Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh's Still Got An Uncontrollable Urge to Make Art

Any DEVO fan knows that its members' lifelong obsession with art goes way beyond music. Imagery and illustration, film and video, performance art and interactive immersion are and have always been, big themes for the band. Frontman Mark Motherbaugh’s early artistic inspirations first emerged surprisingly enough, via the United States Postal Service. As a child, the Devo frontman was fascinated with “mail art” also known as correspondence art. The drawing trend, which Mothersbaugh says had origins in Dadaism, the Bauhaus movement and surrealism, was based on sending small-scale works through the mail to others. 

“People would do some artwork on a small piece of paper or card, put it in an envelope and send it in the mail to somebody else,” he explains. “Then maybe somebody in Vienna would send something to somebody in Berlin. And sometimes people would add something to the artwork and send it to somebody else, or send it back; some people would just trade them, or keep them.“

Reflecting the size and accessibility of the mail art he was getting into, Mothersbaugh started making and sending out his own postcard shaped works. When early Devo was working on the new wave classic "Uncontrollable Urge," he says he jotted down the second verse on one of his art cards and accidentally sent it out, "it just became a song where I repeated the first verse, so it never got a second verse. And after that I started thinking, well, I should save these cards."

"So very early, like 72, or something instead of sending them all out, I started collecting them," he explains. "I put them in these red binders that I found at stamp stores— they hold about 100 cards each." He ultimately amassed about 700 of these volumes in his collection.

He’d always wanted to share the works with the world and earlier this year, he did just that with his new art book, Apotropaic Beatnik Graffiti, which represents about five books from his personal collection. And these tomes aren't just visual art; they also feature lyrics, album and song titles, graphic design ideas, and other miscellaneous concepts, ideas and schemes, providing his fans a provocative peek inside his mind.

Flipping through the book, its card-size canvases represent an array of  colorful concepts, some of which feel like manifestations, mapping out what he wanted Devo to be before they became chart-toppers with songs like "Whip It" and "Beautiful World." "I would draw pictures of what I thought we were going to look like when we were on stage and I did geometric outfits and things like that," he says.

There's also a recurring image of an eye (as seen on the cover), which Motherbaugh says represents both literal and figurative perception and perspective. The spectacled singer says he's had issues with his eyesight since he was born. 

The "stream of conscious visual poetry representing one human’s observations of life in a wiggly world," as Mothersbaugh calls the book, is available through Blank Industries in association with Mutmuz Publishing, and it comes with a free Flexi disc record of a new tune called “How Did We All Get Here?” complementing the book.

As for his band, they just played an exuberant NPR Tiny Desk set (see it below) and they play the Ohana Festival on Sept. 27 in Dana Point, California. Devo is also in the process of unveiling their complete music video catalog in restored resolution on YouTube, "with an episodic examination of their video history."

Mothersbaugh, who also stays busy scoring movies and TV (he just did the Apple TV+ Time Bandits reboot) at his big green landmark facility on the Sunset Strip called Mutato Musika, also promises more published works including "a big retrospective book" of all his visual art, coming soon.