David Byrne’s Hopeful Drawings
The lesson embedded in Tempo Gallery’s How I Realized About Non-Rational Logic, an exhibition of David Byrne’s artwork, is spelled out in a wall-sized artist assertion at its entrance. For guests who can nonetheless catch this breezy, trippy present earlier than it wraps up its six-week-long run this Saturday, determining the title’s significance from the works themselves could be extra rewarding than counting on the autobiographical rationalization. Byrne’s nattily sketched phrase associations, surreal cartoons, and thought diagrams — additionally collected in A Historical past of the World (in Dingbats) Drawings and Writings David Byrne (Phaidon Press 2022) — nod to artwork making as high-spirited brainstorming and insightful deviations.
The truth that psychological detours function this present’s unifying theme can be no shock to any customer with passing information of Byrne’s multimedia profession. Just like the drawings and writings at Tempo, Byrne’s output has concerned inventive sleights of hand that solely seem easy as a result of a long time of savvy refinement. From his days as a two-time artwork faculty dropout turned frontman and chief songwriter for the punk-era juggernaut the Speaking Heads to his present Broadway flip deconstructing the pop live performance into postmillennial musical theater by means of the stripped down, gymnastic choreography of American Utopia, Byrne exploits our nation’s homegrown conventions. His material ranges from promoting bromides to self-help speak to non secular fundamentalist exhortations, their languages reframed into funkier, extra skewed grooves and configurations that — like these spur-of-the-moment drawings and pictographs — make America’s delusional optimism appear credible once more.
Byrne’s public popularity for proposing counterintuitive hopefulness supplies one other subtext in How I Realized About Non-Rational Logic. Though he enjoys a celeb’s comfy perch in gentrified New York, the artist has publicly inveighed, insightfully and determinedly, towards the town’s ongoing encrustation in Midas gold. In response, much less well-known and well-connected fellow artists — together with some on this publication — have charged him with ignoring inventive communities and cultural initiatives thriving past Gotham’s gilded zip codes. However dwelling within the glass home of an elite Manhattan gallery, as Byrne does, doesn’t imply you’ll be able to’t throw rhetorical stones on the creepy commodification of practically each side of every day American life, supplied you purpose these objections on the proper brokers.
That’s to not say this exhibition is political. It isn’t. However there’s greater than a winking nod to the inbuilt contradiction in exhibiting unassuming drawings and writings — most made spontaneously by Byrne with a mere pen or pencil on archival paper — in an elite artwork gallery with world outposts. Set straight throughout from the ostentatious Chelsea skyline seen by means of the gallery’s Seventh-floor skylights and ceiling-to-floor home windows, Byrne’s small-scaled and spare drawings — many courting from the town’s grueling lockdown interval in 2020 — could remind us (and perhaps reminded the artist as effectively) that artwork could be created wherever you end up entombed, and by utilizing no matter instruments you may have in that bunker.
So, is Byrne’s artwork any good? Stylistically, the perfect drawings and most attention-grabbing verbal pictographs land someplace between the interrogative visible adventures in Saul Steinberg’s virtuosic drawings and the typically overhyped calisthenics of Keith Haring’s charming silhouettes. Because the exhibition spotlights probably the most rudimentary stage of Byrne’s visible repertoire, it’s akin to observing, in any given metropolis or small city, a daydreaming bus passenger with pen in hand, drawing or scribbling excitedly in a moleskin pocket book. So the “non-rational logic” to which Byrne alludes is the fertile mindlessness that goes into making artwork on an on a regular basis foundation.
And so Byrne reveals that the pen has causes that purpose can by no means know. A still-life doodle of a woolen winter cap can metamorphose bushy human limbs and look able to take a winter’s stroll. A confident pigeon gazing into its wardrobe mirror can see its neurotic human double staring again with reciprocal envy or admiration for what they each nearly are, or aren’t. Visible engimas like these play out by means of the drawings’ persistently disarming humor. What causes the agony in Byrne’s Mr. Potato Head as he grimaces and rears backward on skinny avian legs? Is the enormous finger reaching down for a pill-sized sensible telephone that of a postmodern Gulliver, texted by Lilliputians who miss his firm?
A few of the works that embody writing — particularly the wall-sized mural that dominates the exhibition house — symbolize Byrne scattering after which rearranging cultural code phrases and familial or social labels. One drawing reveals {that a} cocktail bar’s taxonomies could be as intellectually productive as a chemist’s periodic desk. Different phrase associations are set inside the roots and branches of timber to disclose how pre-given classes can, with out a lot acutely aware thought, outgrow or uproot former hierarchies; nonetheless different pictorial lists present how the unconscious thoughts classifies and distorts markers of human progress or worldly success.
Cease making sense, Byrne famously sings within the Speaking Heads’ underground dance hit “Girlfriend Is Higher” (1982). And within the American a long time since Byrne first plied his musical commerce in New York’s squalid Decrease East Aspect golf equipment — in a much more egalitarian financial system than ours and in a metropolis that then had an undeniably extra numerous, de-institutionalized inventive ecosystem — the willfully ignorant amongst us have more and more seized energy by denying empirical info whereas claiming to be most enlightened, turning rationality ever extra on its aching head.
So this lightheartedness is a tonic for our instances even because the exhibition poses a severe query: Can the only gestures in artwork and writing revive optimism amid the harmful nonsense and simplifications that move for cultural and mental exchanges today? Within the liner notes to his album American Utopia (2018) Byrne, within the pre-pandemic Trump-era, comes near eulogizing that American custom of hope, earlier than returning to the premise that “to be descriptive is to be prescriptive.” If you happen to unpack that sentiment additional in gentle of those drawings and writings, it’s much less a naïve platitude than it sounds. And it makes me surprise what else artwork is for, however to remind us that what we name “being affordable” is simply too typically our expedient alibi for not utilizing our creativeness.
David Byrne: How I Realized About Non-Rational Logic continues at Tempo Gallery (540 West twenty fifth Road, Chelsea, Manhattan) by means of March 19. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.