David Lynch: In odd we trust

How can the avant-garde creator survive in today's competitive commercial world? Say you're an experimental artist and film-maker. You deal in disturbing images of violence and insanity, you're fascinated by abstraction, and your penchant for non-linear narrative often leads into regions of stygian impenetrability. How are you supposed to make a living out of this? David Lynch has the answer: you market yourself within an inch of your life. Visit the film-maker's website, davidlynch.com, and you see how it works: alongside a panoply of novelty ringtones ("What the hell... Damn!"; "My teeth are biting! My teeth are biting!") and an animated photo of a startled-looking Lynch jumping up and down, you'll find diverse merchandise including DVDs, artworks, baseball caps, T-shirts and David Lynch own-brand coffee (guaranteed, no doubt, to make your hair stand on end like his own electrified brush-cut).

In addition, bookshops are now stocking Lynch's new publication Catching The Big Fish, a slim self-help volume of gentle wisdom in which the world's most unlikely practitioner of Transcendental Meditation offers encouraging, calming insights into the beyond - spiritual chicken soup, perhaps, as an antidote to all that coffee. "Ideas are like fish," writes Lynch. "If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch big fish, you've got to go deeper."

David Lynch is arguably not only the most instantly recognisable film-maker since Alfred Hitchcock but the most heavily branded: for all its seemingly anti-commercial Martianness, Lynch's persona, and all that it stands for, are as intensely marketable as Salvador Dali's. The latest stage in promoting international Lynch-awareness is an exhibition at the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris: entitled The Air Is On Fire, it is as inclusive a compendium of Lynchiana as any fan could desire. Covering some 40 years of Lynch's work, from his early years as a painter - even before he turned his mind to film - the selection encompasses drawings, paintings, photographs, installation pieces, soundscapes, early shorts and Post-It notes. Yes, Post-It notes. Lynch has made a habit of keeping every single envelope, napkin, blotting pad and spare scrap of paper that he has ever doodled on: here an enigmatic slogan, like the one that gives the exhibition its title; here a more than passable Kandinsky pastiche; and here, presumably, an early sketch of the unearthly "baby" from his first feature Eraserhead (1977), the gruellingly nightmarish black-and-white film that instantly launched the self-explanatory term "Lynchian".

Personal eccentricity and David Lynch have long been synonymous, but the Paris show surely caps his reputation by uncovering his reluctance to throw away the scraps. All Lynch's casual drawings and sketches form a sort of diary, as one of the exhibition's curators, Ilana Shamoon, tells me: everything is worth keeping because any one image could spark a new idea at any time. Lynch's sheer output in so many different media is terrifying, quite apart from quality: presumably he is turning out material of one sort or another pretty much non-stop. When Lynch visited London in January, I asked him whether he made any distinction between work and play. "No," he stated emphatically, as if the very idea were unthinkable. "Work is play. I wouldn't say that for everyone - but it could be. So vacation is almost a punishment." Does he actually take holidays? "No. When a family thing comes, it's almost a hardship." Family life with Lynch, you suspect, can't be easy: last year, he was divorced from his third wife Mary Sweeney, his long-time partner and editor (and co-producer of his latest film, Inland Empire) only a month after the couple finally married.

Lynch, it appears, has been fairly hands-on in helping chief curator Hervé Chandès assemble the show at the Fondation Cartier building designed by Jean Nouvel: dark basement below, glass atrium upstairs. "It's a strange building for shows," Lynch says, but he has helped remodel the space in his own image, hanging the ground-floor paintings on structures that look like extra-terrestrial S/M torture racks. Downstairs on opening day, le tout Paris clusters around a cinema that Lynch has designed, complete with old-fashioned red-plush seating, to hear him explain himself. Typically, very little is concretely elucidated, but sitting in a large overcoat, looking gently anguished, and speaking in that familiar gee-shucks drawl that suggests earnest deliberation, Lynch enthuses about the joys of painting. "It's the most beautiful act in solitude - it's you and the paint and the ideas falling. To me, all the mediums are infinitely deep." He croons in gentle rapture: "Sooooo much to discover in those worlds."

Probably more zealously adulated in France than anywhere else, Lynch gives the Paris press its money's worth in terms of elusive vagueness. He's asked about Bob, who appears in some of his paintings - Bob's Dream, Bob Burns Tree, the Max Ernst-like Bob Finds Himself in a World For Which He Has No Understanding - as a distorted homunculus, an enfeebled Ubu-esque humanoid, but a figure not, apparently, to be confused with the murderous Bob of Lynch's TV series Twin Peaks, nor with the figurehead of Lynch's one-time haunt, Bob's Big Boy Diner . "This is a different Bob," Lynch explains. "There are many people in the world in Bob. There's something about the sound of the name, and something about the shape of this particular Bob got me going. Bob is a person who is experiencing different things in the world. I kind of identify with Bob in some ways." Half the room scribbles furiously: you rather imagine that the next day, several French newspapers carried the headline, "BOB, C'EST MOI".

Lynch's most disturbing comment in Paris comes in answer to a question about Transcendental Meditation, which he has been practising daily for 33 years: he discovered it, his book reveals, when he met an instructor who looked like Doris Day, ("Boom! I fell into bliss - pure bliss. And I was just in there.") Transcendental meditation, he explains at the press conference, "allows any human being to dive within and experience the beautiful unbounded ocean of pure consciousness - pure happiness, pure love, pure energy, pure creativity, pure intelligence for any human being, every being." He has set up his own Foundation, he explains, which aims to help schools let students realise their potential through meditation, "not just send them out into the world half-baked, filled with stress and all kinds of problems."

While that idea sounds benign enough, it's a little unsettling to hear American cinema's acolyte of the Savage Unfathomable dispensing a beatific gospel, like any corporate snake oil saleman. But while TM clearly hasn't done Lynch's productivity any harm, what he consistently trawls up from his "ocean of pure, vibrant consciousness"is intensely grim, violent and unsettling, seemingly the undiluted product of blackest id rather than of shimmering karma.

Whether or not the Paris exhibition offers great insight into Lynch's films is a subjective matter, depending on how obsessive the viewer is about finding connections. What it does reveal is that as an artist, Lynch is far more diverse (that is, unfocused) than he is as a film-maker. The work passes through a bewildering number of styles and phases, only a few of which Lynch consistently sticks with. Many display their influences proudly: over the decades, the work repeatedly pays homage to Francis Bacon; more recently, Lynch has been pasting real trousers into paintings, à la Rauschenberg. A strikingly morbid series digitally modifies Victorian erotic photos into ghoulish fantasia, an uncanny and defiantly unpleasant melding of Joel-Peter Witkin and Hans Bellmer: mutated headless nudes goose each other with stumpy limbs. Words play an important part in some of the bigger canvases, notably the series of predominantly black paintings in which amorphous humanoid forms shudder through an endless night, and you squint to make out slogans such as, "Oww God, Mom, the Dog He Bited Me!" It's in the simplicity of such images, and the faux gaucheness of the words, that you realise how much Lynch has influenced the hip infantilism of so much contemporary art: some of his Post-It jottings are virtually blueprints for David Shrigley.

Some of the most impressive pieces are those which most obviously chime with his films - notably a deeply atmospheric, coal-dark series of black-and-white photos, mainly of deserted factories and abandoned machinery, although there's the odd tomb-like hotel room too (in one, Lynch peers forlornly out of the mirror). In some ways more unnerving than the distorted Victorian nudes is a glossy colour series of meta-cheesecake portraits: close-up details of pin-up-style nudes clutching themselves as if from the cold, as they gaze blankly into the lens. They're at once sexy and chilling, and remind you of a recurring theme in Lynch's work, right up to his latest film: the idea that the history of cinema is also a history of young women undressing in hotel rooms, never quite sure what they've let themselves in for.

The Paris exhibition may well prove to be a bigger draw than that new film, the exceptionally oblique Inland Empire, which opens this week. Running at three hours, Inland Empire is even denser and more fragmented than previous Lynch marathons of disorientation, such as Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. It's less a narrative than a free-associative fugue, although it starts out as a story, about a Hollywood actress called Nikki Grace (Laura Dern), who gets the lead in a remake of a Polish film over which hangs some obscurely baleful cloud. What coherent narrative Inland Empire initally offers soon yields to a labyrinth of films-within-the-film, scherzos of ghoulish imagery, and sudden flips between parallel worlds (Hollywood high and low; screen and reality; the Polish city of Lodz and a drab sitting room inhabited by talking rabbits).

It must be said, this sometimes startling but often gruelling delirium of a film demonstrates the impasse that surrealists can find themselves in: it becomes ever harder to surprise an audience because however weird things become, ultimately everything is expected since it's all... well, Lynchian. However, Lynch firmly insists that Inland Empire is anything but random. "There is a plot," he says. "What would be the point of just a bunch of things? There's a story, but the story can hold abstractions. I believe in story. I believe in characters. But I believe in a story that holds abstractions, and a story that can be told based on ideas that come in an unconventional way."

Famously, Lynch's ideas do materialise in unconventional ways: the proverbial lightbulbs, as it were (indeed, one character in Inland Empire appears with a red lightbulb in his mouth, purely because the actor was fooling around in one scene, and Lynch thought it fitted). The sinister Red Room in Twin Peaks came into being when Lynch was leaning on a car and (as his book tells it), "sssst! - the Red Room appeared." Inland Empire emerged similarly: one day Lynch bumped into Laura Dern, who had starred in his films Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, and he suggested they should do something experimental together. Learning that Dern's husband happened to come from the "Inland Empire" (a region of Southern California), Lynch knew he had his title, whatever the film eventually turned out to be. These are the kind of flashes that make Lynch go "Eureka!" - or, as he seems to prefer it, "Holy jumping George!"

You could think of Inland Empire itself as a vast mechanism for generating and assembling ideas the unconventional way: Lynch shot the film over three years, on harsh grainy DV, deliberately using a low-end Sony camcorder rather than anything newer and slicker. Shooting digitally, he says, gave him unprecedented freedom but, despite impressions, the film was not simply made up as he went along. There was a script, Lynch insists. So how much did it resemble the finished film?

"I can say it resembled it almost precisely. Say you get an idea for a chair - you see the chair in your mind's eye, it pops there - 'Oh! That's an idea!' - and you see the shape of it, and you see how it's put together, and when you think about it, then you can do a drawing of it. Now the drawing is like a script..." So the script is an imperfect blueprint for what the film will eventually turn out to be? Fair enough, though you still can't imagine what Inland Empire might have looked like on paper. In fact, none of the above remotely tallies with Catching the Big Fish, in which Lynch claims about Inland Empire: "I didn't have a script. I wrote the thing scene by scene, without much of a clue where it would end." So did the actors know when they started where the thing was going? "No, they didn't know - and near the end they didn't know. In the end I brought the cast along with the scriptwriting process. Because when the filming was finished, the script was finished. It couldn't be a traditional shoot. If Laura had gotten another gig, I don't know what would have happened."

"Unconscious" is always a key word in discussions of Lynch: he's arguably the only American film-maker who has consistently used his unconscious as his primary material, while most have tried to conceal theirs. In fact, he points out, "When it's unconscious, you don't know it, so it has to be conscious. But ideas seem to bubble up..." In a characteristic tic, he mimes the bubbling, waggling the fingers of both hands in the air as if playing an invisible toccata. "And then bingo! - they enter the conscious mind and you see them, and you've caught an idea like you catch a fish, and you're rolling. They come in fragments for me - it's not something I can control, and I don't know if this fragment is ever going to lead to another fragment, and another fragment, that will make a feature film."

So the film-making, the painting, the photography and the rest - are they all one big organic unity for him, one activity sparking and fuelling another? "It sometimes goes like that. It doesn't mean that if you're working on a chair, you're gonna end up with an idea for Inland Empire, but sometimes it does."

Especially now that French approval has semi-officially consecrated Lynch as an artist, you wonder how long he will go on trading specifically as a film-maker, rather than a Renaissance man and general guru of the arcane. In his book, Lynch even declares, "I'm through with film as a medium. For me, film is dead." Ditching celluloid, he has taken to the digital with proselytising zeal - and especially to the internet, which he describes with the breathless awe of a midwestern farmer watching glowing tablets of stone descend into his cornfield: "It wasn't there, and suddenly this place is there. It's so magical. How does it even exist? It's in the ether..." - Lynch's fluttering fingers explore the ether around his sofa - "and it's connected to the world. Everybody and his little brother is there. It wasn't that way - and now it is that way. It's PHENOMENAL... It's a world theatre - plus waaay more than that, it's where all things will be seen."

To be rather more down to earth about it - for Lynch specifically, the internet is also a space to generate T-shirt revenue, and to show his various animations, notably Dumbland, a rough-edged, very Shrigley-ish series in which a brutal flatulent slob named Randy encounters such figures as a "one-armed duck fucker." It's strange to think that such wild and lowdown imaginings issue from the great oceanic consciousness that Lynch claims we should all be diving into. Nevertheless, it's heartening to know that - his uncharacteristically sunny 1999 film The Straight Story apart - Lynch hasn't yet, in all these years, given us so much as a thimbleful of sweetness and light.

If a film as extreme as Inland Empire isn't, somehow, as shocking or unsettling as it might once have been, perhaps it proves that, over the years, Lynch has done his job as a purveyor of alien insights and transformed the world around him in his own image. Thanks to films such as Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, and to the genuinely unprecedented TV phenomenon of Twin Peaks, it's fair to say that we are now all Lynchians: at least, more of us are than probably realise it. "I think people understand the abstractions more than they used to give themselves credit for," Lynch says in Paris. "I think there is an understanding of abstractions in us human beings, and some people are far into the world of abstractions, and feel so good being lost for a time and having an experience. Others - this is very frustrating to them, and they don't like being lost." And even that unhappy few, you suspect, would be only too pleased to console themselves with a David Lynch limited-edition Limoges porcelain espresso kit - while stocks last.

The Air is on Fire is at the Fondation Cartier, Paris (+33 0142 18 56 50), to 27 May