Maybe it was the rubber masks or the flowerpot hats or the plastic hair, but to this day Devo can’t quite shake their reputation as a novelty act. To the faithful, though, Devo were more than a joke and even more than a band: they were a multimedia collective intent on exposing the artificiality of modern life and the way it degraded human existence, a process they called de-evolution. And their goofy props and pioneering music videos and sophomoric album art were as crucial to this mission as their songs.
Mark Mothersbaugh: I’m kind of a contemporary social scientist. The pieces that are going to be in this show are sort of like Rorschachs of human faces. What I mean by that is looking for information that people normally try to hide from you when you meet them every day.
I recently have been looking at some of the ones from the 70s, and I don’t think the same way I did back then. You see the threads of thought when you don’t edit what you’re thinking and you’re not trying to make something on purpose–it’s kind of like you took a blood sample every day and broke it down and saw what was in your system at any particular time. Some of the old ones I really love, and some of them I think, “I certainly was obsessed with women back then.”
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MM: I think it was around 1997. I’d already been obsessed with mirrors and mirror images. I had used Xerox machines to take my artwork and make mandalas and sort of Rorschach versions of artwork I was working on. I loved the symmetry. When you’d look at nice cabinetry work and…they’d slice two pieces of one-thirty-second-inch veneer off of a tree and set them together inverted, and you’d have this great pattern created out of what was a seemingly random pattern before that. I don’t know what inspired Mr. Rorschach in the first place. During the time period he invented Rorschach patterns there was a vogue for people signing things; you’d dip a quill in an inkwell and after you’d sign your name you’d fold the paper in half and unfold it and you’d have this graphic image that was created that was like a Rorschach blot. There was a period in England, and I think in the U.S. too, in the 1800s where people had autograph books and they did that.
About five years ago I showed them to Benedict Taschen, who was snooping around LA for people to do books. We ended up not doing something together, but it made me determined to do something with them. The sizes in the gallery show are much bigger, but my personal collection–I’ve been collecting picture frames that are for images that are between one and four inches. I found these frames that were made during the Civil War, when people used to put amber types and tintypes in little precious boxes that they would carry around with them. These boxes, over 150 years, have gotten beat up, lost parts, been repaired, and they’ve rotted and worn out. I’ve been putting these images in these cases, and they’ve become like a family for me.
We all have good work ethics….I’m from the midwest and Akron’s like a Chicago wannabe. It was a factory town, until they closed our factories down and we had nothing to do. I’m one of the lucky ones who figured out how to make his own conveyor belts.
