The Dallas Morning News. Saturday, 10 August 1996 By Timothy Cahill - Albany Times Union

Big Talker Says Little About His Art

NORTH ADAMS, Mass

It could have been a lyric from a Talking Heads song, sung in David Byrne's mellifluous yawp: "Do you remember when / Sitting in the dark / I was taking questions / Until the time was up?"

Instead, it was a news conference at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the former mill complex in the downtrodden Berkshire city of North Adams. The occasion, the opening of Mr. Byrne's new art installation at the museum. So why was the singer-songwriter, screenwriter, director, photographer and Oscar-winning composer sitting in semi-darkness, lit only by the glow of two banks of TV monitors and the cold, white flash of nearly a dozen photographers? Guess it was time, as Mr. Byrne himself once advised, to stop making sense. It was hard, though, to kick the feeling that the 35 journalists who attended the mass interview were part of an elaborate performance piece, with Mr. Byrne the director and choreographer.

What it didn't feel like was a chance to get inside the pop star-cum-visual artist's head, to learn much about his creative process, because Mr. Byrne didn't elaborate much on that. Sample answers to questions about his work "I can't think of a good answer." ,"I suppose so.", "I can't explain it."

Mr. Byrne is the kind of artist who lets his art speak for itself. For an hour before the question period, in the converted gallery space of Building 13 of the old mill, reporters walked around Mr. Byrne's installation, titled Desire, listening intently for the work to give them some clues to its meaning. They were among the first to view the new installation, which will be on view until Oct. 20. Conceived as a single piece, the heart of the work is a collection of photographic illustrations mounted on enormous upright boxes like large-scale versions of the ads that run the length of the cars on the New York City subway. The photographs are presented in two series of 12 panels each, arranged in circles like a wheel inside a wheel.

The outside group, titled Better living Through Chemistry, consists of stock photographs of inspirational landscapes overlaid with motivational slogans from corporate handbooks. To these images of manufactured banality, Mr. Byrne married pictures of an array of drug paraphernalia, from bongs and coke spoons to roach clips and crack vials. The inner circle, called Stairway To Heaven, is made up of similar montage pairings, this time pictures of money from around the world combined with a sinister inventory of street weapons, from a lowly box cutter to a gold-plate Uzi. At the hub of the installation is a 21-foot square electric train city made up of 400 miniature buildings, including the Empire State Building, 600 feet of track and more than 100 electric train cars. The layout, built by North Adams architectural model-maker William Sweet, was added to the exhibit because Mr.Byrne admired its workmanship.

To add to the cacophony of stimulation, each visitor is issued a personal tape player with an "audio track" by Mr. Byrne, with words sounds and music, like the train city unrelated to the panels. The tape includes sayings such as "In truth, nothing is a big deal" and "Your past is a set of thoughts that could just as easily come from a movie as from your own experiences."

The reporters, encountering all this for the first time, stood listening to the tape and walking from panel to panel with strained or thoughtfully perplexed expressions. If the work was speaking for itself, it was plainly talking in a foreign language. Relatively few made it over to the far end of the gallery, where two stacks of eight televisions were
repeating evocative but disjointed images and legends such as "Music is the politics of the dispossessed."

The press was convened in a make-shift cafe space, with large wooden cable-spools for tables and metal factory chairs. Mr. Byrne appeared, dressed in a black jacket and black pants, a white shirt and a tartan vest harking back to his birth in Scotland. He sat on an
unlighted riser with his skinny legs crossed at the knees and his thin arms crossed at the wrists, looking a little like a cricket on a high stool. Though he has been an international celebrity for more than 15 years, he seemed uncomfortable in front of the small audience, most of them clearly of an age to have grown up with his music and struck by varying degrees of residual awe. But no one asked him about his music. They asked him what purpose the audio track was meant to serve, and he said it was to "trick people into making them stay a little
longer" with the pictures.

They asked him why he chose drug implements and foreign money as his motifs and he responded "I saw in some unexplainable way a similarity between drugs and those inspirational phrases."

They asked him if he saw society suspended between sarcasm and reality, and he answered, "I find things amusing and darkly disturbing at the same time."

This seemed to sum up the news conference very well.

(Distributed by New York Times News Service)