2006/09/08

Heavy mental:David Byrne & Bruce Mau

A mutal interview between two very talented artists:
David Byrne: Musician
Bruce Mau: Graphic Designer
BM: You mention something here that is absolutely critical in my own practice.
Namely, the idea of taking the sensibilities developed in one medium and
deploying those to advantage in another. One thing I realised about my own
work is that I am a child of the cinema – the work I do in book design could
only have happened after the invention of the jump cut, the close up, the
montage. Almost all of my work is about sequence. If you look at any individual
image or page in my work, it seems dead-pan, dry and flat. All the action is
in the movement from one moment to another. And I know that when I take the
sensibilities that I have evolved in my approach to the book as a sequential
object, an object that unfolds in time, into a practice like, say, the design of a
landscape, I do it in a fundamentally different way than the traditional approach
to landscape.
DB: This cross-referencing from one discipline to another reminds me that I tend
to jump from one medium to another, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
It’s energising and refreshing. Somewhere I got the idea that cross-fertilisation
is good, that one discipline feeds the other and that each one can be entered
into with a sense of play. Not that play isn’t serious. I’m often not aware of the
inspiration that gets carried from one area over to another, which is fine.
I wouldn’t pretend to be a great virtuoso, but there are ways to express
the heart and mind that don’t require years of apprenticeship – and sometimes
a great craftsman or skilled player forgets that the communication is not in the
virtuosity, not that it hurts – one can lose sight of what’s important.
Another thing I’m often not aware of is where things are headed. In
retrospect things look like they were following a master plan, that there was a
carefully laid out route to arrive at something or other, but more often than not it
was intuition and accidents. The grand scheme may be there in the unconscious,
subtly guiding one’s attentiveness to pay attention to these accidents and
happenstance, but I’m often unaware of it.



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