By DAVID LYNCH (Hyperion; 1994)
Let’s hear it for grabbing while the grabbing’s good! IMAGES, a gaudily designed coffee table book by the incomparable David Lynch, was published at the height of the 1990s anti-Lynch fervor. I’m referring to the backlash that erupted after the poorly received second season of TWIN PEAKS and the disastrous 1992 release of TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME, after which Lynch, by his own admission “couldn’t get arrested.” It took until the 2001 bow of MULHOLLAND DRIVE for Lynch’s reputation to fully regain its former luster, but he never paused his creative drive—hence IMAGES, which is now an expensive collector’s item. So, to those of you who resisted the anti-Lynch headwinds and purchased this book upon its 1994 release: well done.
The opening third, grouped under the heading “Moving Images,” is composed of crummy black and white stills from Lynch’s movies up to 1994. Stay with it, though, as the rest of IMAGES consists of fascinating never-before-seen examples of Lynch media. It’s a widely known fact that Lynch was trained as a painter and sculptor, and it’s those things that are on primary display.
Among the paintings are abstract canvases with titles like “Sputnik Over City Featuring the Letter A” and “Bugs Are in Every Room—Are You My Friend?” Not being an art critic, I’ll refrain from judging those works, which look to me like the doodlings of a three year old (or an insane asylum inmate).
Also included are the “Ricky Board” (apparently based on “what the Japanese might do to organize controlled accidents in a formal environment”) and the “Bee Board” (a board with bees stuck to it in rows and tagged with names), as well as the infamous “Fish Kit,” consisting of itemized fish guts splayed out on a board and identified, complete with handwritten instructions (“PLACE FINISHED FISH IN WATER,” “FEED YOUR FISH,” etc.). A “Chicken Kit” offers more of the same.
Bee Board
Fish Kit
There are also evocative Weegee-esque photographs of industrial cityscapes and dead animals, “Postmodern mood Structures” consisting of molds of peoples’ heads with weird objects atop them, and some surreal text marked by Lynch’s unique brand of optimistic grotesquerie (example: “happiness can in fact become a small sore—festering and transferring negative energies to the once quiet and peaceful mind giving it over to strange and unproductive thinking”).
Post Modern Mood Structures by David Lynch
Amidst all this lunacy a straightforward dissertation on spark plugs, apparently one of Lynch’s obsessions, comes off as downright bizarre, as does a photo essay on dental hygiene. This, in short, is an authentically Lynchian book, a vivid evocation of a singularly deranged genius.
DAVID LYNCH Discusses PHOTOGRAPHY