Mark Mothersbaugh, co-founder of the band Devo and a prolific composer for film, television, and advertising, is sharing the MIA’s second-floor Target Galleries this summer with Leonardo da Vinci. Both men are known for their fearless inventiveness. Only one of them, as far as we know, wore a conical red hat while stripping the clothes off a woman with a bullwhip. Here, in an exclusive interview with MIA Stories, Mothersbaugh describes his artistic epiphany, his memories of playing Minneapolis, and what it’s like to share a bill with the original Renaissance man.
I started getting excited when I thought it was Leonardo DiCaprio. I thought that was cool, that the museum was doing something about him. I met him once—he sat on my lap when he was 12. I’d gone to a party that his dad hosted at his house. When I first moved to Los Angeles, I knew a lot of these older, creative guys—I gravitate toward all people older than me. Dean Stockwell, Timothy Leary, William Burroughs—I just liked that crowd. And one of those older guys was this underground comic artist named George DiCaprio, Leo’s dad.
Da Vinci probably suspected that humans were insane. He probably knew the equivalent of guys who wear Confederate rebel belt buckles, people who told him, “You’re thinking a little too much.” We would probably have a lot to talk about.
Mothersbaugh as the frontman for Devo.
I was the kid with the invisible “Kick me” sign attached to me, through 12th grade. I was fully into the Stones and the Beatles and the whole English style of combing my hair forward, and teachers would throw me out of school, telling me to get a haircut and then come back. And other kids took that as a cue to become vigilantes. I received many free hair cuts with a razor blade.
It was one of those defining moments. Everybody has something, epiphanies are many and varied: your first kiss, your first orgasm, your first home run. Mine was the day I got eyeglasses. I’d spent almost eight years of my life navigating the world in a fog that started six inches in front of my face. I had no idea there was another reality that people were operating in, and suddenly this curtain was pulled away. I’d never seen a chimney with smoke coming out of it. Clouds. Birds flying. The night I got glasses, what looked like the bottom of Coke bottles in front of my eyes, I went home and dreamt I was going to be an artist.
I started drawing all the time. Maybe because I’d been in this fog all those years, I’d learned to live inside my mind. All through high school and junior high, you can tell from my notebooks that I was determined not to daydream—my notes are pretty good. But after a few weeks, suddenly there are drawings in the margins and then a week later there’s a whole page of drawings. I never figured out how to make my mind leave the fantasy state that I’d developed.
When I got to Kent State, I was suddenly anonymous. All the kids in class would look at their watches until 3:30 p.m. and then go to fraternities and sororities and local bars on Main Street—and to me that meant the whole art building was empty. I was in love with printmaking. I could take artwork I’d done the day before and burn plates, print colors, print one-color ink and use the drying racks, and wash that screen and start another. By 6 a.m., when school was starting again, other kids were coming in hung over and I’d have finished a whole piece of art.
I was an angry young man, an artist trying to figure out my place in the world. And I thought what I was looking at was not evolution but de-evolution. My feeling was that there was a life-force that we couldn’t see or understand. I once heard these people speaking in tongues. I was impressed by that. The idea of surrendering the intellect to faith. I became fascinated by science—what does science know? Maybe the 90 percent of the brain we’re not using is the important part, the part that gets to indulge in the Fourth Dimension and time travels and the 10 percent is a boring nanny, just a host mechanism for this other, more interesting part of our brain.
Jerry Casales, a friend of mine at Kent State, found this book called In the Beginning was the End: Man Came into Being Through Cannibalism. The author had a theory that homo sapiens were an unnatural species of ape that came into being through eating neanderthals. Eating brains of other apes, our brains grew at such a fast rate that it’s not only so much larger than that of other species but also misshapen and insane and unnatural, and we’re the only species out of touch with nature. Then I came across this religious pamphlet called Jocko-Homo Heavenbound, about how we’re ape men marching not toward evolution but de-evolution. We thought, this gives us a forum, we’ll use this all as background material to talk about de-evolution.
A self-portrait by Mothersbaugh.
We didn’t think we would be a band, to be honest. Jerry and I and our friend Chuck Statler, who had gone to Minneapolis and come back to Ohio, had this idea for Art Deveaux, an agitprop art cooperative. A clearinghouse for ideas that would involve public-access TV—we wanted to get de-evolution on TV. When Chuck came back to Ohio in 1973 he had a copy of Popular Science that talked about laser discs, and we thought, that’s perfect! Rock ‘n’ roll is over and now that the laser disc is here, sound and vision are going to dominate, the visual arts are going to take over. And we were perfectly set for that.
We made our first film, The Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-evolution, and screened it on a sheet behind our band performances. We were known as the weird band that showed movies of themselves playing their songs and then played them.
Chuck would take us around Minneapolis in those early days, driving through downtown past burlesque and rock clubs. We played the video room at the Walker in 1978. Security knocked on the door backstage and there was this guy in an army outfit. It was my dad. He says, “Mark, I wrote a little speech about de-evolution that I want to read onstage.” Here’s this guy who’d been in World War II, a Dale Carnegie traveling salesman, and says, “Guys, I want to be your manager.” He wanted to be in the band and drive us around! He wrote lyrics to a song called “Enough Said.” He was definitely a closet artist.
“My Little Pony,” one of Mothersbaugh’s sculptures in the “Myopia” retrospective at the MIA.
Sure, we played First Avenue. But I remember this place where there was a polka band, an old woman on accordion and these ancient guys—they were really good. The World’s Most Dangerous Polka Band? They really were dangerous. They played right by the bar, people would be bouncing all over. It was amazing.
I started writing music for commercials, and for a long time I used to put subliminal messages in all my commercials. Sometimes it was very simple, like “question authority,” or maybe, in a Hawaiian Punch ad, “sugar is bad for you.” It got to be too easy, and I was a bit scared that someday I’d be sitting in a room of executives and they’d say, “What did you do?” Then one day I got a call from a picture editor, and he said, “I knew what you did.” But even now, there are messages I put in music for Pee-wee’s Playhouse that no one ever found out about.
I think there are different kinds of artists and they go from one thing to another, and they change, and their life is about change. I’m about permutations on a theme—the things that concerned me and upset me and inspired me when I was younger, they’re still with me. I apply them in ways that are more knowing and less naive and sometimes less effective because of that. I walk through the museum now and see things that I am a bit in shock that I agreed to show it to people. But every room has something in it that makes me smile.