David Byrne
born 1952, Dumbarton, ScotlandThe artist explains: “In the Borges story “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” he describes a Chinese system of categorization that breaks down the world into Things The Emperor Owns and Everything Else. Claude Lévi-Strauss claimed that one of the most basic categories we humans have is “Can I eat it?” and then, “Do I like to eat it?” The Way we categorize and perceive the world is sometimes based on what seem like arbitrary criteria.
For example, there could be intersecting layers of categories: brown things, brown things that are alive, brown things that will hurt me, brown things that make nice pants material. One imagines a kind of plaid semi-translucent three-dimensional Venn diagram representing these categories and their intersections. The number of categories in the world is, therefore, larger than the number of things in the world.”