Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide

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.

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.

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.