Tuesday, February 01, 2000
Ex-Talking Head offers new look
David Byrne's multidimensional artworks, like his music, defy convention
BY OWEN FINDSEN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Visitors to David Byrne's exhibit at CAC don headphones, as he does here, to hear inspirtaional phrases.
(Tony Jones photo)
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“Winners are loosers with a new attitude.”
“You will never find the other ocean if you never leave the shore.”
“You are your Superself and nothing can stop you now.”
Slogans such as these are the kinds of things that David Byrne collects and recycles into art.
Mr. Byrne, pop star and pop artist, is showing his work at the Contemporary Arts Center. Each large color photograph, which is lit from behind, includes a self-help slogan. And, floating in the center of the image, is a piece of drug paraphernalia. The works are titled Better Living Through Chemistry.
“To explain it, it sounds kind of dumb,” Mr. Byrne says. “Maybe that's the point.
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IF YOU GO
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• What: Better Living Through Chemistry and Stairway to Heaven, artworks by David Byrne.
• When: 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Saturday, noon-5 p.m. Sunday, through April 2.
• Where: Contemporary Arts Center, 115 E. Fifth St., downtown.
• Admission: $3.50, $2 students and seniors, free on Mondays.
• Information: 721-0390.
• Also showing: Terry Allen: Belief; Celeste Boursier-Mougenot, From Ear to Ear; Jacci Den Hartog, Views of the Garden.
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“The idea is to use the same kind of techniques, the same kind of presentation as actual advertising. The exact same size, same materials as airport advertising. I use the same kind of graphic geegaws and gizmos they use in computer graphics.”
Mr. Byrne, who has a New York address and a California driver's license, set out to be an artist. He was studying at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Maryland Art Institute in the 1970s when he started the off-beat music group the Talking Heads. Known for his music and the 1986 motion picture True Stories, he says he has always been creating visual art as well.
Like his bizarre and thought-provoking music, the art defies convention. It is part photography and computer design, part wordplay and part soundtrack. Visitors to the CAC don't just look at the art. They don headphones to listen to a compact disc that's an integral part of the art, flooding the ears with inspirational sayings.
What do the empty slogans and overblown images have to do with drug use? “I think they're two sides of the same coin,” the 47-year-old artist explains. “It's almost as if these things belong together.
“Someone said "the bigger the front, the bigger the back.' The more pumped up the inspirational phrases are, and the more glorious the landscapes are, the more the flip side grows as well. By boosting one side you also boost its opposite.”
It's not meant as a lecture against drug use. It's a warning about the way America overdoes everything. Once you accept the exaggeration in one direction, you have to accept the other.
“I think these pieces are very American,” says Mr. Byrne, who was born in Scotland. “Europe doesn't have the same culture of advertising and boosterism that we do, but they're getting there.”
Mr. Byrne is also showing another set of images, Stairway to Heaven, the same size and format as the slogan series. This group of artwork shows guns and other weapons with various foreign currencies. Knives, pistols, machine guns and shells float in space surrounded by paper money.
He wants the images to be “pleasantly disrupting, jarring in a pleasant way.” He makes the images bright and beautiful to make the viewer ashamed to appreciate the beauty.
By coincidence, the CAC is also showing studies for a sculpture project by Terry Allen. Also a pop musician and visual artist, Mr. Allen is a longtime friend and sometime collaborator with Mr. Byrne.
“Terry's wife (Jo Harvey Allen) was in True Stories. We worked together on some of the music. We've worked together on a couple of other things and stayed in touch since then.”
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