Oliver Girling, Eye Weekly- Toronto's arts newspaper October 12 1995

Byrne Victim

David Byrne's voice is a cultural icon of our times. Not necessarily
mellifluous or even ubiquitous, but unmistakable, like Elvis' or Edith
Piaf's or Lonnie Donegan's. With its tremolos, growls, sudden octave
leaps and whines, its texture has something in common with the voices
of "mediums" at Ouija boards or revival meetings who allow their vocal
passages to become vehicles for other presences, other energies. In
his case, "the other" is ideas, with the premise that different stories
require different sound personas to be articulated.

The Talking Heads, the band he began his career with, were more
sophisticated than most of their colleagues in punk's first wave (like
the still overrated Sex Pistols, whose "rock and roll swindle" was
such a good polemic that neither the band nor its manager ever re-
covered). There is no piracy in Byrne's oeuvre: an aesthete and a New
Yorker (are they one and the same?) he nevertheless manages to pack
emotion into the laconic delivery, into those split (conceptual)
personalities. He manipulates the tools of modern sound recording
operatically, to amplify vocal nuance, to dramatize the accidental.

I half expected that mercurial instrument to spill out at me from
the tape machine when I played back my interview with him, in
defiance of reason and of my own experience of his quite regular
speaking voice. Of course it didn't. But such is the power of
voice that its psychic personas can overshadow the speaker --
this quality has been used in ritual and ceremony from the beginnings
of poetry and song. I talked to Byrne about his recently published
book, Strange Ritual: Pictures and Words, and wanted to make
connections between his auditory and pictorial worlds.

I've just heard the song you did with Selena, which I enjoyed
very much

I thought that came out really well-- I was really happy with
the way it worked out. It sort of sticks out like a sore thumb
on her record. At the time she was going for a crossover, that
song sounds more rootsy than the other stuff.

There's syncopation, a kind of polyphony, with the Spanish song
cutting across what you're singing, that I thought of in connection
with some of the images in this book. It's this idea I've also
seen in some of your music videos, of playing music against text,
against the image. Instead of illustrating it, you're playing
against narrative.

Yeah, or a relationship, but not a direct relationship. The
last thing I wanted to see was pictures that refer to themselves.
Because they bleed off the page, they seem to be somehow jour-
nalistic. You should be able to go inside a bit more easily than
when they're framed.

Are there art or photography practices that you connect with in
particular? I'm thinking of the "inventory" aesthetic you see
in some contemporary work.

There's a number of photographers... one of the earliest I
remember was this Californian guy, Ed Ruscha, who used to
take pictures of apartment buildings, gas stations that sort
of stuff, where the aesthetic was more about the choice of
what was taken and the inventory than about making beautiful
prints.

What about a sculptor like Chaim Steinbach?

It fits, but it's a stretch... (laughter).

Obviously you're connecting to something more like a folk
religion than formalist art-making -- the pictures hint at
a kind of spirituality.

I genuinely find these things sometimes awe-inspiring --
I like it whether it's in a store window or in a religious
shrine or altar, or whatever. Or in the case of my own photos,
an object gets pulled into the realm of the sacred one way or
another. When an artwork goes into a museum, it goes into
this white-walled room, a white void. The funny thing is,
unless you're incredibly wealthy and have a huge house so
you can also have a big white wall, it's hard to recreate
that same experience -- it's not the same at home. Though
I've shown my prints in galleries, a lot of this stuff I
really felt works best in a book -- the accumulation of images,
the series.

Could you consider the book as a kind of performance by the
author?

This book and some others are closer to that than they are
to being a book about something else.There was a guy named
Quentin Fiorino who did one with Buckminster Fuller and one
with Marshall McLuhan in the late '60s. They had pictures,
bits of text -- those books were a bit that way as well.

There are almost no people in these pictures.

In True Stories I tried not to get any trees in any of
the pictures because they destroyed sometimes the kind
of surreal simplicity of a shot, or a building; you almost
wanted to have the thing floating in space. In a way it's
the same here -- people would seem like unwelcome intruders
into this world that they've made. These things are perfect
little shrines, or offerings;. Once they've been made, the
maker's hand is not important any more. I guess I also feel
that these artifacts, this evidence, tells a lot more than
a picture of a person would.

Are you showing some of this work in a gallery?

In a couple of weeks I'm having my first gallery show in
New York; I've had other shows in Europe, and in Japan,
one in Buenos Aires, but this is the first one where I
feel like I'm really under the microscope of the New York
art world. It's a fairly new gallery -- Christine Rose
Gallery on West Broadway in Soho.


I DARE YOU!

We talked about the Siquieros Polyforma in Mexico City,
the most visceral monument an artist has ever built to
himself, about the exhaustive show of tattoo art now on
at New York's Drawing Centre, about the painted posters
of Indian movie stars in Bombay and about photography as
ventriloquism.

The last seven pictures in Strange Ritual are of other
books, which like Joseph Beuys' welded-shut cans containing
Bergman's film The Silence have been transformed by the
artist's re-contextualizing into sculptural artifacts. The
titles speak for him: "Ponder On This," "You Can Live
Forever In Paradise On Earth," "The Book Of Knowledge,"
"The Secret Museum of Mankind," "How To Do All Things,"
"The Truth About Mars" and "I Dare You!"