Head Case

David Byrne. Photo Mark Johann. Courtesy David Byrne.

It’s 1989: a fraternity rush party at a New England university. In the Zeta Psi chapter house’s high-ceilinged reception room, wine and cheese are being served; the brothers (in jackets and ties) are asking prospective pledges like me (also blazered up) about their majors, extracurriculars and hometowns. It’s all very decorous and far removed from Animal House when from the bowels of the frat house booms: “Aaaooohhh! Watch out / You might get what you’re after...” A ripple goes through the wine-sipping, cheese-nibbling crowd in response to the beginning of the Talking Heads’ Burning Down the House. “Cool babies / strange but not a stranger...” Soon, ties are being shucked en route to the throbbing basement, where Old Milwaukee is being pumped into plastic cups.

This, the would-be brothers are thinking, is more like it. “Hold tight / Wait till the party’s over...”

By the end of the ’80s, the Talking Heads’ own party was winding down. When the pop-charting art band called it quits in 1991, its front man, David Byrne — always an unlikely rock star — probably heaved a sigh of relief. (Especially considering that, with canny investment advice, he’d never need to work again.)

But what would he do next?

“The ability to do whatever you want,” Byrne recently told an interviewer, “that’s not a luxury, that’s a curse.” So how has the Scottish-born former art-college student dealt with this curse?

By scoring a film (Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor) and various avant-garde dance projects; by founding Luaka Bop, a record label meant to popularize Brazilian music in North America, as well as to release his often critically praised, but invariably low-selling solo albums; by narrating music history documentaries on PBS; by lecturing on (of all things) the perils of PowerPoint; by publishing (in English and Spanish) a cryptic book on the nature of sin and virtue.

And by exhibiting bitterly preachy photo-and-text works around the world, including at Toronto’s annual Contact Photography Festival this month.

Another decorous occasion: Contact’s opening luncheon on May Day at Brassai, a stylish bistro in the city’s west end. Byrne, the keynote speaker, has aged well: his salt hair is cut short and spiked; his pepper eyebrows arc whenever he makes a point. Gone is the oversized white suit he made famous in Jonathan Demme’s quintessential concert film, Stop Making Sense. Byrne has instead opted for a well-tailored grey jacket, slacks and a red-striped dark shirt that hugs his narrow frame.

He’s showing slides and making loosely connected points about advertising, art and kitsch. A shot of a Stella Artois bottle with a halo illustrates his belief that consumerism has become our popular religion. “The first department stores, huge consumer palaces, knew that they had to tap into the spiritual urges of the population, to recreate people as consumers of goods as opposed to consumers of religion,” he says. An Apple advertisement depicting John Lennon and Yoko Ono during their “bed-in” period prompts this rumination: “Ads tell you to be an individual, and that you should do what everybody else does. Individuality and conformity go hand in hand. You’re asked to hold two contradictory ideas in your head — which can make you go crazy.”

David Byrne's photo-and-text installation, exhibiting in a series of Toronto bus shelters.

It’s all fairly mild anti-corporate stuff. But the work Byrne’s exhibiting in a series of downtown Toronto bus shelters is anything but mild. Near the corner of Queen and Strachan is an installation that explores the notion that beauty is a sin. Below a photo of a grotto of twinkling chandeliers, Byrne has written, “How can Beauty be a sin? Is Beauty not what makes life worth living?...I had an impulse to say a day was beautiful....The blue sky and the brisk breeze created the illusion that all was well. That the sewage treatment plant was no longer pumping its sludge and toxic wastes into the bay, that the lawyer behind the door of his office was engaged in the pursuit of justice. That the tanker anchored down the street was loading and unloading goods that were honestly made.” Byrne’s text recites the leftist cant accepted by art students everywhere: that lawyers always aim to subvert justice, that corporations exist to foul the environment and abuse workers, that beauty is a lie disguising the underlying ugly reality.

Further west in another shelter, Byrne takes aim at ambition. Beneath a photo of a “Guitarist Wanted” flyer posted on a telephone pole, he opines, “Ambition is the motor that drives the entrepreneur, the performer and the politician — all of them con artists, working their scams on friend and foe alike... [Ambition] turns [people] into desperate strivers, prepared to do anything to realize their ridiculous ambitions. To strive, to achieve, to abandon one’s family and friends for a shot at fame and fortune — is this a value to hold worthy?” It’s a pretty rich observation coming from someone who’s already achieved fame and fortune.

Courtesy Penguin Group.

Byrne’s post-millennial output is resentful, acidic and angry to the point of fury. The best modern art, we’re often told, provokes strong reactions — if we’re hurt or upset, then the work is doing its job. Byrne’s photo-and-text project certainly does infuriate — but his attempts at humour ring tinny, his sad notes verge on maudlin and he divides the world too simply into us (good) and them (bad).

Oscar Wilde once wrote, with characteristic egotism, “I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I altered the minds of men and the colour of things. There was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder.” The Irish playwright was one of the key artists of his era; given the diversity and potency of his previous output, you might argue that Byrne occupies a similar place in this era.

Unfortunately, Byrne’s photo art rejects every aspect of the humanist tradition. A highlight reel of his caustic pronouncements: “The more one knows oneself, the smaller one’s opinion of oneself”; “Hope is for the cowardly, for those who cannot face the reality of existence”; “What was evil, despised and abhorrent yesterday is admirable and cheered today.” To compare Byrne’s somber, nasty, predictable aphorisms to Wilde’s amusing, generous and brilliantly subversive ones is to know the fall of man.

The only thing more depressing than spending time with Byrne’s photo-and-text works is the possibility that he is among the best we can produce. It makes you want to crank up the tunes from his exuberant youth, to remember the visceral joy he once gave us. What does Byrne’s new art mean? Who cares. Let’s dance.

Alec Scott is a Toronto writer.