The offbeat vision of a Southern rebel produces art you can swear by
An artist’s uncensored — and potty-mouthed — life
Wayne White is an artist, sculptor, illustrator, animator, puppeteer, set designer, musician (the banjo, but still), raconteur, and a bit of a rebel. He won three Emmy Awards for helping design the groundbreaking TV show Pee-wee’s Playhouse (where he was also the voice behind Randy, Dirty Dog and Flower No. 3). He made innovative music videos for the Smashing Pumpkins and Peter Gabriel. He made commercials for Snapple and Old Spice.
Then, when the allure of show business faded, he became a fulltime artist, putting a lie to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s observation that there are no second acts in American life. “F--- you, F. Scott Fitzgerald,” says White. He’s a charming guy, but he’s always telling people to f--- themselves, particularly the art establishment, which he views as humourless.
His oeuvre includes thrift-shop paintings that he buys and then paints words on. “Picasso’s ass falling off,” says one. “Just a picture / shunned by scholars / now it costs / 10,000 dollars,” reads another.
People see echoes of Ed Ruscha, a better known artist who also paints words onto large canvases. “Ed F---g Ruscha,” White calls him.
Lately, though, White is running out of reasons to tell people to f--- off. Against the odds, he’s become a hit. Beauty Is Embarrassing is a fanciful documentary, directed by Neil Berkeley, that tells the story of White’s life and allows full rein to his unique combination of Southern folksiness, do-it-yourself pluck and offbeat vision.
Beauty Is Embarrassing never really establishes White’s position as an important influence in the art world, but you know what? F--- it.
The film is structured as a show that White put on in front of an audience, beginning with a banjo solo and moving into a monologue that he illustrates with slides of his personal history.
Raised in Tennessee — in a culture where, a friend recalls, “art was something you bought at K-Mart” — he moved to New York City and tried to make a living selling his own comic books on the streets.
Fortunately, he ran into a more successful artist, Mimi Pond, who had written a bestseller called The Valley Girl’s Guide To Life and who is most famous for writing the first full-length Simpsons episode, Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire (Matt Groening, the creator of the Simpsons and a family friend, is interviewed in the film.) They got married, and she mostly gave up her career to raise their two children and allow White time for his work.
Beauty Is Embarrassing takes us through the genesis of Pee-wee’s Playhouse, from its start in a rundown studio in New York to its finish in a porn theatre in Florida.
During its run, it was a brilliant piece of surreal theatre, and White was one of the artists who sculpted its madly psychedelic world (and, backstage, created a parallel universe, called Flocked Box Theater, with other underemployed artists on the show.)
The film is best when it shows White talking about his work: his inventive stick sculptures (he loves sticks), the giant-head sculptures he makes on a whim, the word pictures he started selling out of a Los Angeles coffee shop that become best-sellers and led to a book (“Maybe Now I’ll Get The Respect I So Richly Deserve”) and that second life.
“Entertainment is a dirty world in the art world,” White says, but there’s no shortage of it here. Beauty Is Embarrassing — he explains the title at the end of the film — is both a lark and a canny examination of an artist’s life.