Sleeping Beauties by David Byrne review – a quirky journey through the afterlife of invention

There’s barely been a moment in  the last half-century when David Byrne hasn’t been zinging about, dancing forward, opting odd. The art-school dropout frontman of Talking Heads, he moved sideways into ballet, dance and experimental theatre, collaborated on the proto-ambient LP My Life in the Bush of Ghosts with his fellow polymath Brian Eno, directed films, wrote musicals (on – of course – Imelda Marcos), co-founded a label (Luaka Bop) that introduced the likes of Os Mutantes and William Onyeabor to a new generation, brought out books of tree drawings, and designed bicycle racks.

Byrne’s career – by most measures a remarkably successful one – has been built from code-switching, fidgety intelligence, stylistic infidelity. At first glance then, it’s surprising that Sleeping Beauties is devoted to failure – to artists who were ignored, laughed at, forgotten; to ideas deemed batty or heretical; to ways of thinking about the world – sustaining it, replenishing it – that, often for political reasons, were found wanting, and wiped from our collective memory banks. Sleeping beauties is (of course) a term he first encountered in an academic paper by Leiden University scientometrics professor Ton van Raan. That was in 2004: this book, like a lot of the ideas and energies it animates, needed time to ferment.

Some of his three-dozen case studies – Caravaggio, heliocentrism – are better known than others. Then there’s Antoni Gaudí – now celebrated as the architect of the most popular building in Spain, the still unfinished Sagrada Família – who, when he died in 1926, after being hit by a tram, was mistaken for a beggar. His career had foundered. A prominent Catalan critic called him “the Wagnerian monster of architecture” and his work “the bum-bum of the flatulence … [it] is German music in granite”. George Orwell later described his cathedral as “one of the most hideous buildings in the world”. Yet, after the second world war, Gaudí had a prominent champion in Dalí. Fashions changed: Irving Penn featured the building in a Vogue shoot. Institutional backing came in the form of Unesco making it a world heritage site. Now, after a woman who prayed to him to restore her eyesight was suddenly able to see, he is within one miracle of becoming a saint.

The most revelatory chapters eschew art for environmental and infrastructural stories. In one – plainly titled Water Management in South India – Byrne recounts how rulers during the Chola dynasty that ended in AD1280 financed a complex network of pools, wells and tanks that allowed monsoon-triggered overflows to be channelled to lakes downstream. Curved stones were developed to trap silt and sludge. Water rights were managed by local people who ensured fruit trees abounded near banks, fish were plentiful in lakes, and that the area was less prone to droughts than other parts of the country. Later the East India Company brought in more clunky management systems and promoted profit above local expertise. It’s taken dogged local activists, operating in the aftermath of destructive floods, to revive the wise old waterways.

Byrne’s subtitle – Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up – makes it sound like a business manual in the cultural industries section of an airport bookshop. The answers he gives range from economic shifts (which have made the likes of solar energy more feasible) to the crucial role played by advocates (for example, Max Brod’s resurrection of his friend Kafka’s manuscripts). If his prose can sometimes be a bit matey (of Caravaggio he asks: “Why was he such a crazy asshole?”), he can also be sardonic (“A lesson for contemporary collectors sequestering their assets in places like the Geneva Freeport – there’s a risk the work will fall out of the conversation.”)

Art that’s rediscovered can disappear again: writer Iain Sinclair has spoken of a category of authors he calls “the Reforgotten”. And rediscovered ideas, Byrne hints at too briefly, can be reactionary as well as progressive. Still, there’s an (inter)national curriculum here that schools and universities would do well to champion: engage with science and with art, be open to play and to metaphor, consider all that is counterintuitive. More? “Follow the young, the persistent, and amateurs.” Not bad advice at all.