Weird Wall Art in the Tobe Hooper Film
Detail
A woman and small boy (with mandolin?).
Clothesline art.
The childlike dove drawing (can double as an angel).
The graphic mod art painting in the upstairs hallway.
Not "weird art," but an occasion to point out the carnival manager's cabinet of Catholic paraphernalia that exists prominently in his small trailer, seen behind him and Joey's parents. In the same vein of "weird" paintings, it is certainly an artifact of our fleeting iconographic identifications we as human beings make, with which we, for reasons of status-stating and bourgeois obligatoriness, deign to put on our walls. As ever-present as they are forgotten, dust-collecting.
The anti-symmetrical modern art mock fresco.
Three plates mounted on the wall, like a rigid embodiment of order and a three-branch system of equitability, constantly judging our protagonists.
Looking past the cluttered interior decor/3D textural art of Texas Chain Saw Massacre's farmhouse, the densely littered decoupage of pop culture adorning the children's walls in Salem's Lot and The Funhouse, the rock 'n' roll collage of K-OKLA's station, the symbolic pop-up fastenings of Lisa's apartment in Spontaneous Combustion and Barlow and Straker's morbid wall adornments, there is the weird wall art to be found in Hooper's films.
Looking past the space toys arrayed around the table, there is the painfully beige color block art behind the institutional men.
This never made much of an impression on me, but this expressively minimalist watercolor piece behind the befuddled guard is too pretty and plaintive not to appreciate it being there.
There are many things on the wall of the nurse's quarters, including weird art, in the same way the quarters of many characters in Hooper's film's walls are covered with their personality in strange and hodgepodge ways (one can even say the funhouse is this... but whose room would this be? America's?). But the weird art I'll focus on, due to its identifiability, is the Pierrot clown poster - a mainstay of 80s kitsch art.
Finally, the art of Chevalier's home, a collection of maternal-themed, womb and loin favoring nudes, scattered throughout but never contextualized. It's the most explicit implicit "weird" art.
If anyone has an ID on any of these artworks/artists, leave a comment! Would love that.
3 comments:
Amazing, thanks!!
the dove drawing is probably a Picasso reference
You are absolutely correct. I was also thinking the bird cut-outs of Matisse in its Rorschach shape-blocking ambiguity.
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