Nothing makes art more exciting than genuine risk, when an exhibit has the potential to succeed wildly or fail miserably, careers sail or stall, when someone gathers the nerve to show something authentically different and the rest of us feel free to gush or guffaw.
Risk is all over “Myopia,” the mega-retrospective of art by Mark Mothersbaugh opening at the MCA Denver this week. Mothersbaugh is a full-blown pop star, a co-founder of DEVO, the legendary oddball post-punk band that scored big with “Whip It,” in 1980. He’s rich and famous and people still line up for his autograph.
What he isn’t — no small detail — is a member of the fine art fraternity, the small cadre of players, usually hand-picked in their youth, who show in the country’s chain of contemporary art museums and high-priced galleries in New York.
It’s a close club and hard to get in, especially for musicians, movie stars and politicians who dabble in paint or clay. The critics are just waiting, and they should be, to annihilate the fakes.
Mothersbaugh is no dabbler. He’s been drawing, painting, copying, inventing, filming, designing, photographing for five decades. His art is holistic: The music, brilliant, is connected to his videos, groundbreaking; the sketches, endlessly entertaining, transform into his prints, rugs, sculptures, installations and zany inventions, all of them likable, challenging and fully creative.
Still, you never know. “Myopia” is a massive, expensive show, filling all three floors at the MCA. It could come off as a great discovery or an embarrassing exercise in celebrity excess. The stakes are high, both for Mothersbaugh and curator Adam Lerner, who connected the dots on Mothersbaugh’s lifetime of work and chanced his own reputation by talking five important museums into booking it, sight unseen, after its Denver debut.
Success could mean a new level of respect the pair, a score for Lerner in a competitive business, a complete legacy for Mothersbaugh in his 65th year, allowing him to command big money for work, perhaps enter the collections of important museums.
Failure would be a drag.
Evo of DEVO
Mark Mothersbaugh was raised on the boredom of Akron, Ohio, and ruined by the killings at Kent State. He spent the first seven years of his life, almost blind, in a world of his own, until he was diagnosed with myopia and fitted with eyeglasses.
He learned to be a confident and creative kid in a climate of low expectations and stayed that way into adulthood, emerging as an artist with a social conscience. He marched against the Vietnam War.
He was enrolled at Kent State in 1970 when soldiers opened fire on protestors and out of that troubled, seminal moment, fine-tuned a take on the world that accounted for a mutated human race, a theory of de-evolution.
His band, DEVO, wrote songs and made crude movies to go along with them — some of the first music videos. Mothersbaugh used whatever media he could find to express himself — postcards, mail art, rubber stamps. His group pasted decals around town. There was a bit of today’s skateboard culture in all of it.
And the remnants of the Beat culture, as well. Mothersbaugh was a frantic writer, at one point, self-publishing a book, 300 pages long, filled with absurd drawings and text.
DEVO honed a new kind of sound, fast and unpolished, defined by edgy songs like “Mongoloid,” and a cover of the Rolling Stones “Satisfaction.” They weren’t angry punks, but there was a darkness to their scope, a canny suspicion of the status quo.
“We kind of felt like we were musical reporters back then,” Mothersbaugh said earlier this mont. “Like we were art reporters and using our art to talk about culture.”
DEVO’s music offered an off-beat complement to the punk rock scene that was making its mark on the cultural edge.
“It was antithetical to trying to be or whatever the 1970s version of “American Idol” was. It was the opposite of that,” said Mothersbaugh.
“People were expressing some internal rage, some internal energy and ideals that surpassed what was currently happening.”
DEVO began getting gigs far and wide. The band would drive all the way to New York on a Friday to play at the famous CBGB’s, then drive back in time for day jobs on Monday morning.
Record companies discovered them and fame followed. Commercially, it peaked with “Whip It.” Promo shots, with the guys in yellow hazmat suits and stacked, red caps, are rock ‘n’ roll history.
Fans waned, but Mothersbaugh went on. In 1986, pal Paul Reubens asked him to score a new TV show he was doing. In just a few days, Mothersbaugh had written the music for “Pee Wee’s Playhouse.”
That’s been a second career. He’s scored more than a hundred films and TV shows, since, some serious like, “Rushmore,” many unserious, like “Rugrats.” It’s made him wealthy, and happy, he said.
These days, he is headquartered in a building on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, called Mututo Musika. It’s a quirky space, a round building, painted lime green on a strip of expensive restaurants and designer boutiques. His recording studio is in the middle with offices and studios spoking out at the sides. Things hang about: guitars, keyboards of all sorts, toys, the ceramic roly-poly objects he recently finished.
This is where he works, writes music, makes art, and continues to draw on postcards. He now has 30,000 of them, sketches of humanoid figures, somewhere between man, Martian and mutant, mysterious machinery, animals without heads and eyeballs without faces, apes, soldiers, tanks, astronauts, and cartoon figures of every kind; the stuff that falls naturally from its creator’s head.
“Myopia” attempts to tell his whole story, the birth of Mothersbaugh’s ideas, their manifestation into words, music, art, whatever.
“In many ways, Mark Mothersbaugh himself is the work of art,” said Lerner.
“Art is not about what you make, it’s about how you live.”
An unexpected show
Adam Lerner met Mark Mothersbaugh when DEVO was in town for concert in July of 2011. Lerner, whose title is chief animator at the MCA, was putting together an exhibit of work by seminal punk scene photographer Bruce Conner. Interviewing the DEVO co-founder was part of the research.
“I had listened to DEVO as a kid, ” said Lerner. ” But honestly, I didn’t know who Mark Mothersbaugh was before I arranged the interview.”
They met at the MCA where a polite opening question about Mothersbaugh’s own visual art output changed the whole conversation.
“Within 15 minutes, I realized that he’s a guy I ought to be paying attention to,” said Lerner.
Mothersbaugh had his own epiphany.
“I went to the museum, and museum was young and beautiful, the director was articulate and energetic'” he said. “I liked it.”
Mothersbaugh had been showing some of his prints, basically blowups of his postcards printed at home and selling them for ‘a few hundred bucks” at small galleries. But he was hardly scratching the surface of the fine arts world.
Lerner suggested they explore something bigger, perhaps a museum exhibit. “He talked about doing this show and I was, like, ‘Man, this is a dream come true.'”
The project morphed along the way. At first, it was to focus on Mothersbaugh’s recent output, colorful, three-dimensional pieces that would fit well into a museum, larger-than-life replicas of the My Little Pony toy, a car, an actual car, that was fashioned from the back ends of two cars. These works open and close “Myopia.”
But the closer Lerner got, the more he realized its was Mothersbaugh’s body of work, culled over a lifetime, that was the heart of his art. There were patterns in the work that needed to be melded together, his attraction to mirrored images, his flow between dark themes and light, his balance of fine artmaking and commercial endeavors.
A simple show turned into a thousand-piece retrospective. Mothersbaugh’s work had to be identified, found, sorted, assembled. There were boxes to empty, notebooks to scour, videos to watch.The tale had to be told in tearsheets and scribblings, grainy videos – not the stuff of contemporary art museums.
“At first I wondered how it would be read by the art world,” Lerner said. “But now I feel it is a giant criticism of the art world.”
By that he means; Why hadn’t the art world discovered Mothersbaugh earlier? Was it his rock ‘n’ background, the dabbler factor? Was it curators’ fixations on easy-to-read objects, sellable objects, that caused them to overlook Mothersbaugh — and artists like him. Probably all of the above.
“The celebrity aspect is a consequence of the fact that he is not just a maker of art, but a maker of culture,” said Lerner.
In the end, both Lerner and Mothersbaugh think the neglect was in the best interest of creativity. That no dealer got hold of Mothersbaugh prevented him from becoming a commodity.
“The uber private part of it, the incredibly private part of it, made it easy for me to work in any style I wanted,” Mothersbaugh said. It made it easy for me to go super low or go high. I could spend a week on one drawing if I wanted to or I could do 10 of them in one hour.”
Still, the exhibit needs to prove its mettle. Lerner has forged a solid reputation in the museum community for academic rigor. The MCA has backed into the late 20th century before, most notably with “West of Center,” an exploration of 1970s counter culture that was fun — and placed firmly into a larger cultural context.
He is applying the same standards to “Myopia” and that has helped it get it bookings at places like the Grey Art Gallery at New York University and the Contemporary Arts Center at the Cincinnati Art Museum. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, an encyclopedic institution with 80,000 objects, will show “Myopia” concurrently with an exhibition focused on Leonardo da Vinci’s codices.
“We believe that Mark Mothersbaugh’s endless curiosity about the world is not unlike that of Leonardo and other great artists: they all share a drive to observe, understand, and create,” said MIA director Kaywin Feldman.
Comparisons to da Vinci are nice, but they push the stakes on “Myopia” way up, perhaps too high. For sure, the exhibit is likable, there’s something for everyone, the DEVO fanatic, the fine art snob, and anybody imaginative enough to see an instrument made from 100 birdcalls as a piece of art.
But the comprehensiveness is part of the risk. On their own the pieces can be schlocky, immature, “super low,” in the artist’s words. As a whole they expose a rare brilliance, piecing together the story of not just art, but an artful life, lived to the fullest.
Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540, rrinaldi@denverpost.com or twitter.com/rayrinaldi
MARK MOTHERSBAUGH: MYOPIA The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver presents a retrospective of art and music by Mark Mothersbaugh, co-founder of the band DEVO. Oct. 30-April 12. 1485 Delgany St. $8 adults. 18 and under free. 303-298 -7554 or mcadenver.org.
