Before, during, and after Devo rewired the cultural landscape, the iconic band’s prolific, polyglot leader Mark Mothersbaugh made, cataloged, and reconfigured a literal warehouse of thousands of his original paintings, drawings, collages, vernacular postcards, sonic sculptures, calligraphic notations, and a gamut of sundry visual experiments. Neatly stored away for decades, Mothersbaugh has increasingly been making his amassed treasures public—in books, prints, and gallery exhibitions. He’s got mountains of these quirky, unflinching, puntastic, intimately surreal, occasionally dark, and profoundly engaged pieces—and the material never stops evolving.
Mothersbaugh recalls that he “fell in love with printmaking in my first year at Kent State University, back in 1968.” He was active as a printmaker for about a decade before touring with Devo made the workshop-dependent practice “nearly impossible,” but in the mid-'80s he met the late great master artist printer Richard Duardo of Modern Multiples, and his obsession lived to evolve in entirely new directions.
"Why We Are Here No. 1" at MutMuz Gallery marked the first installment in a planned exhibition series exploring Mothersbaugh’s ongoing inquiry into human nature, perception, and the absurd logic of existence. Much of the work in the show originated from what he calls his Postcard Diaries—small-scale drawings and texts that he began making during Devo tours as private reflections and correspondence. “These cards were never intended for public viewing,” he explains, though many have since been exhibited. He has purportedly made over 60,000 of them—and he’s still working on it. And since Devo is about to go out on tour again, expect more.
Mothersbaugh’s recent book, Apotropaic Beatnik Graffiti (Blank Industries) is a collection of “neo-dada beatnik poetry” and postcard graffiti pieces, and the Chinatown exhibition included screenprints as well as paintings. But nothing matches the pure enchantment of Orchestrions, sound-producing sculptural instruments that do things like play the sounds of birdsong instead of musical notes. He constructed these wonders in the same space as the gallery occupies, subsequent to which he’s let other people show and curate over the years. Their July show will be a collection of photography from the mid-'90s featuring Ross Harris’ work with Beck and Elliott Smith.
MutMuz Gallery, 971 Chung King Road, Chinatown, Los Angeles.
