Text & Car Crashes: the Art of Scott Teplin
There’s always something beneath what there is. Everything can be turned inside out to reveal something else, often something more substantial. And donuts, well, they’re never really just donuts in Scott Teplin’s world.
Teplin gets his artistic kicks by turning things inside out, by mangling and mashing and cohabitating the objects of his obsession. The results vary between innocent, impossible, labyrinthine interiors and landscapes to sexual metaphors that are as silly as they are inspired, like his most recent drawings of mangled and mashed cars, trucks and planes, his Crash series. “[I] became fascinated by the way the car metal mated together like horny taffy, and I started back obsessing over singular objects again—cars, trains and helicopters—getting it on together and turning themselves inside-out,” Teplin said. His “again” here refers back to his tendency to get obsessed with particular forms, like donuts, letters of the alphabet, beds and interiors.
But Teplin’s Crash series is a little more subtle and more visually complex than his previous work. Not that his previous work isn’t complex. His donuts often found themselves with hundreds others in intestine-like knots, walking the line between funny and sick. Or subtle. His rooms are mazes that map Teplin’s mind and provide a kind of estimation for the viewer’s own subconscious associations. It’s just that the Crash drawings seem to represent a nod to something deeper, more focused and nuanced than the cartoonish rooms and suggestive donuts.
“[In the Crash series] I didn’t want to make a statement about the danger of driving or war or anything, so I removed elements that might steer the drawing in that direction,” Teplin said. “Similarly, I use garish or happy colors to stay away from overly ominous statements of death and destruction. I’m also exploring how far I can sexually abstract my representational drawings.” Sexual abstraction is something Teplin has worked with in varying degrees. When asked why so much of his work is kid friendly, and what the place of innocence is in art, he just talked about sex.
He said even his rooms—including the ones shaped like letters of the alphabet in classic kids-book fashion—are really just an exploration of the inside-out, revealing nature of sex. And the cartoonish, innocent donut, well, “Donuts are mostly just butt holes.”
But whatever sexual tension and satire is buried in Teplin’s drawings there’s an undeniable childlike quality.
The book The Clock Without a Face, for instance, is an illustrated detective wonderland that pulls Teplin’s art into the real world. Produced in collaboration with Mac Barnett and Eli Horowitz, who collectively go by the pseudonym Twintig, and published by the masters of art-and-life line-blurring McSweeny’s, The Clock Without a Face is a story of thirteen rooms in a clock tower (yes, Teplin-esque rooms packed with wild and revealing artifacts), each offering new clues to an overarching mystery narrative. But besides being a critically acclaimed, kid-friendly sleuth story, readers were invited to participate in a real-life mystery and deduce from each page of
the book the whereabouts of real-life artifacts, the twelve numbers of the clock, which were hidden around the U.S. The Clock Without a Face is the four-dimensional manifestation of the magical, childlike sense of the discovery that Teplin’s art inspires, a quality so many in the art world have shed in favor of cynical irony, arrogant punditism or outright despair and loathing. Granted, it took a little prodding to get Teplin to admit to indulging that inner child. He definitely seems more interested in the underlying themes of sex, specifically, and “what’s inside stuff” in general.
But, whether those missiles do represent penises or those are disembodied boners poking up from the sheets in Teplin’s cartoon beds, what kid wouldn’t want to live in a Q house with its fountain in the living room, the mysterious subterranean entrance and the swing set out back?
I use garish or happy colors to stay away from overly ominous statements of death and destruction. I’m also exploring how far I can sexually abstract my representational drawings.”
Teplin digs into the details of his houses with an obsession that marks a great pen-and-ink artists. His meticulous determination to get everything in his imagination on paper set him alongside Albrecht Dürer and Hieronymus Bosch. Child or adult, no one with even an ounce of latent wonder can’t escape being somewhat captivated by the nuance and strangeness of Teplin’s worlds. After pointing the childlike quality his work inspires, Teplin admitted that he’s probably still in a state of arrested development.
“I still have a lot of non-adult like tendencies. I hate the taste of alcohol, beer included. If possible, I’ll always have a white Russian, because if I have to imbibe, why not make it taste like sugary ice cream? Same with food. My wife is a foodie—but I would prefer pizza- and burgers-candy. Better yet, give me food pills and I won’t have to waste time eating at all. Plus I was held back in first grade and expelled in middle school.”
Far from being the artist’s flaw, his admitted arrested development brings about all sorts of hilarious art projects and collaborations. It’s not a stretch to imagine this former New York City skater punk, who would wear disguises like wigs, fake zits and prosthetic noses for his driver license photos (“pre-9/11, of course”), collaborating on Randy Packs, a set of Garbage Pail Kids-esque improbable sex act trading cards.
And it’s this sense of wonder and weirdness that makes Teplin such a good match for the magic factory that is McSweeny’s publishing house. Teplin said that, just as he was giving up on being an illustrator due to the pretension and schmoozing required in the New York publishing world, former McSweeny’s art director Eli Horowitz called him up “out of the blue” to do the cover for the twenty-seventh edition of their quarterly journal. Since then, Teplin has done several collaborations with McSweeny’s, culminating with The Clock Without a Face.
“They’re more interested in working with artists with their own individual, weird vision than with someone who can draw Nick Cage riding a bull through a china shop filled with statues of Hollywood moguls, or something idiotic like that. They don’t bulldoze you with their art-director egos because what they’re after is a collaboration with an artist they trust or are more than happy to take a risk with. I think that’s one reason their work is so different than anything else out there.”
Most recently, Teplin worked on Song Reader, the newest Beck album. Song Reader, in the pleasantly anachronistic vein common to McSweeny’s publications, will be released not as recorded album, but as a book of original, unrecorded sheet music, full of art, including Teplin’s. After the December release, McSweeny’s will post recordings of the songs by both known and unknown musicians on its website.
This kind of project highlights Teplin’s penchant for arguably dying media. He said that when he first moved to NYC right out of college, he fell in with a group of “rowdy book artists.” Not only did this lead to his laboriously hand making books for his art series, but it also inspired him to bind his own sketchbooks to his admittedly anal specifications. But he does take exception to the notion that these are dying arts. Rather, they’re resurging due to a newfound appreciation for craftsmanship and quality.
…give me food pills and I won’t have to waste time eating at all.”
“I don’t think the future of handmade artist books is looking particularly dim. Look at what’s happened to letterpress: It’s exploded in popularity mostly because people get so sick of seeing sterile computer-generated graphics everywhere that even their dentist can produce with a copy of MS Word 95.” His appreciation of obscure media isn’t to say Teplin’s work can’t stand up to and, more so, add to the best of mature, evocative contemporary art. Take the Crash series for example. In his mangled and mashed cars, trucks and trains, Teplin reveals a mature understanding of human nature and sex, one that includes, but explodes beyond, the tongue-in-cheek dealings with sex in the Donut series and others.
The ropy bands of metal do resemble strings of viscous semen, and the nooks and crevices can recall the innate inside-out, biologically voyeuristic aesthetic of the vagina, but Crash’s take on sex is much more complicated. The artist relates people to massive machines and sex to something inextricable and violent. Often, when these two girthy gravities collide, there’s no pulling them apart. Once a plane, like a person, has crashed and mated with another, it’s changed—it’s mutilated in a way that makes it at once more complex and beautiful and more horrific. Sometimes the two objects don’t stick, and sometimes they do, but the effect of the crash is there, and can change the whole identity of the thing.
Crash is somewhat of a departure for Teplin. Most of his art is psychological to some degree, but Crash reveals Teplin’s more conflicted, less forgiving self. He can be all fun and games, but he bleeds. He thinks butt holes are hilarious (which they kind of are) but the weight, pain and insecurity of relationships doesn’t escape him.
And the contemporary art community stands too benefit from the balance Teplin brings to the table. Yeah, everybody gets wrecked and sex can be a violent, complicated thing, but don’t forget what it was like being a kid. Sex is also funny. People are funny. Donuts and boners are downright hilarious. And there’s a lot to discover in all that weirdness.*
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 25, which is Sold out. Get our latest issue in print with a new Hi-Fructose Subscription here!
