Things I discovered from David Lynch’s disconnected head
It was the summer of 2019 when Manchester was blessed with the exhibition of David Lynch: My Head is Disconnected. As I started watching the latest season of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, I was reminded of the same eerie excitement I felt entering the David Lynch exhibition that summer, pensively watching as the harrowing tales unfolded in front me.
Hosted at the HOME gallery, a frequent gathering place for the hipster would-be “cultured” folks about town, the collection of work gave insight into David Lynch’s artistic dreams, savagely inked, painted and sculpted into canvases for everyone’s scrutiny. I recommend that you view each picture closely if possible.
My adoration for his cinematic work and my teenage obsession with Twin Peaks had me giddily excited at any references or possible links to characters he created, such as Bob. The large painting pictured above, placed near the entrance, almost as a beginning and a grand finale, set the tone perfectly for what was to come. The piece is framed on each edge with what looks like theatre curtains made of wood. In the centre is a forest of dead trees with a dark sky littered with letters. The letters spell out the title of the painting over a small figure that walks on a barren land.
I learned that David Lynch went to art school in Philadelphia and studied as a painter at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts before venturing into filmmaking.
The body of work displayed his enduring themes of darkness, depth and perhaps even trauma. The Guardian was critical of his work for this exhibition, claiming it was nothing new of what he’s known for producing. Yet what was exciting about the exhibition, especially for Lynch fans out there, was it provided a closer look at his other creative talents and created space during the Manchester International Festival for a globally recognised filmmaker to devastate and inspire the crowd with some disturbingly unconventional but meaningful artwork.
Haunting and horrifying can also be beautiful.
What is it about the dark and mysterious that beguile us? As much as you may want to deny it, there is a fine line between the object of our horrors and what triggers curiosity. The topic of death, violence and suicide are not new to Lynch’s work and yet they continue to turn one’s stomach in a way that questions why we are driven to be voyeurs of our own fears. Perhaps this is due to the observation that the things we fear in life are also what drives us.
His embossed figures makes his paintings feel even more real and yet their disproportionate bodies hint at a world that is misshapen and disconnected. Despite the sullen titles and the feeling that you are witnessing a traumatic event, it felt as if each painting was capturing a momentous part of life, an event that is filled with raw emotions and a rare insight into the fragility of human beings and the way we interact with the world. Although very pronounced in how surreal the subjects are by their deformed and multiplied body parts, the topics of their experiences are relatable to the horrors of real life.
Fiction is a powerful social construct and can easily define our reality.
As I reflect back on the grisly typography scattered on Lynch’s paintings and the thinly inked sentences that filled them, it becomes clear that each of these art pieces in isolation of a story, become incomplete and less meaningful. The use of language has almost equal parts in influence to the visual presentation in how the overall work is expressed.
This becomes more directly addressed in one of his earlier pieces, one that stood out for me.
Pictured above is just one example of a Ricky Board, part of the Naming Collection. This portrait depicts the way in which we personify and imagine differences and characteristics in things that may be given a name. The project shows four rows and five columns of the same object but with different names. He indulges in others to take part in this practice by following a simple method.
Do It: How to Make A Ricky Board (2012)
“This board can be any size you want. The proportions are dictated by four rows of five rickies. Each ricky is, as nearly as possible, exactly the same as every other ricky. The ricky can be an object or a flat image. The thing about the rickies is you will see them change before your eyes because you will give each ricky a different name. The names will be printed or written under each ricky. Twenty different names in all. You will be amazed at the different personalities that emerge depending on the names you give. Here is a poem:
Four rows of five
Your rockier come alive
Twenty is plenty
It isn’t tricky
Just name each ricky
Even though they’re all the same
The change comes from the name” – David Lynch
This excerpt is from Do It: The Compendium curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, a collection of creative practices by several artists, sourced also from brainpickings.org as linked below.
Things have a way of returning to what’s most familiar.
Nearing the small corners of the gallery that foretell the end of the exhibition (or at least in the order of my viewing), the work of art begin to take different shapes and what is now displayed is a series of sculpted light lamps and a wall filled with twenty seven matchbook drawings. These matchbooks are also noteworthy in that they were created during the time he was filming Eraserhead, his first feature film. It’s fun to imagine the various scenarios where he drew on the matchbooks and the random places they came from.
The light lamps sculptures I can only describe as a strange amalgamation of the familiar mundane and abstract. It felt a bit like walking through an Ikea light section that was designed for an industrial yet futuristic concrete city made entirely with Tim Burton’s goggles. The materials used to make the light lamps combine glass, rolled steel, different types of wood constructed into tall unconventional shapes. Sadly the photos I took could not do them justice.
So, I end this blog post encouraging you to check out more content on this exhibition. You can also purchase David Lynch’s work from Artsy and Artnet, if you have the coin to do it. For many of us, we can only hope that the rich continues to relinquish their hold on art in the free spaces that galleries and museums offer and under the guises of cultural festivals, like the Manchester International Festival. As pessimistic as I may sound, I am hopeful that more of this will be accessible to working class people in the future. I’m excited to see what MIF will bring us next.
Please indulge in the following videos for further content:
Here’s a great video of the exhibition by squirrelnatkin on YouTube:
Link to how to make a Ricky Board:
