Straight Talk

You’ll remember Mark Mothersbaugh as the leader of Devo, the New Wave band with the red plastic ziggurat hats who stormed MTV with clever synth-pop songs like “Whip It” and “Girl U Want.” Though the band is semi-dormant, Mothersbaugh has continued to produce new work at a jealousy-inspiring pace. He and his bandmates stay busy at his Mutato Muszika studio with film and commercial soundtracks ranging from Rugrats to The Royal Tenenbaums. But he has also been a visual artist since before the formation of Devo in the early 1970s, and in the last several years he has embarked on an ambitious serious of small-gallery shows across the country. His latest, a series of photomanipulations called Beautiful Mutants, kicks off at Ox-Op Gallery in Minneapolis on January 3.

THE RAKE: Tell me about the Beautiful Mutant series.

MARK: It’s a collection of pieces I’ve been working on since 1998 or ’99. They’re somewhere between Rorschach prints and a literal portrait. I’ve always been kind of obsessed with symmetry in human form. It’s actually a lie, because we aren’t really symmetrical, we’re only vaguely symmetrical. We’re as close to the potato as we are to a perfect mineral or a snowflake.

THE RAKE:How many photos have you done?

MARK: I’ve done quite a few experiments, one or two thousand, and I’ve done about 350 that I think are really compelling. The ideas behind Rorschach art were intriguing to me, that people are compelled to attach meaning to abstract forms.

THE RAKE: Though the band’s often remembered for the robotic dancing and the wacky hats, Devo was always more than just a novelty band.

MARK: Everybody in Devo has always felt this attraction to come up with something so strong that it couldn’t just be confined to “weirdo art.” Devo at its best was always able to straddle that line between commercial art and fine art. We were hoping popular culture was going to take a quantum leap. Our surprise was that it was so easy to misuse sound and vision and turn it into something banal. When we were first making films, we had high hopes [for MTV]. What it turned out to be was a less interesting version of Home Shopping Network, because it had a smaller range of products—they were all just records.

THE RAKE: Are you happier as a visual artist than a musician? You’re completely in control of your message that way, and don’t have to worry about your record label passing you off as a novelty act.

MARK: Well, you know, it’s two-sided. Obviously, music is such a big art form. And I do like the challenge of being able to make something that’s relevant to you personally into successful public art. With Beautiful Mutants, it may not be as important to people as if I was showing at the Museum of Modern Art. But I’ve found an audience [at small galleries] that’s fervent about ideas and challenging imagery. The last tour was really satisfying.

THE RAKE: The cliché about artists is that they hate doing commercial work, but you seem to get a charge out of it.

MARK: It goes back to being influenced by Andy Warhol. He played with that edge between commercial and fine art and attacked it very overtly with things like the Campbell’s Soup can. I grew up with the hippies, and watched them get crushed at Kent State while I was there, and became aware of the fact that in this country, rebellion was obsolete. The ironic thing about the punks is that they never learned that lesson from the hippies and became a commodity so quickly. We always felt like the best way to change something was through subversion.

THE RAKE: You’re swinging through Minneapolis twice in 2004, returning for a December show at Creative Electric gallery. What keeps drawing you back here?

MARK: We love Minneapolis. That’s where we first worked with Chuck Statler on the very first Devo film. I remember going up to his place about 1975, and we got to his house and his garage had been crushed by snow. You have a number of good galleries—what can I say? Most cities in the world can’t get one good gallery, so I’m counting my blessings in Minneapolis.