Mark Mothersbaugh

Roq la Rue, 2316 Second Ave, 374-8977. Opening reception Fri Aug 15, 6-10 pm. Through Sept 5.

Mark Mothersbaugh, the main voice of DEVO, has been keeping journals for over 30 years, and every day he contributes new illustrations, collages and paintings to his archive of about 25,000 entries. For many artists, sketchbooks are the starting point, a place to rough out ideas and concepts that are later finished in other places, or in different media. These journals become works of art themselves, a window into the thought process of that particular mind.

As an artist and musician I am amazed by how prolific and consistently interesting Mark Mothersbaugh's work has been, and I've been inspired by it. I recently had an exhibit of paintings and collages, called What Would DEVO Do?, showing members of Devo in different situations.

Recently I had the opportunity to speak to Mothersbaugh about his upcoming show at Roq la Rue. I was interested in talking to him about his music, art, and film, and his success at integrating so many different media, but most of all I was interested in his tirelessness. He seems to be unable to stop, almost possessed by, his need to create.

"I think it comes from [the fact] that I can't shut my brain off," he told me. "I'm not sure when it started, because when I worked at the mall I didn't ever really relish going to work. It was a rare day that I wanted to go sell clothes for Chess King at the Summit Mall. Pretty early on, I knew I wasn't fitting into that world.

"But somewhere in there I was doing some gallery shows and selling paintings for $35 bucks apiece. The last show I did in Akron, Ohio, back in 1974 or '75, I think I sold one painting, and it was to my uncle. There was some article in the Akron Beacon Journal, and they wrote that I was in this band, and it was kind of mentioned as a sidebar. We put out these records, and we found a way to talk about what we saw going on around us. We found a voice, and a medium, and it was something we called Devo."

Mothersbaugh and his bandmates were starting a new movement of vision and sound--and at first, because nobody knew what to make of them, they were lumped in with the punk movement, which was happening simultaneously. But where punk was nihilistic and self-destructive, Devo's message was much more positive: geared toward productivity, awareness, and making your own choices, and about not buying into the lie. The band members coerced their record label into letting them make films, and they became pioneers of the video age. Many of the ideas for their videos and album covers came from illustrations in Mothersbaugh's journals.

"This was all long before there was MTV," he says, "and we kept talking about sound and vision and how it was going to bury rock and roll, and the artists who were visual and audio would be the ones who would take over. We were sure of that.

"We had a way to talk about what we wanted to talk about. We were commenting on life on planet Earth and the things we saw going on around us, and trying to find a way to organize our thoughts, and organize our feelings. Then it was easy to wake up in the morning: You could be drawing, or borrowing a camera from somebody long enough to take photos and make a photo essay, or you could be writing music."

Through music, art, and film, Mothersbaugh has had a key role in building modern pop culture, and anyone who's interested in, or perplexed by, the world we live in should take this opportunity to see it from his perspective. His work simultaneously observes the contemporary world and allows you to see it through the eyes of someone who helped to create it. Devo helped pioneer the video age, which then spawned the MTV generation, who are living in, and creating, the world that Mothersbaugh is now observing and reacting to. His journals have been there to collect every step--all with a healthy dose of humor, cynicism, and mockery from the mind of a man who can't turn his brain off.