"A One Man Multi-Media Company"
By Adrian Dannatt, The Art Newspaper, No. 135, April 2003

A wildly protean polymath, it would be hard to imagine how David Byrne could cram his resumé onto anything less than a limitless digital chip. Of course, his main fame rests on his part in arty New Wave pop band Talking Heads, but Byrne has been actively involved in every area of our manifold audio-visual culture since his days at Rhode Island School of Design. He has written and directed distinctive feature films from "Stop Making Sense" to "True Stories", and exhibited and published a whole variety of quirky visual evidence from selected news photographs to found-images and drawings.

Indeed Byrne is a one-man multi-media company. His adventurous music label Luaka Bop hosts a variety of truly international acts and including Cornershop, as well as his film and video projects, exhibitions, solo records and music productions.

Byrne has always taken photographs and has published various radical tomes such as "Strange Ritual" and "Your Action World", creating a whole series of "New Sins" for the 2001 Valencia Biennial. His latest exhibition at Pace/MacGill Gallery, in New York, gathers a range of photographs, drawings and objects, and celebrates the concurrent release of "Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information", a DVD and book of his computer animated PowerPoint presentations.

The Art Newspaper: Your new show seems to be inspired by the world of American big business.

David Byrne: Well there is one room which is definitely all about corporate stuff, using PowerPoint, the computer graphics programme, as an art medium, which is ubiquitous for corporate presentations. Businessmen, salesmen and even art professionals use it too, it has this aura of being a corporate tool. I wanted to use all that along with all the icons it comes with and subvert it, use it to my own end. So I started doing pieces that dealt with it. Then as I got more proficient I realized I didn't want it to be totally self-reflexive, I could deal with other subjects and use PowerPoint not as something completely neutral. One of these deals with physiognomy, faces and celebrity, the value of facial appearance. But a lot of it starts off dealing with corporate charts and arrows. The other works are called "Corporate Tombstones", signs they tend to have in rural industrial parks. We started playing around with them, changing the names to those of artists on my little record label, which was rather amusing, having these semi-unknown artists on huge corporate signs, I'm hoping that it's not as simple as merely a criticism of corporate sensibilities, that it's something a little sweeter maybe.

TAN: Indeed, current cultural theory suggests that even the crassest corporate entertainment is actually used by the ordinary consumer in a much more dynamic and subversive way than assumed.

DB: Yeah, I think a lot of people don't take it at face value, they can actually "read" it. They may not have all the verbiage to articulate how they're reading it, but they "read" this stuff, whether films or advertising, in a pretty sophisticated way. My 13-year-old daughter knows that she's being manipulated, but she's also aware that she likes the stuff too. So it becomes this complex thing of being sort of resistant but not 100% resistant.

TAN: Your work has always seemed to be about the so-called "authentic" and the "inauthentic".

DB: That's all got very messy lately. For this exhibition I mixed it up by putting in drawings which are really old-fashioned. They are kind of spinning off the Kabalistic Axis Mundi and evolutionary trees, but then substituting things which shouldn't be diagrammed this way. I think of them as going back to Concrete Poetry, where it was about the graphics, the way the words were arranged on the page, I think of them as graphic poems, as opposed to scientific diagrams.

TAN: Do you hope the viewer is amused or subtly challenged?

DB: So often the first reaction is amusement. I often operate on a level where I like work to be entertaining, but then I hope that something else happens too: that the viewer gets maybe a little bit confused because these works are offering a criticism of this form but also celebrating it, and that can be confusing to people, to have both at the same time. I like to see people having a giggle, but I've go reactions from some people who thought the work was sweet and actually moving which is not the sort of reaction you expect from corporate things.

TAN: The photographs you published and exhibited celebrate the ordinary, like Eggleston or Gabriel Orozco, and are equally strong compositions...

DB: Well, it's become a bit of a cliché this idea of taking ordinary things and putting them on pedestals, elevating them, photographing them in a way that makes them look extraordinary. Maybe I do it with a different kind of exuberance, or with my own slightly different sensibility. Pictorially, in terms of composition, I guess that's what it comes down to, not just the idea of being fascinated by the banal or the ordinary but how you manage to do it.

TAN: Are you now deliberately mixing up the elements in your varied creative work?

DB: For a long time I made a big effort to keep them separate because I thought if I mixed them up it would create even more confusion. I feared it might seem like I'm capitalizing on my "celebrity" as a musician, and trying to just sneak a little bit of art in there. I've got past that now, I can even put music with some of the art pieces, that becomes a really important part of the PowerPoint pieces I did. It does seem like gradually I'm finding ways to pull the different strands together.

TAN: With someone like Captain Beefheart you can see a direct correlation between his paintings and his music, whereas with you there is an interesting divide as your music has become increasingly sensual and about the body while your visual work remains very cerebral.

DB: I think that's true; give it time. Maybe in time I'll manage to pull those strands together, but at the moment I don't mind they're separate. In general the art work is fairly intellectual though occasionally something sensual or overtly emotional comes in, though generally it's more idea-orientated.

TAN: So much of your work is about man-made artificiality one begins to suspect its secret agenda is really about nature.

DB: It could be true. I live in New York at the moment and that's what I have to deal with, that is the "nature" I see when I look out the window. I often ask myself if I'm not dealing with just one little tiny aspect of nature, which people make, rather than a universal nature, and I'm missing a big chunk, as are a lot of other artists. If I got out to a less urban place maybe my work would change radically. In the music world everyone has so many preconceived ideas about what the "authentic" sounds like and probably have the same preconceived ideas about what "authenticity" in the visual arts looks like too. It's a clichéd idea that if it's sloppy and expressionistic it's more real

TAN: You seem very interested in a lot of new work in the visual arts.

DB: There are so many younger artists whose work interests me. I just went to the Armory Art fair for three full days. I got overloaded, but I'm probably one of the few people who really, really liked it. I saw lots of things I really liked. Most people just complain about it, but I found it to be loads of fun and lots of great stuff.

TAN: You are currently politically active with Musicians United to Win Without War.

DB: Yes, I'm usually not at all politically active; I often feel those specific political issues are not seeing the forest for the trees. But in this case it feels like it's really an emergency, that George Bush and his people are so out of control, so dangerous, so filled with hubris about the might and power and God on the side of America that it just terrifies me. All the good things that the US has done in the world and all the good will is slowly being dismantled by this guy bit by bit. The fastest thing I could do was get a list of musicians together; it was wonderful, to see this really wide, diverse list of names. We are doing the least that we can in very serious circumstances.