that is the art-creative process,
all you need are the fingernails, right?
You're still hanging on. Most people... what is it,
the odds of even having a successful career?
It's infinitesimal.
You know, there are a lot of people that do it for a minute
and a half but Kenny's been doing it for 40 years.
Artists have a hard time, whether it's at the beginning
of their career, the middle of their career
or the end of their career. No one escapes,
but if you make your art from love you're fine.
I'm not gonna lie... I was on the 15 bus going across
and I seen him just working right there and I'm like, yo,
that's, that's too cool, like, I need that,
I need that, anything.
Okay, before I do it, do you want a monster or happy?
Happy. It's all about happy and love.
- Happy. - And peace, man.
- Okay. Check it out. - That is so dope!
- You got it. - I got a smiley face!
Hey, Joe, bring it in, bring it in, baby.
Something very important that's going on
is this increasing merger of progressive popular culture
and fine art culture.
So, Kenny was in the forefront of that, and we see that this
is really defining progressive culture today more and more.
There's a group that resists that
and Kenny, as much as any other artist,
is fusing the two together.
Art's always done such a good job at speaking
to such a small number of people.
Kenny is a real populist, he's happy with it being on
the street, but for people to go, like,
"Wow, that's kind of cool. What's that advertising?"
It's like, oh, nothing, it's advertising free thinking.
I think, what a subversive message
to put out in our culture.
Well, I think that street art does not have to be
filtered through an academic power system
or a critical art power scene.
It is right where it is and it's direct to the people.
Yeah, I mean, it's great when you make work on the street,
there's no red tape, there's no committee, there's no, like...
just you have it, you think about it, you leave your house,
it comes to fruition, you see it the next day.
I like cartoons because I think of them sort of like actors
that never get old and you can kind of create these
compositions with them and, you know, in different countries,
you can not speak the same language
but you could've grown up on the same thing.
He's guilty of engaging in the F-word, "Fun,"
and so you see that instantly in his work.
He's not out of control... sometimes he has this
out of control appearance to his work, but it's always
in control at the same time, and so there's
a definite discipline that you see in his work
with each one of his pictures.
He's always kind of done the things he wanted to do
and not really play along, you know, a lot of times there's
a comfort zone in the art world that a lot of people
don't want to move past, and another thing's exclusivity.
You know, he'll do a museum show but then he'll go and paint
all these cars for people that he meets randomly, that show up,
and so that might work against the sort of preciousness
of a lot of people that sort of pigeonhole art into.
But at the same time he's reaching a whole different
group of people and I think for him that's what's fun,
that's what's interesting and that's what he goes towards.
I get included a lot in these street art
type of places, exhibitions, and things where it's me
and a lot of, I guess, more traditional type of
graffiti, graffiti art.
In a way I weirdly feel like I'm the kind of clowny,
gay element, the only clowny gay element that exists.
I actually never really felt like I belonged
in any of the defined groups, which I still don't...
belong in any particular group.
I'm not that and I'm not that and I'm not that, I'm kind of
like all of it and there really isn't a group for all of it.
I think the kids call it now, I think they call it "fluid,"
is that what the kids call...
Sexuality, your sexuality is fluid.
I'd say it was challenging for me when I was younger,
when I was still kind of questioning myself
and I was concerned with what other people might think
about me, and now that I'm older,
I don't really care about that.
It's not easy, living in this world, it's not.
Take a shell-fie?
A shell-fie!
Or a trashy?
Well, that's not really as funny as shell-fie.
It's all personal consumption,
and then it gets used in other stuff.
I'm obsessed with garbage,
I'm obsessed with plastic, mostly,
plastic garbage, the impact it has on our world.
There's hardly anyplace on the globe that you can go to
where you won't see some kind of garbage, trash.
One of the things I like to do is take this element
that I find dangerous and turning it into something
that I find attractive, that is interesting to me.
I love the idea of taking the discarded, the unwanted,
and turning them into something else.
Yeah, he's got a particular attraction to cast-off items
and he likes these old devices.
Give him a princess telephone
and it's going to become something else.
One point that I think does need to be highlighted
about Kenny Scharf is the importance of performers,
and in a way he's really a bit of a showman, he's an artist
but he's also kind of a Master of Ceremonies, and I think
that's a part of his generosity as an artist
that most people don't see or understand.
I think the timing is starting to be right for all
the stuff that I've been kind of wanting for a long time.
It seems like the rest of the world
is finally gonna catch up to me.
It's not about being a star, being a... famous person,
it's just about being an artist and creative.
So are you excited to see your painting?
Yeah.
When was the last time you saw it?
When they had it in the old Whitney.
I'll see you later.
So what was your idea behind it?
Was it... was there something
that conceptually you were feeling?
Yeah, I think it's like...
It's a combination of...
tranquility and chaos, all in one.
When the worlds collide, it's like everything
is existing together at the same time.
And that you can be calm
and have tranquility inside chaos.
The most important thing for Kenny is his family,
there's nothing goes after, you know, which saves him,
it makes him a mensch, it makes him a good person, you know?
And he loves his family more than anything,
and I understand that.
Malia!
Scharf's work is really underlying
the fragile state of the world's environment.
He's one of the few artists that puts the kitchen sink
into his work, totally American in many ways,
and it's just like the noise of life
lives in his paintings.
There has to always be someone who does too much,
he's too much, and that's what makes him a genius.
He takes that practice and takes it to such an extreme
that you go, "Oh, my God, who does this?"
It's like a... a visionary, only a visionary.
He could make it like this very fun, comic-y,
visual pastiche, but within there are... he's working out
not just his demons, but a larger collective demonology
of what's going on in our culture.
So there's that freedom and spontaneity and aliveness
that's actually in our nature.
A healthy part of aging is to become more playful again
and to let go, as you let go of the burdens you become
more childlike again, in a certain sense.
Even the word "play," I mean, that's what artists do,
they just play, and musicians,
they play music, you know,
so that sense of childlike creativity is precisely I think
why we turn to artists, I think they preserve
or they express that part of us that most of us had lost.
Provided by explosiveskull https://twitter.com/kaboomskull