Issue 02
Mark Mothersbaugh
By Jacob Cohen-HolmesPortrait By Eriberto Oriol
A jubilant toddler with four legs. A pair of twin girls petting a fawn with two hind ends but no head. A set of triplets joined at the skull. The head of a newborn named “Baby Blow Hole” with two mouths, one nose, and an odd-looking single eye. A man in an old-fashioned suit with a head shaped like an eraser.
The latest issue of Bizarre Magazine, perhaps? Or human deformities resulting from Chernobyl’s aftermath? No, these are but a smattering of the outlandish images that have sprung from the mind of the supreme Joko Homo himself, Mark Mothersbaugh. That’s because when Mothersbaugh is not performing with DEVO or working on a film score for his production company, Mutato Muzika, he’s pumping out a staggering amount of art. For the past 30 years, his obsession has been creating thousands of surrealist, postcardsized illustrations, which he finally shared with the world in 2003 for his solo gallery tour, “Homeland Invasion.” More recently, Mothersbaugh has turned his twisted genius to photography, taking vintage snapshots of normal-looking people and transforming them into “Beautiful Mutants,” which you can peruse at Mothersbaugh’s website (www.mutato.com). I caught up with Mothersbaugh recently at the circular Mutato Building, a weird, sunken structure, which either looks like a UFO or a pack of birth-control pills, depending on your point of view.
Your beautiful mutants look radically different from the drawings you’ve exhibited previously. What moved you in this new direction?
This is based on a personal interest in and obsession with Rorschach, symmetry, and the lie that the human being is symmetrical, when in reality we are not. About five or six years ago I went and visited a brother- and sister-in-law who were schoolteachers in India, and I took a camera over with a fisheye lens. For some reason, I became really interested in the architecture and I started taking these photos where the fisheye lens ended up making things look like Christmas bulbs, or something.
It was an experiment in symmetry, and the results made me want to continue it. I had these funhouse mirrors I’d bought and I was taking these pictures. I was always fascinated with the idea of distorting yourself in a mirror. It’s still me, but another way to look at me. Or, that’s my friend, but a different way of looking at him, and yet you can recognize that’s the same person, even though things have been stretched or changed.
I tried taking mirror images of people, symmetrical photos, but it wasn’t the way I wanted. I started looking for a lens that would split the image in the lens, but I couldn’t find it. Then someone said, “Have you tried working on the computer?” So I tried that and it was much easier. I started coming up with these portraits I was doing. The interesting thing I found is that when you take one half of a person and mirror them, it seems like people have a light half and a dark half. That was fascinating to me, so I started experimenting more and more with it. This was like 1998. I had a setup at home, so I could work on them after being at Mutato all day.
Where do you get the photos you work from?
I started off with things out of my own collection. I was finding archival photos that came from my family’s photo album. From other locations, I’d just start looking for images that I thought would be conducive to the process. In some of the shows, I include images from a wedding I had last year. There are pictures of my wife and me, and some of them have baby photos of my wife and her mother. It depends. Sometimes I open the shows up wider and they have a wider range. But I like the strength of it if it’s all sepia images from a specific time period. So that’s kinda what I’m doing right now. But I’m working on doing more modern images, and more of them from my recent past that are self-portraits. I’ll probably show those next year, as I get more together. Right now, in the shows, some of the original photos I used are 100 years old, some are older than that.
How many of them have you done?
About 400. I counted them up recently. I usually pick the strongest 50 to exhibit. I might use anywhere from 25 to 45, depending on the gallery size.
When I look at these photos, it occurs to me that you’ve taken so-called “normal” looking photos of people, made them “symmetrical,” a term we usually associate with beauty, and thus, ironically, turned them into mutants, or something that deviates from the norm. Am I on the right track here for the title of your show “Beautiful Mutants?”
But, you know, evolution or de-evolution, whatever you want to call it is fueled by mutations. Otherwise, we would still be exactly what we were 30,000 years ago. Without mutants, things would never change. But, yes, you’re right, beautiful and mutant don’t normally go together. That’s actually a term Jerry Casale and I came up with about 1975 or 1976. Back in those years, we actually considered all of the five members of DEVO going and getting matching plastic surgery. We couldn’t afford it at the time, though. One of the more successful beautiful mutants who unfortunately has taken a hit for other reasons is Michael Jackson. He did what DEVO talked about in a way. He turned into something else. He turned himself into a white woman. And he’s had amazing dedication to it. He’s never been quoted as saying, “Oh, I wish I’d never done it, and I still looked like myself.” He doesn’t have that feeling at all. His connection to it is that, “Yes, this made total sense. I could afford it, and I’m an early experimenter in the ultimate art canvas: myself.”
Reminds me of one of those reality shows about plastic surgery.
Exactly. The ones where people come on, and they say, “This is what Rowena looked like three months ago before we worked on her.” They show some woman: sad, shit hair, bad figure, pimples. Then: “Here she is now.” And she basically looks exactly the same, except her boobs are bigger, her lips are puffed up, and she has a new hairdo. Now she’s happy. Then they show her crying, looking at the picture of what she used to look like, how awful that was. It’s like a Twilight Zone episode come to life.
And yet, this idea of mutants and mutations is something you’ve been interested in all your adult life, with DEVO, or your company now, Mutato Muzika, or with this new art exhibit.
It’s like, try and make conscious choices. One of the subliminal messages we used to put in things was “Choose your mutations carefully.” Instead of mindlessly allowing yourself to be manipulated by people who don’t necessarily have your welfare in your best interest.
A lot of your photos call to mind those classic images from sideshows or the Tod Browning movie Freaks.
Some of them do, yes. It’s like, how far away are you really? How different are you from them? It’s back to “Mongoloid,” [from the 1978 DEVO album Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are DEVO!] you know, “He had a job, he brought home the bacon, no one knew.” How different are mongoloids? It’s just one chromosome. So yeah, here are people that were perfectly normal looking, and it’s just their own reflection that makes them stand out in a different way.
Were you once involved in the Church of the Subgenius?
I was pretty active in it at one time. It was an art conglomerate of interesting wackos and theorists and artists with a sense of humor, basically. A lot of talented people were part of the Church of the Subgenius. Ivan Stang, the guy who started the whole thing, actually at one time did some claymation for a DEVO video, “Love Without Anger.” That was the first time we worked together. After that, we collaborated on different projects, books, performances, and things.
Weren’t you an ordained minister in the Church of the Subgenius?
There wasn’t much to being an ordained minister. You just created your own title, and that was it. You were whoever you wanted to be. An emperor, a sheriff, a fireman, whatever you wanted to be. But since a lot of their initial humor came from mimicking Televangelism and doing kind of a three-steps-too-far crackpot version of religious quackery, a lot of people became ministers, popes, what have you. It was fun. I lost interest because it didn’t have a focus at a certain point. The motto that everyone can join if they want to is fine, but when it came time to do books and publishings, Ivan Stang tended to let everybody print something in the book that wanted to, and it lost the edge that it had in the beginning.
That reminds me, I have a story I want to tell you that’s perfect for SWINDLE, along the lines of the “great rock-and-roll swindle.”
Go for it.
This is the short version: We got flown to Jamaica once, Bob Casale and I. I think it was around ‘77, about three or four weeks after the Sex Pistols broke up. We’re sitting there with Richard Branson, one of the richest men in the world, and we’re all in our 20s at the time. They had all this pot, so we’re like, OK. So we’re smoking pot. And they said, “What do you guys think of the Sex Pistols?” And we go, “They’re great.” We had partied with them on the last show they did in San Francisco. We were playing at some punk club, and they were playing the Winter Palace or wherever it was. They came over afterwards and blah-blah-blah. So they go, “Well, what do you think of Johnny Rotten?” We’re like, “Oh, he’s cool, we love everything he does.” They go, “He’s here in the hotel, and Johnny Rotten wants to join DEVO. And if you guys want to go down to the beach right now, we’ve got reporters from NME, Sound Magazine, and Melody Maker and they want to do a cover story about Johnny Rotten joining DEVO.” That’s when we realized they hadn’t been doing any pot smoking, and it was only us. They’d been rolling joints for us to smoke, but they’d just hold it, then hand it back to us.
You know how like when you’re somewhere at school and you’re realizing how stupid everything about life is. And somebody says something, but you’re trying not to laugh, because you’re someplace where you have to be serious or pretend you give a shit. But we were stoned, so it just made it even worse. We just started laughing at them until tears were coming out of our eyes and we were choking, and we’re like, “It’s not you, Richard. We’re not laughing at you. We love Johnny Rotten. That’s great. But what if we just help him start a band.” So we had to hang out there for like a week with them because they’d flown us down there and we didn’t want to be in a band with Johnny Rotten. It was kind of uncomfortable. But we were in Jamaica, and neither one of us had been anywhere exotic before. Anyway, there’s a longer, stupider version, but they were the rock-and-roll swindle band. So there you go.
