Imagining the world anew through creativity | Adam Lerner | TEDxMileHigh

So I wrote my dissertation, my PhD dissertation, on an American artist by the name of Gutzon Borglum, and Borglum was a fascinating figure. He largely taught himself how to paint and sculpt, and he somehow worked his way into the company of such great figures as the sculptor Auguste Rodin and the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. But even beyond art, he did things like campaign for his good friend Teddy Roosevelt, he trained Czech rebels on his estate in Connecticut, he conducted an investigation of airline production during World War I, he developed a plan to reinvent money, and schools too. Oh, and he also carved these four portrait heads on a mountain that we call Mount Rushmore. This guy got stuff done. Me, it took me 10 years just to get the PhD. Granted, not all of it was writing the dissertation. I did spend nine months of 1997 in the archive of the Library of Congress, reading every letter that Borglum had written, and I did what we academics were trained to do. I found out how it is that Borglum's ideas embodied ideas of modernism, anti-modernism, progressivism, republicanism, organicism, and nativism. I'm sorry, this is what we do as academics, we call it historical context. Which is another way of saying, find someone amazing and show how all of their ideas were actually someone else's ideas. And that's why it's not surprising that I never once said, what an amazing way to live your life. I never once asked myself, what can I actually learn from this guy? Because Borglum, above all else, above his artistic talent, was capable of the freedom to imagine the world afresh. So, me, I didn't become an academic. I became a curator. Curator is a little bit more positive. We do actually ask the question, what can we learn from this artist? So I would stand in front of a work by, say, Andy Warhol. I would say, Andy Warhol teaches us that there is no distinction between art and life. I would say that, but in actuality, I didn't go to the pantry and peel off the labels of the soup cans and paste them on the wall. I didn't try to make walking the dog into a performance art piece. Even though I'd say that Andy Warhol teaches us this or that, if I were honest with myself, I didn't actually learn anything from Andy Warhol. And, you know, neither did I learn anything from the dozens of amazing artists whose work I curated over 10 plus years. I mean, I learned about them, but it never even occurred to me that I could apply the lessons that I learned to my own life. In 2001, I curated an exhibition of an artist named Bruce Conner. Bruce Conner is what we curators call a leading avant-garde artist, which is to say he's completely unknown. And I was working on an even more obscure element of his work. It was actually these rock and roll photographs that he'd taken in the late 70s of bands like the Sex Pistols, Dead Kennedys, and Devo. Coincidentally, around this time, the Denver County Fair, an amazing fair here in Denver, they actually invited Devo to perform in Denver. So, oh, Devo, you know Devo. They're the bands with the funny red hats, right? You know, whip it. Whip it good. You all look so young, but if you're teenagers at like 45 and 55 like me, then you definitely know Devo, right? Okay. So, I asked my good friend, an old-time punk rock photographer, Richard Peterson, if he could introduce me to somebody in the band while they were in town. And Richard arranged for me to meet with the frontman of Devo, Mark Motherspot. All right. So, as you gather from some people's reactions, like, he's beloved. I mean, there's some people who have Mark's face tattooed on their body. Like this guy. Sorry. Sorry about that. Okay. So, I remember this. Here I am. I'm interviewing Mark Motherspot about what it's like to work with avant-garde artist Bruce Conner. This is a little bit like interviewing Jay-Z about his amazing florist, okay? But this is what I was trained to do as an academic. I didn't know any better. So, I meet with Mark, and then what ends up happening is after 15 minutes of talking with him, I realized this is probably the most creative person I have ever met in my life. And I was amazed that no museum curator had taken his art seriously, and no one had actually told his whole story. His story is really incredible. He began as a visual artist, and he enrolled at Kent State University in 1968 in the visual arts. And so, that means that he was there on May 4th, 1970, when the National Guard opened fire on student protesters, killing four of them. And his future bandmate, Jerry Casale, describes the trauma of seeing their classmates lying dead in a pool of blood. After this event, they came to think that the whole idea of progress that everyone in America seems to really be big on is nonsense. We are not evolving as a society. We are devolving. And therefore, they formed the band Devo. Devo played music, but they did much more. Mark, he wrote music for the band, and he collaborated with his bandmates to do set design, costume design, record arts. But he himself had a much, much grander career, and he himself did so much more as well. I learned just how much he did when I visited him on a regular basis to do research for an exhibition and book that I was going to do about him. So, I discovered, for example, he has four storage spaces filled with the weirdest things you can imagine. And a lot of art. I went through boxes and boxes, including all of his old journals from college. And in this one in particular, he outlines ideas that become ideas about occupying the entire rest of his life. I opened boxes that hadn't been opened in 40 years that had things like decal art that he made in the early 1970s before decal art was even a thing. I saw all the films and learned about the films that they made as a band before music videos were a thing. I found one box that had all of the page proofs for a 300-page book that Mark had written, illustrated, and self-published when he was 25 years old. But what's really amazing, if I must say so myself, is that in the 20-plus visits that I made to LA to his studio, I went through close to 30,000 postcard-sized drawings, prints, and collages that he created since the 1970s and stored in these little red binders. Fortunately, Mark saved everything. Unfortunately, Mark saved everything. I also conducted about 10 hours of interviews, and I learned stories like the time that he and Jerry Casale opened up a shop in a shopping mall in Akron, Ohio, selling rubber stamps and rubber stamp art to make money to pay for their film. It's amazing, isn't it? Yeah. I learned about the cassette that they gave to rock star Iggy Pop, who loved Devo's music, and then passed it along until eventually David Bowie himself introduced Devo on stage at Max's Kansas City in New York in 1978. And then after Devo's heyday, I went on to score Pee Wee's Playhouse and about 150 other television shows and movies, including all of Wes Anderson's early films, up to recent blockbusters like The Lego Movie. So Mark was an incredibly productive artist. But what was really the highlight of my experience of working with him on this was a trip we took to Guadalajara, Mexico, to a factory to fabricate these two rumped My Little Ponies that he made into these awesome creatures. And then while he was there, he decided to ask them if they wouldn't mind also making about 70 of these ceramic figures based on one of his drawings. They made 70, but we only were able to ultimately end up with 50 because he broke about 20 of them while painting them. But even more than the art part of it, just traveling with him was an experience. So he insisted on going to the market where he bought these tourists' tchotchkes, and then he insisted that on the way home, instead of taking a taxi, we go in this horse and buggy. And then... I know. I know. It's like this, like, Valentine's Day buggy or something. Right. So then on the airplane on the way home from Guadalajara, I go up to the bathroom, and I come back to my seat, and I see Mark fiddling with something, and I didn't know what it was. It turns out he had stolen my passport from my bag while I was away, and he put these googly eyes on my picture. Right. Which I fortunately found out about before we got to customs. Okay. So that last bit, that last bit, it's not beside the point, because the essence of his art is connected to his gags and his goofiness. You see, Mark sees the entire world as a sandbox, and he feels free to play in it. You see, he continually reinvents, he continually reimagines the world afresh. Now, we did this exhibition, and during the course of it, there's so many works of art that we had to produce. One of them, one of the most recent editions, is a pretty good indicator of just how much Mark is able to take what it is that the world presents to him. So there was a Devo fan a few years back, maybe three or four years ago, in suburban New Jersey, this guy, who came up to Mark and said, do you want to come back to my house and see my gem collection? And Mark said, sure. Well, it turns out this guy owns the largest ruby in the world, and when Mark said, maybe we can do something with it, the guy said, sure, and Mark carved it into a soft serve ice cream cone. Yeah. Which we included in the exhibition. So the exhibition, I just want to let you know that in working on it, I came to feel like he's not just the most creative person I'd ever met, he's probably one of the most creative forces in American culture over the last 40 years. It took eight rooms and 10,000 square feet to be able to just scratch the surface of this career of music and art. And that was a huge success, partly because the underlying message of it was that it's not that he is a master artist. That wasn't the message. The message of the exhibition was that here is somebody who's living their life creatively. So the exhibition went on to travel to six other cities. It's opening in Cincinnati on Friday. The book reviewed in the New York Times, as well as other places. But what's really incredible, though, is that... Oh. I realize there's amazing connections between Gutzon Borglum and Mark Mothersbaugh. Because, I mean, of course, they both were voluminous producers. They both were free to make and do what they wished. But what's incredible is that they also sort of were known for this one popular thing, which is largely misunderstood. I mean, after all, isn't Whippet like Devo's Mount Rushmore? But working with Mark Mothersbaugh was completely different for me. I mean, maybe it was the fact that he is just an everyday producer. Maybe it's the fact that he produces things with just, like, this simplicity to them. Maybe it's the fact that I had more proximity to him than I've had to anybody else. But somehow, working with Mark Mothersbaugh changed me. I wanted to actually learn from him. So Mark actually, he loved working with me. I mean, I told his story. And he loved that fact. So here I was in the one to tell the guy from Devo's story that incorporated everything in his life. That incorporated his music and his art. And that made him sort of really want to continue to work with me. But I thought that maybe he would want to do another book or another exhibition. Instead, he said to me, Adam, I would love to do an opera with you. Now, my first thought is, I'm a curator. I don't know anything about doing an opera. And then it occurred to me, oh, this is how it's done. This is what it means to live creatively. You don't ask for permission. You don't need to have the authority to do something before you do it. You do it. And so for the last six months, we've been working on this opera together, batting ideas around until we finally came up with one that actually seems pretty awesome. It's a sort of coming of age story. Maybe it's Wizard of Oz with a punk rock twist. So, you know, it's the story of a young Mark Mothersbaugh character. But it's fictionalized, of course. So there is an orphan from the Battle of Kent. And this boy who is searching for his home, searching for his parents and his home, he encounters all these mythical figures. He encounters the shapeshifter, David Bowie, the penitent Iggy, Sid, vicious, who can make himself disappear, and Malcolm, the evil businessman. Now, of course, what ends up happening is that, you know, you can't find home, but you can find a new home in the world that you have around you. I don't know whether this is going to be successful. It doesn't even matter to me. The point is that I learned something from this guy. You know, what I learned was that, you know, we need the Rodins of the world, but we can learn something from the Guts and Borglums, too. There's an aesthetic value associated with, you know, rigor and virtuosity, but there's an aesthetic value to freedom, expression, play. I mean, we need Beethovens and Motarts, but it was the three-chord songs of rock and roll that changed the world. So therefore, when you unleash the harness, when you do something that feels fresh and right for you, you're not just doing something that's good for you and living your own life. You actually have the potential to do something that really impacts the world, a world that otherwise tends to follow existing patterns. Now again, I don't know what's going to happen with this opera. We might not even end up completing it, but I know that I won't be asking Pavarotti's permission before going through with it. Thank you.