David Lynch: My Head is Dis­con­nect­ed – A strange trip into a bril­liant mind

David Lynch always want­ed to be a painter. Although pri­mar­i­ly known as a film­mak­er, the lux­u­ri­ant­ly bequiffed Mon­tana native has been mak­ing art since long before he picked up a film cam­era. In the mid 1960s he stud­ied paint­ing at the Boston Muse­um School and Penn­syl­va­nia Acad­e­my of Fine Arts, where he had a vision to cre­ate his first ​‘mov­ing paint­ing’, Six Men Get­ting Sick (Six Times). This crude exper­i­men­tal short from 1967 – an ani­mat­ed loop depict­ing a row of dis­em­bod­ied heads vom­it­ing in uni­son – con­tains the essen­tial DNA code of Lynch’s pro­lif­ic five-decade career.

For any­one inter­est­ed in delv­ing deep­er into the mind of this rad­i­cal visu­al artist – and for fans of con­tem­po­rary art in gen­er­al – there is a major new exhi­bi­tion of Lynch’s art cur­rent­ly tak­ing place at HOME in Man­ches­ter. Run­ning until 29 Sep­tem­ber, My Head is Dis­con­nect­ed includes 88 pieces spread out across four the­mat­i­cal­ly curat­ed rooms. There are dream-like water­colours with elab­o­rate, quirky titles such as ​‘I Find It Very Hard to Under­stand What is Going On These Days’ and ​‘Who Is Out­side My House My Dog Is Run­ning Away’, a set of lamp light sculp­tures illu­mi­nat­ing Lynch’s long-stand­ing fix­a­tion with elec­tric­i­ty, and dystopi­an land­scapes com­prised of mixed media which bear Lynch’s sig­na­ture indus­tri­al aesthetic.

Beyond any imme­di­ate mean­ing you might dis­cern from these art­works, part of the fun of the exhi­bi­tion lies in try­ing to fig­ure out what exact­ly ​‘mixed media’ con­sti­tutes. In addi­tion to more con­ven­tion­al mate­ri­als, sev­er­al pieces are made up of organ­ic mat­ter of inde­ter­mi­nate ori­gin – hair, bone, wax, var­i­ous con­gealed flu­ids – while oth­ers fea­ture used objects such as chew­ing gum and fag ends. These are art­works which need to be seen up close to ful­ly appre­ci­ate, as even the more sim­plis­tic pieces are remark­able in their depth and tex­ture. This is espe­cial­ly true of Lynch’s ​‘Match­book’ series; 27 tiny vis­tas etched onto the inside of dif­fer­ent sized matchbooks.

Made in the ear­ly 1970s while Lynch was devel­op­ing his debut fea­ture, Eraser­head, these pen­cil, ball point and felt tip pen draw­ings may seem like idly dashed off doo­dles at first glance, but on clos­er inspec­tion they rep­re­sent Lynch’s unique artis­tic sen­si­bil­i­ty in micro­cosm. Each atmos­pher­ic minia­ture is incred­i­bly detailed, reveal­ing more and more infor­ma­tion the longer you spend exam­in­ing it. The thrill of see­ing them dis­played side by side is that, for all their super­fi­cial uni­for­mi­ty, spe­cif­ic shapes begin to emerge after a while: trees, caves, door­ways, a pair of dis­tant hill­tops; twin peaks, perhaps.

Those famil­iar with Lynch’s on-screen visions, par­tic­u­lar­ly Blue Vel­vet and Mul­hol­land Dri­ve, will recog­nise many of the recur­ring motifs that crop up in the exhi­bi­tion. Yet while it’s unlike­ly to change your per­cep­tion of Lynch’s work, you will come away with a renewed appre­ci­a­tion of this sin­gu­lar artist. For more than half a cen­tu­ry, Lynch has peeked into the dark­est recess­es of the human psy­che via bold, haunt­ing art­works in which char­ac­ters appear trapped in an Amer­i­can Dream that has decayed into some­thing night­mar­ish. More than any­thing, how­ev­er, My Head is Dis­con­nect­ed reminds us that Lynch is first and fore­most a humorist.

My Head is Dis­con­nect­ed runs at HOME Man­ches­ter until 29 Sep­tem­ber, and is accom­pa­nied by a pro­gramme of film screen­ings hand-picked by Lynch. For more info vis­it homem​cr​.org