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by Seth Rogovoy
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Aug. 15, 1996 -- David Byrne's multi-media installation, "Desire," is the perfect exhibition to introduce the public to the concept and potential of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams. Playful, suggestive, provocative yet utterly accessible, "Desire" might not break any new ground in contemporary art, but it is bound to win over the skeptical and the uninitiated to the reality of Mass MoCA and to the argument that contemporary art is not something to fear but to welcome.
Throughout his career as the leader of the new-wave, art-rock band Talking Heads, as a composer of film, dance and theatrical scores, as a filmmaker and as a record producer, Byrne's strength has always been his ability to find meaning in the mundane. Early songs celebrated the simplest pleasures attainable to modern man as if they were tablets handed down from Sinai: "My building has every convenience, it's going to make life easy for me...."
In "Desire," Byrne turns his attention to the ubiquitous world of advertising and its close cousin, corporate marketing. In a series of striking color transparencies mounted in bus-shelter-style lightboxes, Byrne superimposes new-age slogans ("Winners are losers with a new attitude") atop images of picture-postcard landscapes. Pulsating from the center of these gorgeous pictures are jarring, high-resolution photographs of street weapons, drug paraphernalia and foreign currency.
In and of themselves, these juxtapositions are not particularly surprising. Money, drugs and violence belong together in obvious ways, and connecting them with feel-good sayings and images is a simple trick: Irony 101. But Byrne doesn't just stop there. He has created a total environment, one that implicates the viewer by trapping him between the billboard-type images and a model of a post-industrial ghost town, built by North Adams native Bill Sweet, featuring an electric train circling the city on a perpetual ride to nowhere.
What is perhaps most startling about the town is that it even with the Empire State Building towering above it, it could be a replica of North Adams. Indeed, Byrne was savvy to make the connection between the cityscape and the sprawling Sprague complex -- and by extension, the entire city -- explicit. While a viewer's focus may be mostly on the panels and the model city, one can't help but notice that the exhibition is a kind of shell game. Beyond the panels lie walls of a real building that looks exactly like one of the models, suggesting that beyond the walls of Building 13 lies a similarly Orwellian world in which an invisible populace is bombarded by ambiguous messages about drugs, money, violence and the keys to a better life. When you leave the exhibit, you will find yourself looking at and listening a lot more closely to those subtly intrusive messages.
Byrne heightens the claustrophobic experience of the exhibit by supplying viewers with headphones playing a private soundtrack of motivational and John Williams-style, symphonic movie music and new- age sayings ("Live your life like the movie it was meant to be") that echo those on the panels. The incessant urgings so lull a listener into a trancelike state that by the time you get to the gangsta rap lyrics of Notorious B.I.G's "Ready to Die," read by an actress in a cheerfully peppy voice, even the urge to "rob and steal, because the money got that whip appeal" sounds like just more of the same can-do, uplifting corporate-speak.
The exhibition also includes two towers of video screens playing shows that tweak advertising slogans and discuss music's power to manipulate. At the opposite end of the building from the main installation, at best they function like appendices or footnotes to the rest of the show; at worst, they're an afterthought.
"Desire" is free and open Thursday through Monday, 11 to 5, through Sept. 2, after which it will be open only on weekends through Oct. 20.
For over 30 years, the Pioneer Valley's Ray Mason has been making music. As heard on Mason's two CDs, `Between Blue and Okay" and "Missyouville," his latest, Mason shares NRBQ's lighthearted quirkiness, readily apparent from such song titles as "My Lips Are Lonely," "Hitchhiking In the Land of No Cars," "She's Wearing Her Hair Like Donna Reed," and "All I Want Is a Little Revenge."
Mason is no mere novelty artist, however. "A Flurry of Coats," among other tunes, recalls The Band in the way it builds upon the utter simplicity of old-timey music while constructing something utterly contemporary. And his signature Silvertone guitar sound alone qualifies him as a musical original and visionary.
You don't play in bar bands for over three decades without learning something. You can hear the entire history of rock 'n' roll being recapitulated in Mason's work, from the garage rock of the '60s to the psychedelic and progressive experiments of the '70s to the new-wave, art-rock of the '80s to the neo-everything, alternative-rock of the '90s. Throughout it all, Mason has remained true to his singular sensibility. He's at the Dalton Depot tonight, Aug. 15, from 10 to 1:30 a.m.
Dos Amigos in Great Barrington transforms itself into a Latin jazz club on Sunday night, Aug. 18, when bassist Santi Debriano performs with his band, the Panamaniacs, at 10....
Congratulations go out to the Berkshires' own Barnyard Blues Project, performing this Saturday at 2 at the venerable House of Blues in Cambridge. For more info call (617) 491-2583....
Be a part of history: The Dooley Austin Band will be recording its show at Bucksteep Manor in the town of Washington on Friday night from 8 to midnight for an upcoming live album. Call (413) 269-6310 for more info...
Ace producer and instrumental wizard Adam Rothberg, whose credits include Dar Williams, Bernice Lewis and Lynne Saner, goes in front of the mike next Wednesday, Aug. 28, at 8, in the Musica y Mas series at the Cactus Cafe in Lee. The Northampton singer-songwriter is a Pittsfield native and perhaps best known in these parts as a member of the Big Waagh Scratch Band. For more info call (413) 243-4300....
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