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Arboretum

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A recommendation by auntbeep

auntbeep's recommendation

An art-book project by cultural muse, David Byrne. Says the New York Times, '“Arboretum,” a reproduced sketchbook of curious free-associative riffs in the form of evolutionary trees and Venn diagrams that he prefaced with a series of questions: “What are these drawings? Why did I do them? Will they be of interest to anyone else? Of any use? Do they need to be useful?”' (via New York Times)

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Updated Jan 17, 2007

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szlea's recommendation

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David Byrne's new book of mental musings, Arboretum, explores the many intricate and interesting correlations in our lives. In this book, Byrne, the visual artist, explores his mental space in a tree-like fashion.

Byrne explains the drawings:

Well, I guess they're a lot of things. Faux science, automatic writing, self-analysis, satire, and maybe even a serious attempt at finding connections where none were thought to exist.

They began a few years ago as instructions to myself in a little notebook—"draw an evolutionary tree on pleasure," or "draw a Venn diagram about relationships," for example. Mental maps of imaginary territory; typologies of wine descriptions, East Village clubs and bars, and medieval war machines. Maybe it was a sort of self-therapy that worked by allowing the hand to "say" what the voice could not.

Irrational logic—I've heard it called that. The application of logical scientific rigor and form to basically irrational premises. To proceed, carefully and deliberately, from nonsense, with a straight face, often arriving at a new kind of sense.

But how can nonsense ever emerge as sense? No matter how convoluted or folded, it will still always be nonsense, won't it?

Just the kind of weird, smart book I love!