By Doug MacCash
Art Critic

When you spend most of your time being an art critic, it's hard to turn it off.

That's why, as I held onto the kids' ladder watching the Hermes parade pass by last year, I wasn't just thinking about beads and marching bands. I was thinking about asymmetrical articulated sculpture, neoclassicism and the legitimate context for public nudity.

I may have been wearing a funny hat, but I was taking the art seriously.

The Hermes floats deserved it. They were the best I saw last Mardi Gras by a long shot. They weren't the biggest, just the most thoughtful. They were as garishly colored as any and as cartoonishly fun. But beneath the pure visual sensation was the more mature tone of the 19th century floats you see in old Carnival bulletins -- the printed previews of the parades that krewes used to put in the newspaper.

As I watched the passing floats, I said to myself that if the Hermes parade were an art exhibit, I'd love to write about it.

So I pretended it was.

Starting back in the summer, Times-Picayune photographer Jennifer Zdon took a series of pictures of a Hermes float (Poseidon) being built in the Uptown den (a big old sheet metal warehouse near Tchoupitoulas), so we could follow the design and development. And, last month, I interviewed the float builders of Royal Artists who were in the Mardi Gras homestretch, putting the finishing touches on five new floats for this year's Hermes parade and renovating others.

The 2005 Hermes parade rolls tonight at 6 on the Uptown route. The theme is the Passions of Zeus (just the sort of broad classical theme that the neoclassicists who designed the first Mardi Gras floats would choose). Unless some other float-makers have made remarkable aesthetic strides in the past 12 months, Hermes will be the parade not to miss. Let me give you an art critic's review and preview.

A solid foundation

First of all, notice that the Hermes floats aren't just flat-walled rectangles. Each vehicle is sculpted from stem to stern.

"The artwork is the design," said New Orleans native Herbert Jahncke, 63, the bearded, suspenders-wearing owner of Royal Artists, as he pointed to an enormous blue snake undulating along the spine of a new float. "This float is a serpent . . . we integrate the total design. We don't just take a float and paint it, put a prop on it, then put on some nice cutouts and flowers on it. That makes for a pretty float, but these are integral art pieces."

The float structures are the work of carpenter Julian Stock, 42, a raw-boned, backyard boat-builder with 20 years experience in float construction. San Francisco-born Stock explained that the Hermes designs begin with modified steel utility wagons (the sort of wagon that might be used to haul hay on a farm), upon which he builds a sturdy wooden frame, wrapped in layers of plywood.

Stock likes to bend the plywood panels, wrapping the structures with as many as 11 layers of compound curves that are made even smoother and more organic when a canvas skin is stretched over the wooden structure.

"You have to envision the whole thing before you start," Stock said of his laborious process. "You have to know how the muslin flows and where to start. It's not a carving or a building-up process where you can fail and add on top of it to make it right. You have to get it right from the first step, like building a boat. . . . I've built a lot of boats and I apply what I've learned in doing that into float building. It's not necessary. But it's necessary, if you want it to look this way."

From Stock's sculpted hulls protrude gigantic figures, but not the stiff front-and-center figures you usually see. The postures of the Hermes figures are flexed and twisted, more like the folks on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel than cigar store Indians, with carefully studied bone structure, musculature and skin texture -- certainly the finest rolling sculpture at Mardi Gras.

A neoclassic approach

Hermes' figures are the work of Randy Morrison, a black-clad Pittsburgh-born artist who began his career sculpting movie props. Morrison pens the float designs.

"We start with the artistic rendering," he said. "That's where we find our gesture and the gesture is the beginning of anything. The drawing also gives us scale. We calibrate everything off of the drawing, in exacting scale, sometimes down to three or four decimal places. And we get all the angles right. Then, I get with our welder and we create all of these gestures in steel."

Once the steel armature is securely attached to the float, Morrison carves the massive sculptures from huge white blocks of powdery plastic foam -- the sort of stuff used to make beer coolers -- which envelopes the supportive steel skeleton.

"I use everything (to carve the foam) -- chain saws, a Sawzall (reciprocating hand saw) and hot wire. Using a long thread of fine wire and electric current, you can dive into the material and create these incredible dynamic textures. It allows you to get a greater level of detail than with any other technique. . . . I look at the drawings of the great masters to find the shapes of muscles and tissue (a very neoclassic approach).

"When you're constructing with this process, your only limit is your imagination, because the reduction process is the same with foam as it is with marble. If you can envision it, you can find all the anatomy and all the gestures that you want. A medium like papier maché (the traditional float sculpting material) is more limited. You can't push as much curvature into it; you can't get that sense of flesh."

Here, I disagree. Morrison may feel most comfortable carving foam, but it's not the material that allows such beautiful articulation and texture, it's his skill. Accurate anatomy can be found in papier maché as well as polystyrene -- if you know where to look.

Adult abandon

And accurate anatomy is especially important in the Hermes parade because many of the Greek gods and goddesses on the floats wear nothing but their birthday suits. Unlike some parades that flirt with nudity and sexuality, Hermes embraces it, with a refreshing air of adult abandon.

"It doesn't make a lot of sense to me," Morrison said, "that in an event that's renowned for women flashing their anatomical realities in front of the world, we should feel unduly conservative in our art. I mean, nudity is one of the central components of all the great art in every museum in the world. Why can we not show that in public? It's a hypocrisy. . . . Some toes curl, for sure. But other people find it very thrilling.

"With an image like that," Morrison continued, pointing to the enormous nude sculpture of Aphrodite, "the impact it has on you isn't about the nudity, it's about the beauty. There's a feeling that supersedes many of our more puritanical values."

Here again, I disagree. The 12-foot-tall buxom Aphrodite (or whoever she may be this year) is all about the nudity -- and that's great. Some people in our culture are embarrassed by nudity; I'm embarrassed by our cultural embarrassment.

Of course, I'm an adult. What about kids? Well, my kids have grown up in a shotgun house, where privacy is elusive, and I've dragged them through all sorts of art shows. So I don't think they're much affected by nudity. As I recall, when Aphrodite went bumping by last year, in all of her abundance, all my kids cared about were the throws, all the throws and nothing but the throws.

Honestly, the painting on the Hermes floats isn't as fine as the sculpting (I'd like to see more care in the water nymphs and sea life that line the Poseidon float), but it's steps above ordinary float painting. Notice on the Hypnos (god of sleep) float that the spray-painted stalactites exactly match the plywood stalactites that descend from the upper structure. That kind of head-in-the-game detailing is unseen in most float designs, where any old pattern or appliqué would suffice.

Also notice how the occasional flashes of neon lighting (Hermes pioneered tubular lighting on floats in 1937) are integrated into the float designs, such as Zeus' lightning bolt, which pierces a temple pediment.

"We do a pretty good job of marrying the form with the medium," Morrison said. "We're looking for content-driven special effects. So our ideas for technology and lighting effects are usually spawned by the emotional content of what we're trying to do.

"The flickering, humming, buzzing effect of neon is great for lightning. But you wouldn't want that if you were looking at a piece that was more sublime. So, for instance, we're putting a black light in Poseidon's hair to give him that sort of cool subtle lighting quality."

The eyes of the blue serpent float are made of those flashing, Dr. Frankenstein lightning balls you see in those techno men's gift stores.

"The eyes were a spontaneous and wonderful concept," Morrison said, "because the whole float is about Zeus when he (in the shape of a snake) attacks his mother because she enraged him. Zeus is the god of lightning -- it's his primary symbol -- so we decided to depict this whole serpent as a living lightning snake. We wanted to put something special in the eyes so we found these plasma balls which are electrical lightning effects.

"At night they're going to be great."

Recaptured traditions

Despite their technological innovations, the 15 Royal Artists employees who work year-round producing parades aren't reinventing the Mardi Gras float form. The final stage of building is to stud the floats with cardboard cutout appliqués (float-builders call them flowers, whether they depict flowers or not) and patches of reflective gold foil, both of which, like most of the Royal concepts, are well within Carnival design norms. Jahncke and company aren't seeking a departure from traditions, they're hoping to recapture those that have been lost.

Jahncke, who holds an MBA from Stanford, was an executive in the family concrete business back in the 1960s, when, in his spare time, he began helping design floats for the Krewe of Proteus, of which he was a member. He fondly recalls martini-fueled brainstorming sessions with Mardi Gras design legend Louis Andrews Fischer in her (yes, Louis was a woman) Pontalba apartment.

In time, Jahncke left the building materials trade to try his hand at what had become his first love: float building. His fledgling company began building floats for Proteus 30 years ago. Royal Artists now builds floats for six krewes, including Proteus and Chaos, three krewes in Mobile and, of course, Hermes, which they began serving 15 years ago. Jahncke credits the Krewe of Hermes with the daring to commission the artistically outstanding parade.

"They took a chance on us," he said. "This is the first time we've had the budget and the freedom to have (this much) latitude."

I spoke to a former Hermes krewe captain (from his pre-Carnival retreat in Key West) about Hermes' fiscal and psychological investment in the parade's enhanced artistry. He explained (on condition of anonymity -- a long-held Carnival custom) that when he became captain 11 years ago, the Hermes organization had fallen on hard times, which he remedied with a membership drive that raised the krewe ranks from 169 to 550. Enhanced membership, he said, led to an enhanced parade budget, which led to the splendid parade we'll see tonight.

"I recognized when I took over," he said, "that the world was a different place out there. To compete on the street these days you can't be the same old thing -- at least that was my assessment. In the past, a couple of hundred members was fine; you threw some trinkets off the floats and that was enough. But the world had changed and the super parades had become very flamboyant, very large in scope.

"I thought it was important that the organization be kind of reinvented. But it needed to be reinvented within the tradition. Hermes is known as -- I don't particularly like this word, but -- an old-line type of club.

"Ordinarily when you have a small membership and limited budget, you tend to go in and do a lot of repainting. But as we were able to grow the organization, we were able to change the emphasis from painting to sculpture. So they (Hermes floats) took on much more of a 3-D effect."

The former captain said that in addition to an emphasis on sculpture, the krewe sought more motion on the floats.

"A lot of things like the limbs of trees and leaves and things should shimmer, he said. They shouldn't be so thick that they don't move. . . . As you look at parades today, that's an important characteristic, especially in a night parade. Does that float come down the street with all of this kinetic effect."

To create the new Hermes floats, the krewe did not search for a new float-maker. Instead they returned to Jahncke, but they upped the ante considerably.

"Herbert Jahncke is a marvelous man, a very dedicated and creative individual," he said. "We told him we want something quite different and unique and we're willing to double or, in some cases, triple or quadruple your budget to do it. We want a very high level of work. . . . If we build a new float today from scratch -- and we've built quite a few of them -- they run $35,000 to $40,000 apiece.

Artistic differences

Though Jahncke and the Hermes leadership are in agreement on most issues, there are a few artistic differences as yet unresolved. Jahncke, for instance, would like to see fewer float riders.

"We want to keep that traditional look of a 19th century parade in modern form," he said. "I'm always in conflict (with the krewe) over the quantity of people they want to ride and the design we want to do. We have to incorporate more people than we would like. Fourteen (riders) is traditional. These floats will go up to 28 to 30."

"We've gone from 14-man floats to 25 to 30," said the former krewe captain, "because as the organization has grown, we've had to accommodate the members. It's terribly important in another way, too. There's not enough action on an old-fashioned float for this day and age. An old float with 8, 10, 12, 14 people on it and nothing moving is kind of boring in this day and age. By having a float with 20 to 30 people on it, you have the (necessary) excitement."

Here, I side with the krewe; 14 riders would be visually sparse, like those half-filled floats you see at the backs of some parades.

Minor artist-client quarrels aside, Jahncke and Morrison predict that the quality of the Hermes parade will increase even more, owing to the continued dedication of the krewe and the visually arresting success of the floats, perhaps inspiring other builders to raise their standards as well.

"We definitely try to push the envelope," Morrison said, "because it's rolling theater and we want to be ebullient. That's why we have such rich colors, so much shape and so much texture over the whole thing.

"We want it to be an overwhelming sensory experience," he said. "And I think we've succeeded in that, because there's something scary and there's something beautiful and there's something sexy and something provocative in every parade we do. We're inspired directly from the Greek myths and we have to credit the emotional content of what we achieve to that.

"Other artists say, 'You've gone too far, it's not necessary for an event of this type,' " said Morrison, who obviously craves the Carnival competitiveness. "They don't understand, it's a labor of passion.

"We're trying to show people, for maybe the first time in 50 years, how beautiful a parade can be. We've given everything we can to raise the bar and create a new standard. I'd love to see a revival of the tradition of Mardi Gras to the glory that it had before. It's in a slump."

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Art critic Doug MacCash can be reached at dmaccash@timespicayune.com or at (504) 826-3481.