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by Seth Rogovoy
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., July 25, 1996 -- If the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art was a person, it could be David Byrne -- multi- disciplinary, post-industrial, innovative, international, versatile, theoretical, commercial, recycled, post-modern. Thus it is only fitting that the very first public exhibition of artwork at the historic, former mill complex in North Adams -- and Byrne's first solo museum exhibition anywhere -- is "Desire: David Byrne at Mass MoCA," opening this Saturday, July 27, from 11 to 5.
Byrne is probably best known as the leader of the influential rock group Talking Heads, which he co-founded in 1975 with fellow art students from the Rhode Island School of Design. Since 1992 he has recorded and performed as a solo artist, often blending musical traditions of Latin America and Africa with contemporary American sounds. He runs a record label, Luaka Bop, which specializes in contemporary fusions of world music. He is also an Academy Award- winning composer ("The Last Emperor"), a filmmaker ("True Stories," "Ile Aiye"), and a photographer ("Strange Ritual").
In his exhibition at Mass MoCA, Byrne brings his work in all these different genres together for the first time. The show, designed specifically for the site, includes photography, video, writing and an original score.
"I guess I'm not bowled over by different media," said Byrne, speaking last weekend in a phone interview from his New York City apartment. "Or I'm not in awe or afraid of them. I may fail at some things, and some things may not work out, but I guess my feeling is what I always thought of as the punk-rock attitude, which was kind of like, `Anybody can be in a band -- just learn a few chords and if you've got something to say you can say it.'"
In "Desire," Byrne is saying things about advertising and manipulation. Two-dozen large-scale, photographic transparencies in illuminated boxes surround a model city -- a post-industrial landscape not unlike North Adams. Like Orwellian billboards, images of drug paraphernalia, international currency and street weapons -- guns, switchblades, razors -- superimposed on inspirational landscapes combined with motivational slogans from corporate handbooks, loom over the depopulated city, which includes a working electric train set and 400 model buildings built to scale by William Sweet of North Adams.
A separate laser-disc show presented on a wall of video monitors stacked side-by-side confronts visitors outside of the circle of light-boxes. Installed by videowall pioneer Jon Stolzberg -- a Williams College alumnus (class of '79) who lives in New York City - - the two-part show features familiar advertising themes that are slightly skewed and a program about music's powers of manipulation.
A final element tying the show together is a soundtrack recorded by Byrne -- "a collage of motivational phrases with inspirational music," he said -- that will help viewers hearing it on personal stereos to immerse themselves fully in the world of the exhibition.
Byrne said that although a lot of thought and preparation has gone into the show and its various elements, it is not driven by theory, but rather by something a lot more accessible.
"I guess I'm thinking of it more in terms of fun, more like a ride or something," he said. "I want it to be a little bit humorous and enjoyable, not something that immediately says `I'm smarter than you are,' or, `You have to read a lot of art theory to understand this.' You can enjoy it on whatever level you take it on."
Mass MoCA Director Joseph Thompson, leading a visitor on a tour of the exhibition as it was being mounted in the hangar-like space of Building 13 last week, said, "When we first started talking, David had three or four of the transparencies done, and he saw them as things that go on a wall. When he came and saw the columns and pillars and the 6,000-square-feet of available real estate, the show expanded.
"It's a telling example of the way artists react to the possibility of generous space and time -- time to develop their work. That's at the core of our mission. To some degree, site-specific installations of this scale would be very difficult to realize in urban museums. This single exhibition space here is roughly a third of the total space of the Whitney Museum. There's no way a museum like the Whitney could give that much space to one installation."
Byrne was indeed attracted by the space and the opportunity it afforded him to experiment. "The spaces in Mass MoCA are so huge and there's so much going on in them -- even if you clear them out there's still a lot to look at, as opposed to, say, in a traditional museum where the walls are pristine white and all the floors and lighting and everything create an aesthetic vacuum," he said. "These places are not like that at all. So I thought that it's better to try and put more stuff in to balance that out, balance the fact that it really is an interesting space. If you had just photographs or paintings on the wall they would just get lost. There's no way that photos on the wall are going to be as interesting as the wall itself."
Byrne is, in fact, smitten by the whole concept of Mass MoCA as a multi-disciplinary center for the visual, performing and media arts. "It seems like it's going to be this incredible thing if -- of course, everybody probably says the same thing, if they can get it all together," he said. "But that's part of it, that it's this incredible folly, that it seems so impossible, the sheer scale of what they might be attempting. All these things that seem completely insurmountable are in a way what makes it so wonderful."
Byrne is bullish on Mass MoCA's ability to attract interest from other artists. "Joe and the other people there have this incredibly open attitude of being very inclusive about putting all kinds of things and all kinds of people together in there," he said. "If that really starts to happen then it will be just like a snowball, just start running by itself. By word of mouth it will attract people, because so many other museums become staid institutions, locked into whatever it is they think they are."
It was precisely Thompson's open-mindedness about what a David Byrne-at-Mass MoCA exhibit could be that clinched it for Byrne. "Most people would want to have a show of photographs on a white wall, which is fine," he said. "I like doing that, too. But knowing what this place was, I said this is what would be really cool here, and he went for it. Not too many people would do that."
Byrne isn't pretending that he didn't have some reservations about presenting his first major installation in an untried venue that is not scheduled to open officially until the summer of 1998. "Actually, it kind of scared me," he said. "I thought, `Hey, I'm kind of being the guinea pig here. This could be a total disaster.' So far it seems like it's going to be a lot of fun. It's going to work out all right."
As to who might come to see artwork that "aims to pleasantly confuse," Byrne said, "I assume some people are going to go there who go to the various cultural events in the area. I don't know what percentage of those people know or care about me. That may not make any differnce. They may like the show and have no idea who I am, which is great.
"There's the performance series at the [Night Shift] Cafe, and I assume that a good percentage of the audience might at least know my name. They might like my music or hate it, but they'll bring a different set of expectations to the show. But I don't know what that is, and I don't know what the other people will think of it either. I guess that's part of the deal."
"Desire: David Byrne at Mass MoCA" has been funded by the Clark Art Institute in support of Mass MoCA and the Williams/Clark Graduate Program in the History of Art, with additional support from Gannett Outdoor Group, Magnani & McCormick, Inc., and Pioneer New Media Technologies. The exhibition is organized by Mass MoCA Director Joseph Thompson and Sara Krajewski, a graduate student at the Williams/Clark program.
The exhibition, housed in Building 13 -- the home of the Night Shift Cafe -- on Marshall Street, will run from July 27 through Oct. 20. Hours are 11 to 5 from Thursday to Monday through Sept. 2. From Sept. 3 to Oct. 20, the show will be open on weekends only, from 11 to 5. Admission is free.
[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on July 25, 1996. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1996. All rights reserved.]
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