New Groovenians article

[Harvey BirdGuy]

Here is an article I found in my local newspaper, The Sun-Sentinel.

Artist gets his Groovenians on
Kenny Scharf is hoping to expand his idea to series or film.
By John Tanasychuk





"I owe a lot to The Jetsons," says artist Kenny Scharf. "The Jetsons really signifies a lot for me."
Not many of us can say we owe much to the fictional animated cartoon that began life in 1962, but then again we aren't Scharf. Since his debut on the New York art scene in the 80's, Scharf has built a reputation as a pop surrealist. He combines images from popular culture with a worldview disappointed that the utopia promised by The Jetsons never materialized. Call it suburban surrealism.
And at 10:30 PM Sunday, Scharfs fantasies come to animated life on Cartoon Network. The Groovenians tells the story of artists Jet and Glindy who are trapped on a boring planet called Jeepers, where their parents want them to live "normal" lives. A sign on Jeepers tells residents to "Have a Beige Day."
Jet and Glindy learn about the planet Groovenia, "...a place where you can be anything you want to be, where all hipsters seek refuge." Groovenia is home to the J. Edgar Groover Jetport and has "universal party hour."
The Groovenians features the voices of Paul Reubens, Drena DeNiro, Dennis Hopper, Ru Paul, Debi Mazar, Ann Magnuson and Vincent Gallo. The characters are based on mannequins Scharf created a few years ago. The song was written by the B-52s.
"It was my idea," says Scharf, 44, who lived on Miami Beach from 1992 to 1999, before moving to Los Angeles to get his cartoon off the ground. "Iv always dreamed of making my own cartoon and it kind of seemed like one of those wishes that you think: ' How will I ever do that? ' "
"I always feel my art has an appeal to everyone. It has an appeal to kids, to adults, to art elitists, to art knuckleheads," he says. "I don't feel that you have to be any certain kind of person get something from my artwork. And I feel the same way about the cartoon.
In South Florida, his work is included in permanent collections of the Miami Art Museum in Davie and the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami.
Bonnie Clearwater, director of the North Miami museum, which hosted a fundraising event featuring Scharf and The Groovenians , says his cartoon is also autobiographical.
"It really sums his vision of escaping the everyday world into a world of creativity," she says. "At the same time, it shows the pitfalls that an artist has to face with reality. With having to make a living, pay taxes, live by certain rules."
On the planet Groovenia, residents must pay taxes to King Norman in order to live their lives of "love and art."
The cartoon also gives Scharf a chance to try his hand in a mass audience medium that so greatly influenced him.
"I think that for our generation and the generation after us, cartoons were more than just fun stuff," Scharf says. "I think they're really part of our lives and our language, our visual language and our humor. I kind of lived for cartoons and the world of cartoons and the fantasy that cartoons allowed and the color and the escape. I still do."
North Miami was just one of half a dozen promotional stops for Scharf and his cartoon. Using his museum contacts, he hopes to build an audience for an artist-made cartoon.
"We've never worked with a fine artist before," says Linda Simensky, Cartoon Network senior vice president. "This was his idea. It was his way of getting out there. That's his world, the art community."
Simensky says the future of The Groovenians will depend on adience-reaction, but the half-hour special a running on the network's adult block. "Its an experiment for us," she says. "Its a different feel and a different kind of style."
While The Groovenians is now just a one-shot special, Scharf hopes to one day make it a series or feature-lenght film. He hopes fans will e-mail the network after they see it. "I definitely see it having a long life."

[Joe Tully]

Here's another article from LA Times (via cartoonresearch.com)

Kenny Scharf is about to realize a dream. The painter and
installation artist who in the 1980s kept company with Andy
Warhol, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat and who these days sells his artworks for upwards of $100,000, has always had Saturday morning cartoons on his mind. Now his own animated
creation, "The Groovenians," will air Sunday on the Cartoon Network.

For him, it's just a matter of coming home. "That's where I'm from -- the TV generation," Scharf said. "It's a natural project for someone who is a believer in pop art and art for the masses. I've always taken a non-elitist stand. It's like coming full circle: to draw from cartoons and then to put back into that culture."

In fact, with "The Groovenians," Scharf gives back exactly what
he stole -- characters -- to the medium from which he stole them -- TV.

Working as a pop surrealist (a term he coined), Scharf has always
subverted images in popular culture. In his paintings, the
Flintstones, for example, might have worm-like bodies; in recent
portraits he painted well-known people costumed and in settings
as if they were "starring in a movie."

"That's how I got my foot into the art world," he said, "using
recognizable imagery and making it my own."

In "The Groovenians," aspiring artists Jet and Glindy live on the beige planet Jeepers (the San Fernando Valley) but, on the advice of a neighbor, escape to colorful Groovenia, a planet where, as
one character explains, "all the hipsters seek refuge." (It's New York, circa 1978.) In Groovenia, though, the two have to battle the formidable King Norman, tax collector in chief. It's a whimsical art-and-commerce parable.

The cartoon also charts something of Scharf's own journey from the Valley, where he grew up, to Manhattan, and from wannabe artist to success. Scharf's work has been shown at the Venice Biennale; his paintings are included in the permanent collections of the Whitney and the Guggenheim in New York, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Monterrey Museum of Art in Mexico and the Sogetsu Museum of Art in Tokyo.

Other artists have crossed into popular media. Warhol, Jean Cocteau, Julian Schnabel and Salvador Dali all made movies, for example. But a complete immersion in a world populated by the Powerpuff Girls and Samurai Jack?

"This is terrific -- an important American artist doing art on TV," said Bob Sain, director of LACMALab, the research and educational unit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as he sat on stage at
the museum's Bing Theater with Scharf during a LACMA "salon" Tuesday night. Sain lamented the paucity of art on TV. "There was Sister Wendy and one episode of 'Sex and the City' -- a tour of the Museum of Modern Art," he joked. "We should have art reports like weather reports: 'There's a Conceptual [wave] sweeping the West Coast, but we'll see a return of painting on Tuesday.' "

The LACMA event was itself pure pop, part of the unorthodox publicity tour for "The Groovenians." Scharf took a traveling installation -- a customized psychedelic Day-Glo mobile home -- to museums nationwide, serving Kahlúa Snowballs and introducing Jet and Glindy to the art world.

Collaborators on his cartoon included Scharf friends Dennis Hopper (he sings) as well as Drena De Niro, Paul Reubens, Debi Mazar, Vincent Gallo, RuPaul and Ann Magnuson, who all did voice-overs. Scharf's favorite band, the B-52's, wrote the music. "They're the musical equivalent to my visualizations," Scharf said. "We were very much influenced by the same things."

That would be those Day-Glo colors, space travel and suburbia -- just some of Scharf's favorite things. "Paint what you love" was the advice he received as a young artist, and Scharf loved the creations of Hanna-Barbera. They offered a geography (a fantastical, whimsical take on suburbia), a history ("The Flintstones" as the past, "The Jetsons" as the future) and a language.

Eight years ago, Scharf was asked to create mannequins in his cartoon style for a New York manufacturer. Realizing that they could be brought alive, Scharf packed up his family, moved back to
Los Angeles and began to pitch the networks. After three months, he made contact with Linda Simensky, senior vice president of original animation at the Cartoon Network. During their first phone conversation, she looked at postcards of his artwork displayed on her office walls.

"This was kind of unusual," she said. "We wouldn't normally go after an artist." But the network thought it was a good fit. "His work has that kind of animation-friendly feel to it."

The half-hour special will air as part of "Adult Swim," the network's block of animation aimed at adults. But Scharf said it's meant for children as well, "like the Pee-wee Herman show."

It hasn't gone unnoticed by adults in the art world.

Paul Holdengräber, director of the LACMA Institute for Art and Cultures, calls the project "an interesting gesture" directed at serious issues.

As public institutions, including museums, become shopping destinations (think Monet coasters) and soft drink companies bring advertising into classrooms, Holdengräber said, high art, low art and
commerce are "areas that are really fuzzy and controversial."

While planning the Scharf salon at the museum, Holdengräber asked the artist who he would choose as his interlocutor. The answer? Dr. Seuss. "I think there's a clue in that," Holdengräber said.

On a less fanciful note, he observed, "A museum supposedly takes the object out of circulation and elevates it beyond its usefulness. People like Kenny and others are saying, 'Wait a minute, let's put it back in.' "

And not for the first time. Scharf's mannequins have decorated windows at Saks Fifth Avenue on Wilshire Boulevard, and his artwork has been turned into other kinds of products as well -- refrigerator magnets, milk glasses, thongs -- which are sold at the Shop Chuey gallery/boutique in Chinatown.

"Kenny straddles the pop movement of the 1980s and the new kids of the 21st century," like Shepard Fairey of the ubiquitous Obey Giant stickers, said David Keeps, owner of Shop Chuey. These days,
he said, an artist can choose to be both artist and T-shirt designer.

Or, in this case, cartoon creator.

"It just broadens the whole notion of the boundaries of art," Scharf said. "It's a quest to bring the whole pop media world and the art world to merge, and it's a great way to do it.

"I think Andy would be very proud."