‘It’s OK to laugh,’ artist Warrens says
LASM exhibit highlights fiction, fantasy
Robert Warrens speaks of the minimalist movement while considering his painting, “Wild Hog.”
It’s a painting he created in 1975, when art critics were praising the genre, which pared art down to its simplest, more pure state.
This didn’t sit well with Warrens. He says as much at this particular moment.
He glances again at “Wild Hog.” It’s one of 19 of his paintings and sculptures in the Louisiana Art & Science Museum’s exhibit Robert Warrens: Fiction and Fantasy. The show runs through March 25, and it isn’t exactly a retrospect of Warrens’ extensive career but a sampling.
A sampling that highlights his narratives.
Which art critics would have considered distracting and inappropriate from the 1950s through the 1970s.
But as Warrens saw it, art was supposed to be about life, things and events. And it was supposed to represent the artist’s reaction to those events.
And the country had already withstood three major assassinations when Warrens painted “Wild Hog.” The battle had been fought for civil rights, and war was about to come to an end in Vietnam.
Pretty serious stuff, and the minimalist movement was too busy producing work that didn’t distract.
But really, the world is one big distraction. One filled with color and life and even humor. Which, as Warrens saw it, is what art sorely lacked — humor.
“So, I came up with this to show an imploding culture,” he said, pointing to “Wild Hog.”
And there’s the hog, jumping over an ashtray filled with smouldering cigarette butts. And the most contradictory of this narrative? The green shoots popping up from within the ashtray, as if the ashes are producing new growth.
The hog is comical in nature, as is “I Cried a River Over You” hanging next to it.
“I Cried” depicts a kitschy table ornament that has reeled out of control. Its frozen glass waves have expanded and transformed into water as fish freely dive into them.
When this painting was chosen to show in a national exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, visitors laughed at it.
Warrens knows, because one of his colleagues visited the show and reported back.
“He said, ‘They were laughing at it,’” Warrens said, imitating the colleague’s indignation. “I said, ‘Great.’”
Warrens meant it, because viewers were supposed to find humor in “Wild Hog,” just as they are in so many of his paintings. It’s OK to laugh, OK to say, “Oh I get it.”
It’s OK to have fun, because Warrens certainly had fun painting them.
And visitors can’t help laughing on this night when Warrens reads the title.
“‘I Cried a River Over You,’” he said again. “It’s from the Etta James song, ‘Cry Me a River.’”
Which may have even more meaning on this particular evening. James died only a few days before Warrens guided visitors through his exhibit.
True, the painting isn’t a tribute to James, but then again, why not? Viewers, as with any artwork, can form their own impressions. They also can take away thoughts the artist presents through his work.
And, to Warrens’ delight, they’re laughing tonight.
Especially when he introduces them to his 1975 piece, “Sitting in the Lap of the Mythic Beast.”
In this painting, a man rests easily in the lap of what seems to be a man wearing the head of a large animal. Note the word, “wearing.”
The second man’s head isn’t that of a beast but seems to be topped by something that looks like the head of a college mascot. That is, if there is a college whose mascot is the Mythic Beast.
Which wouldn’t be a bad mascot, actually. The beast could be quite intimidating. Then again, the beastly head in Warrens’ painting really is not so much scary as it is amused.
“Can you imagine walking into your psychiatrist’s office and seeing this hanging in the waiting room?” Warrens asked.
More laughter.
Warrens traveled from his New Orleans home for this gal
lery talk. He was born in Wisconsin and was an art professor at LSU from 1967 to 1998.
He’ll give visitors a brief overview of his history, how he earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin and how he convinced his commander to let him create posters while in the U.S. Army during the Korean War.
He earned his master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Iowa, after which he landed a job at Concord College in Athens, W.Va.
“I stayed there eight years, and I loved it,” he said.
“The scenery was great. Had I been a landscape painter, I would have stayed there until I died.”
But it was back in his undergraduate days that Warrens began seriously considering art as a career.
A professor persuaded Warrens to try it. Warrens saw the professor’s own work.
“And I thought, ‘My God, what a wonderful way to live,’” he said.
“He was doing some magical things in the 1950s.”
Just as Warrens continues to do now.
“I’ve spent my life making my work valuable by making it pertinent,” he said. “I decided to go this direction in figuratives and fantasies, because it showed how I felt in life.”
Warrens has since become a force in Louisiana’s visual arts world. The New Orleans Museum of Art featured a 20-year retrospective of his life’s work in 1990, and he has painted commissioned murals at Baton Rouge Community College and New Orleans’ Lakeview Library.
Most recently, Warrens’ Katrina Series was featured as a part of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s Southern Master Series.
Some of those paintings from that series hang in this exhibit, and Warrens again is able to find humor within a subject of turmoil.
One painting, “Escorting the Corps of Engineers,” shows Warrens’ wife, Sylvia Schmidt, leading the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to her front door. One of the corps members is depicted as a wooden puppet with a long nose.
Remember what happened when Pinocchio lied? Well, blame for the breaks in New Orleans levee system in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina often has been placed on the corps.
Warrens’ narrative tells the story of a corps that lied about the levees’ strength. And one corps member’s nose grows longer as the lies are told.
But the most profound image, not only in the series but in the entire exhibit, is three-paneled “Walking the Dogs.”
The image is simple. Three children each are walking three dogs. They are dressed in school clothes, and Katrina’s floodwaters have risen to their waists.
Meanwhile, only the dogs’ heads are above water, their leashes connecting them to the children’s hands.
The children’s reactions can’t truly be described as fear. They’re more confused than anything. And the dogs simply move forward.
Absent are the bright colors in Warrens’ other paintings. This image is more monochromatic with its dominant greens and whites.
“A better name for it would have been ‘A Symphony of Leashes,’” Warrens said. “I didn’t want it to be realistic. There has to be a distance — a psychological distance.”
True. Coming too close to the subject would mean having to live horrific memories. And Warrens and Schmidt, like so many others in New Orleans, experienced the horror of losing a home.
So, Warrens continues to find humor in his narrative paintings. He’s working on a levee series now.
“And I wasn’t sure if I could find humor in levees,” he said. “But I know something needs to be done with them, just like our coastline. If we don’t do something now, they will disappear.”
But Warrens hasn’t disappeared. He has persevered.
While others were turning to minimalism and abstracts, he stuck to his figures, stories and humor.
And viewers are smiling because of it.