Pop goes a subversive cartoon for adults

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 Kahlua 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 Holdengraber, 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, Holdengraber said, high art, low art and commerce are “areas that are really fuzzy and controversial.”

While planning the Scharf salon at the museum, Holdengraber asked the artist who he would choose as his interlocutor. The answer? Dr. Seuss. “I think there’s a clue in that,” Holdengraber 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.”