Mark Mothersbaugh // Pop Icon, Composer, Fine Artist

Mark Mothersbaugh // Pop Icon, Composer, Fine Artist

By Ben Zoltowski, Artwork by Mark Mothersbaugh, Photography by Johnny Brewton

Mark Mothersbaugh is nothing if not a hallowed eccentric. When a collective of Akron, Ohio artists joined together in the early 70’s and called themselves Devo, there was never any intention of becoming a band -- their mission was different. Radical visual artists seeking a place in the high-concept art world, riding atop their own version of the social theory that humankind was (and is) ultimately devolving. They just happened to play instruments. Jump ahead 40 years and Mothersbaugh, one of Devo’s founders, is now modern embodiment of an artistic mad scientist. Between his ongoing Beautiful Mutants series (a photographic study wherein human faces disturbingly attain perfect symmetry), his Postcard Diaries (sci-fi noir cartoon illustrations, scrawled onto postcards on a daily basis) or Rugs (quite possibly the most functional visual art ever created) -- Mothersbaugh is an obsessive creator. Oh, he’s also written over 150 scores between TV and film -- maybe you recognize his work from just about every heartrending scene in Wes Anderson’s canon.

Over the course of an hour, on the phone from Mutato -- his neon green flying saucer of a studio out on Sunset Boulevard -- by way of Japanese inventors, Chinese scientists, ill-behaved lap dogs and TV-smashing rockstars from the 80’s, Mark Mothersbaugh breaks it all down for us.

BZ: I’d read once that you’d been turned on by plates a woman made that were adorned with Rorschach patterns -- is the Beautiful Mutants body a direct consequence of these?

MM: Beautiful Mutants actually pre-dated the plates, but it did inspire me to briefly start a collaboration with this woman on some other things.

BZ: Oh yeah? What’d you two collaborate on?

MM: Plates. (laughs).

BZ: Ok, so what led to Beautiful Mutants?

MM: Well, I was already interested in Rorschach, but I think my interest in the Beautiful Mutants came from buying a set of old ancient funhouse mirrors about 15 years ago. And I had these mirrors around my house -- and ya know, you come out in front of it and you can hide part of your body behind it and stick a hand out and you have this floating fleshy arm with two hands on each end of the stem. I got into it just playing with these mirrors, and then I’d take photographs of them. At the time, I was living alone, probably about 10 years ago, and they became kind of like this thing I did every night when I got back from writing music all day -- I came back and I worked on these Beautiful Mutants. And on the one hand it’s kind of a like a middle school prank -- it’s in the vein of erasing the eyelids in the eyeballs and putting your own eyes in there so all of a sudden Abraham Lincoln looks insane -- on the other hand, they looked so beautiful, they were really attractive, they had a kind of snowflake quality to them. At the time I was reading a book about a Chinese scientist who pumped music through water from different parts of the planet and froze it and was looking at snowflakes, and making observations; like polluted water tended to make more uglier and non-uniform snowflakes and ‘beautiful music’ piped through pure water from untouched places in Siberia and the Arctic made these beautiful snowflakes. I just loved this coinciding information about symmetry, and it was kind of surprising to me how non-symmetrical humans really are. This held a lot of appeal, because it took a lot of being human away once you have pure symmetry. I was just kind of impressed with a what a large percentage of human faces you could split in half and you’d have this enlightened, angelic side and then you could have this demonic, darker side to each human -- you could find that in people that they had two totally unrecognizable people

BZ: Sort of like that last page in Mad magazine, where you fold the page inwards and you get this entirely new image -- did you ever see those?

MM: Oh yeah, I looked forward to those! I was always disappointed if I could figure them out ahead of time. They were like this cool conceptual art piece.

BZ: Most visual artists would balk at the thought of presenting their work on a medium that can be stepped on -- though with your Rugs work, you’re practically insisting upon it. Is this new form any kind of reaction to a typically self-serious art world? Or are they purely function-driven?

MM: I think it’s more interactive. It just kind of made me laugh when I started making rugs and then was able to just walk on them. I remember a director that I’d done amovie with came over with his wife and their small dog. I’d just brought some rugs back home and set them in the entrance way of my house, and there was this one with an alien face on it and within two or three hours of it being there, this dog did one of those butt-scoots and left a brown scar on the cheek of the alien. The owner was all upset and flustered and I was kind of like ‘Well that’s pretty wild. That’s what’s gonna happen!’

BZ: A lot of artists would have been upset by that.

MM: Ya know, I do all these gallery shows and there’s paintings or prints that are on a wall behind glass and God forbid you should sneeze and a mouth full of beer flies acrossthe room and hits it. But ya know, when you turn it into a rug, you’re asking people to kind of take their best shot. So now I have some of them that have been used as entry mats or are lucky enough to be under the feet of my children -- they’re the rugs I kind of have the most affinity with.

BZ: For some reason I often think of your visual work and (actor/musician/artist) John Lurie’s watercolors in the same breath -- maybe because you both tap into this very subversive sense of innocence. Do you feel like there are any similarities, or have I lost it completely?

MM: Well I don’t know him as a person very well and we’ve never hung out together, but I’ve seen his work on television a lot, and I like what he does professionally. It could be very similar. But for me I feel like I was actually a visual artist first, before anything. Back in 1971, in our fantasies we were thinking Devo was gonna be the Akron, Ohio version of Andy Warhol’s Factory, but just updated, with ‘more important issues to deal with.’ We didn’t see ourselves being so much about fashion as more about doing what wasn’t happening. And I thought what the common denominator between us and Warhol’s Factory was that we didn’t see ourselves locked into a medium, we saw ourselves as aesthetic problem solvers interested in dealing with different concepts and ideas, with technology being our palette to dip into.

BZ: And Devo was actually making videos on their own long before MTV, right?

MM: Yeah, we were making these little films before MTV and we were blabbing on about believing in ‘Sound and Vision!’ and ‘Music Television!’ or being like ‘There’s gonna be Devo Television someday!’ And we were totally convinced that laser disc was gonna come after vinyl because it was just like vinyl but it had visuals attached to the music and we thought all the bands that were out were gonna become out-dated. Like ‘Hey what’s Rod Stewart gonna do once he’s only making music and doesn’t make visual art?!’ We thought they were all gonna be dinosaurs and die away. For a second, we thought ‘It really is changing, rock & roll is gonna die and something greater is gonna happen.’ But instead record companies perverted the whole concept of sound and vision and turned it into MTV -- which was something much more banal than I’d imagined it was gonna be. I didn’t realize what they were gonna do was hire ad agencies to essentially make baby pictures for record companies and put stupid, mindless videos against rock & roll bullshit and pretty much disarm a potentially credible important medium in pop culture. They pretty much dumbed it down as far as they could.

BZ: The labels were hiring directors to create imagery that was probably wasn’t ever intended during the song-writing process.

MM: That’s correct. And Devo thought of images or concepts and then wrote music inspired by that. We didn’t even think we were gonna be musicians to be honest with you. We thought we were gonna create music, but we thought Devo was gonna be more like ‘an intelligent agit-prop Blue Man Group’ where we could send three or four different Devos out on the road at a time. We didn’t think we’d ever have to travel. We’d just stay at our factory and create art and the musicians would just be part of ‘Devo Inc.’ The actual players in the bands were to be irrelevant, it was about the ideas in the music.

BZ: In May, Devo performed “Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!” in its entirety for the first time ever at the All Tomorrow’s Party festival in London -- will we get to see this in the U.S.?

MM: Unless there is a specific request for it, I doubt it.

BZ: Well then how about a full Devo tour?

MM: Well, we’re gonna have a new album soon. Right now we’re looking for different mixers and producers to do one-offs on the different songs, people that resonate with the songs. Let them take a whack at it so to speak and we’ll assemble that into an album by the end of the summer. With any luck we’ll go out and do a show that has higher percentage of new material in it. Rather than a show just based on what we’ve been doing for thirteen years -- which is Devo playing the same show we did at CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City but with all the greatest hits from along the way folded into it. We’ve been doing that for a long time and we think that anybody that’s a Devo fan that’s lasted through that deserves something new. Instead of saying ‘Here’s Devo, 30 years later!’ we’re trying to say ‘This is a continuous path.’

BZ: Did you try any of the new stuff out at SXSW this year?

MM: We tried some of the new material and mixed it in and I think that some of the people that weren’t Devo fans probably didn’t know which songs were new and which were vintage.

BZ: You scored the upcoming film-adaptation of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, the ubiquitous Rugrats theme, with maybe the Wes Anderson scores being the most well known -- either way, a good percentage of your film work seems to compliment these overtly colorful worlds -- do you have any sort of visual prerequisites before you sign on to a project -- or is the substance of the film itself enough?

 MM: When I write for certain people, like Wes Anderson, I might give him three times more music than what he needs for his movie just because some movies inspire you more than others. One of Wes’ strengths is that he’s the writer, he’s the director, he is hands-on in all of the set design, art direction, casting, everything, he is at the middle of it all, he doesn’t defer things -- and with music, he sits in the room with me. I remember when we were working on ‘The Life Aquatic,’ he was sitting there with a laptop writing a scene and he goes ‘Ya know Mark, I’m thinking about putting a composer in this movie.’ And then we started coming up with ideas, talking about ‘Well the ship’s not doing well, they haven’t bought new recording equipment since 1981 -- so what kind of instruments would they be using?’ We went down to the basement at Mutato and pulled out old Devo equipment and I performed a lot of the score on the old synthesizers we’d actually written Devo songs with. Stuff that I never threw away, we just pulled out these old antiques and fired ‘em up and Wes even played with them. Some directors, it’s not like that at all; it’s a business, you don’t see them, they come into the spotting session, they interview you for a half hour, they hire you, you come back again, you spot the film with them, which means you go through it and look to see where you’re gonna put music and then you don’t see the director again until you’re on the recording stage with an orchestra. And it’s then that you start finding out that they’ve got other problems with the film, like ‘the movie moves too slowly during the second half and we need something to speed it up.’ So you start adding something to your score, like you add arpeggios or something...

BZ: Some might not know, but the scope of your filmography is pretty vast.

MM: It’s a crazy world, scoring TV and film. At this point in time, I’ve done sixty-seven TV series’ including theme songs for almost all of them and I’ve done about seventy feature films. I’m doing one now called ‘The Invention of Dr. Nakamats,’ a documentary about some nutty Japanese inventor who actually did invent the floppy disc but has this incredible ego and thinks he’s more important than Thomas Edison because Thomas Edison only had 1,023 copyrights and Dr. Nakamats already has 3,332 copyrights in his lifetime and he’s got more to go. One of his inventions was a pump for pumping soy sauce, one was a pair of roller skates that has a motor on it which he calls ‘Dr. Nakamats’ Car of the Future.’ So I’m doing a small film like that at the same time I’m doing ‘Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs’ which I’ll probably mix at Abbey Road in London and it’ll have 120 players on it -- maybe 123 if nobody dies before we get there. For ‘Dr. Nackamats’, the score is mostly coming out of a library of leftover rejected music that I’d written for Wes because the director liked that style of music.

BZ: With Devo being signed to a major label, you must have experienced something similar to what it’s like being hired by a studio.

MM: When you’re working on a film or TV show, you know what you’re getting into, it’s all spelled out a certain point, you know what your duties are. But there was this weird feeling when we were signed to Warner Bros. The whole time there was this feeling of being a junior high student; that age where you’re smart enough to be an adult, drive a car and deal with things, but everybody looks at you still like you’re a child and they don’t give you responsibility. Now that record companies are imploding, there’s a chance that things could change for the better. You see the ‘Jessica Simpsons’ of the world -- they’ve manifested childish behavior; being immature because they’re not given any real responsibility yet they’re making a lot of money. And they have these handlers that are all fluffing them constantly, trying to make every silly whim come true and they’re not really given a chance to behave like an adult in the real world. With early rock & roll, it was such a cliché to hear a story about a band throwing TV’s out of windows, taking too many drugs, paternity lawsuits, running cars off cliffs, flying planes into mountains, totally crazy shit. They were these full-grown humans that were in this industry that encouraged them to be non-self-sufficient. Luckily my visual stuff to me was just therapy through all that. I think I saved a lot of money too....