Pop Surrealist Todd Schorr Paints the Unusual & The Arcane
Images courtesy of Todd Schorr and KP Projects
Todd Schorr creates weird and ambitious works that feel like fever dreams about death, sex, and a fear that the good times are long gone. And the painter and sculptor has stayed busy in the last decade since Hi-Fructose last checked-in on him and his prolific artmaking.
“Since I was a child, I have had a lifelong fascination with the unusual and arcane,” he says. “It is an aesthetic that can probably be traced back into a person’s background environment, as well as their DNA somehow. Why are some people fascinated while others are repelled by the same visual stimulation?”
Schorr’s success has hinged on his revelry in twentieth-century pop and schlock. By his own account, his work is a “mulligan’s stew” of influences that might reference Ray Harryhausen films, midcentury sci-fi and horror comics, classic movie monsters, surrealist forebears like Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch, cartoonists ranging from Tex Avery to Walt Disney and everyone in between, and whatever nonfiction books he’s into at the moment.
Lest you underestimate the expansiveness, all those references can come up in a single work. What makes Schorr nothing less than genius is his facility with making those references feel connected. No matter how many ingredients go into the stew, it tastes unified, with each component adding something worthwhile to the whole.
In 2021’s “R. Crumb and the Genesis of Zap,” the viewer is treated to a trip within the universe of the eponymous illustrator (at least as Schorr envisions it). R. Crumb himself is centered, belting out a tune from his beloved banjo, while surrounded by several inspirations and creations. We see Donald Duck, for instance, as a great beheaded idol—Crumb cited Donald Duck comics as a childhood favorite that led him to a life in drawing. Crumb’s own Mr. Natural reads from a dirty magazine while other characters and inspirations prance about.
In “Liquid Universe” (2016), we see a classic mélange of traditional Schorr subject matter. An ape dressed as a genie sits at the center of a surreal circus of figures. We see references to hot rod and surfer culture, B-movie adventure movie heroes, aliens, monsters, clowns, classic cartoons, Neanderthals, geometric figures, Humpty Dumpty, and sundry other figures.
The feeling is one of confusion, but imbued with exuberance. We are caught up in the reverie of action. We feel woozy and need to let the rational, thinking part of our mind take a break, to buzz off in the same way that the winged brain in the painting is free to fly away after the Viking destroys its chains. Notice the boy and the girl on top of the brain. The girl holds an atom, the symbol of nuclear age progress and enlightenment. And the boy has a skateboard, a symbol of youth and wholesomeness. Both are part of the waking mundane world, where things have to make sense, where we have responsibilities and work and bedtimes. Where we have schedules that demand our attention, that pull us away from the act of daydreaming and imagination. Schorr’s works are a place for our brains to fly off. We can visit these vistas of the bizarre, the freakish, the wonderful, and journey to find that which makes us stop and linger on the sheer possibilities of life.
His art is the art of the unconscious. He dwells in the land of id. Nothing is real, but only because anything can be real. And because Schorr guides us there he populates his paintings with the things that are important to him. Apes, famously, because of his childhood love for the original versions of RKO’s King Kong and Mighty Joe Young. There is a hot rod monster in the style of Stanley “Mouse” Miller. A Clarabelle Cow from very early Disney. The mix of hyper-realistic and hyper-stylized characters. And of course, a wicked sense of humor.
HUMOR IS DEFINITELY SOMETHING I ALWAYS TRY TO BRING INTO MY WORK EVEN WHEN I MIGHT BE GETTING INTO WHAT MAY SEEM AS SERIOUS SUBJECT MATTER.”
“Humor is definitely something I always try to bring into my work even when I might be getting into what may seem as serious subject matter,” says Shorr. “I do not want to ever get preachy. It is the influence of the satiric type of humor instilled in me from reading Mad Magazine as a child.”
The biggest difference between Schorr’s work of several years ago and his works today might be the shift in tone. His art is still funny. Humor is still front and center. It is difficult, truly, to imagine a painting or sculpture by Schorr which could not elicit a little chuckle, even if only from the initiated. But there is a newfound edge to his latest work. A sense of sadness behind the comedy. It might be anger, or maybe confusion.
The root, though, is attached to another major pillar of his work. Satire. Schorr’s work at its most powerful and demanding leverages his visual language to build complex critiques of contemporary society. Schorr does not provide answers. Many of the topics he turns to are so large—institutional in nature—that a single, remarkable answer is inconceivable. Where Schorr shines is bringing us to the sideshow: where we can see the problem play out, convulse, revive, contort, and morph. We see the problems of
this world in their beguiling beauty and sinister monstrosity. We see their complexity. And through Schorr’s surreality, we come to appreciate the imperfection of our waking reality.
“I think the general uneasiness that seems to have gripped the planet over the last few years has definitely crept into my work,” says artist Todd Schorr.
A look to one of Schorr’s most recent works, “Gullibles Travels,” reveals this in greater detail. The painting is classic Schorr. We find an ape—one of his most constant subjects, which faithfully regains his attention with near religious fervor—holding up a flat earth. A goon is plopped atop the terra discus, crying and wide-mouthed and spewing out large droplets of spittle that fly away in the shape of the logo for Twitter. The ape stands on top of the Loch Ness monster and has an audience before it comprised of dancing fairies, a marooned Martian, and a buxom mermaid (both ape and Nessie seem transfixed on the mermaid’s nakedness). The background features ghosts in a cemetery, a pot-o-gold out of which sprouts a rainbow terminating in a unicorn. A tarp showing hand drawn planets and stars covering up the real and far less scrutable cosmos sets the backdrop.
Comparing this and other recent pieces to his early works reveals a new edge. His paintings are never subtle or coy but they have hardly ever expressed this kind of danger. Signature elements of his practice remain as lodestones to his newer work—the obsession with midcentury Americana, injections of the weird and monstrous, mixing high realism with even higher style. Motifs including apes and eggs and pinups and references to art history and a wink of autobiography. But the unabashed glee of his early works has been replaced with foreboding.
TRYING TO MAKE SENSE OF MY PLACE IN THIS UNIVERSE KEEPS ME ON A CONSTANT QUEST TO LEARN ABOUT NEW SUBJECTS AND EXPAND MY KNOWLEDGE. I AM NOT GOING TO FIND ANSWERS IN RELIGION OR HALF-BAKED CONSPIRACY THEORIES…”
Let us return, once more, to “Gullibles Travels.” Where else is there to turn in that place, but to follow everyone’s gaze to the drooling idiot? The earth is arid. There are mountains in the distance but across what great expanse? Not even the Martian can get home. Best to just sit and watch the monsters convince you the earth is flat. Maybe you can get some water out of the lake for agreeing with them, at least. The land looks parched and there does not seem to be a good watering anywhere nearby.
Schorr comments, “Keeping informed on world events and culture is a priority. There is this general increase in the level of ignorance and stupidity that seems to have infiltrated some minds lately. Where has common knowledge gone?”
The goon’s saliva makes a reappearance in another recent Schorr work, “The Spittle Aspirator.” Here we see another Martian accompanied by a knight as they encounter—or confront, or are accosted by—a giant clown. The clown’s mouth is foul with rotting teeth and a torrent of spittle rains out of its mouth and onto the Martian and knight below. The landscape looks similar to that which surrounds the ape and Nessie in “Gullibles.” Here, though, the clown is accompanied by a big tent circus which spirals away toward the sky.
Schorr’s work has always been a gumbo. A dash of this, a slather of that, and somehow it all comes together. “Somehow,” of course, because he has been working at his idiosyncratic style since the late 1980s when he left a cool gig as a professional illustrator to pursue making the art in his heart.
But behind this style that entrances us with intricate compositions and fun nods to the pop culture of yore is a deft conscience concerned about the state of the world.
We could look also to “Land of Enchantment.” This work from 2022 depicts onlookers viewing a nuclear test from a promontory. There is a burger joint, OPPIE’S, and a Bob’s Big Boy-style oversized mascot whose face is modeled on J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the project to build the atomic bomb for the United States government during World War II at the Los Alamos Laboratories in New Mexico (the state motto, of course, is “Land of Enchantment”). Big Oppie carries a tray with a classic
American diner burger as well as a bottle with the stopper out of it. A cruel genie materializes out of the bottle and warms its hands against the mushroom cloud of a nuclear weapon detonating in the valley below.
“As a kid growing up during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the threat of nuclear annihilation was a very real possibility,” says Schorr. “We had the ‘duck and cover’ drills in school and one of my friend’s parents had a bomb shelter built under their garage that we used to play in. So going through that period as a young kid has had a lasting impact. In our present day that threat is still there but hopefully it will stay tempered by its futility to ever ensure any kind of positive outcome for either side deciding to go down that route. The ‘Land of Enchantment’ is more a ‘nostalgic’ take on the early years of nuclear testing when there were actual audience attended viewings!”
Schorr has considered nuclear annihilation in his art many times before. “Atomic Vacation” (2010) presented an explosion as the four horsemen from The Book of Revelation on their way to flatten a family setting up camp in their Airstream trailer. Mushrooms are redolent throughout his work and might also be looked at varying as signs of birth and decay. His 2013 painting “Einstein’s Mushrooms” is a barely veiled allusion to nuclear power as a source for good and evil. There we find Albert Einstein foraging for toadstools—clad in lederhosen and big-headed as if he were drawn by a midway caricaturist.
But what kind of mushroom would Einstein reach for? Mushrooms, which turn the waste of our world into nourishment. Mushrooms, which share the shape of the deathly cloud that follows the howl of nuclear annihilation. Einstein was a brilliant human being searching for knowledge in his own time. Did he fully comprehend the horrors his research would one day make possible?
“Trying to make sense of my place in this universe keeps me on a constant quest to learn about new subjects and expand my knowledge. I am not going to find answers in religion or half-baked conspiracy theories. For me it is a never-ending search for wonder in the natural world and the man-made world that keeps my imagination fertile. All this will somehow work its way into new paintings to come,” Schorr says.’
Expect more from Schorr, and soon. He is working on new paintings that will eventually find their way into a gallery show, and perhaps a book. Upon those walls and within those pages we will doubtless find images full of dread and hope, inviting us on a dreamcruise once again into the mind of Todd Schorr. It’s sure to be a trip that leaves no one the same and everyone wanting more.*
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose issue 77, which is available here in print.
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