Svojevoljno izazvana, kontrolirana, shizofrenija.
Mullican u hiprnotiziranom stanju izvodi performanse i stvara slike i crteže, želeći se što više udaljiti od "sebe". Apstrahiranu osobnost (iliti osamostaljeni kreativni proces) koja kroz njega djeluje pod hipnozom (i koja ga tijekom performansa tjera da plače, proklinje, trese se, svija se na podu, prisilno govori i samoizruguje se) Mullican zove Ta Osoba (That Person), a ona - zapravo stvarnija, dublja i izvornija od samog "Mullicana" - s vremenom otkriva svoje osobine, da primjerice, premda neodređena rodom i vremenom, voli kavu.
Neki to zovu sociološkom antropologijom svakodnevnih nesvjesnih procesa, a neki prepoznaju sablast najslavnijeg paranoika Daniela Paula Schrebera otopljenu u šalici Borgesova čaja. Mullican je stvorio vlastitu paralelnu stvarnost i njezinu mitologijsku metafiziku koju opisuje koncept pet svjetova.
matt mullican / under hypnosis / performance na Vimeu
Artist Talk - Matt Mullican - Part 1 na Vimeu
Artist Talk - Matt Mullican - Part 2 na Vimeu
[Rather than focusing on the physical art object, Matt Mullican’s body of work addresses how art functions for an individual and the society in which that individual lives. Over the last thirty years, he has developed an intricate framework through which our experience of reality can be dissected. In an enormous range of media, Mullican shows us the amorphous territories lying just below our daily operations. Each material becomes a context for examination of pure subjectivity, pure materiality, and everything in between. His production - from re-contextualized images to digital spaces to hypnosis performances – separate the layers of our belief structures, exposing reality as a product of the imagination. Notably, much of his recent work explores the persona which has emerged from the hypnosis performances. “That Person” is responsible for a set of works, which expose a more primary worldview and a more real self, capable of existing outside the authority of the physical world. Developed over a period of three decades, the works of Matt Mullican are now considered some of the most influential contributions contemporary art has seen in recent years: his oeuvre is both mysterious and clear, and remarkable for the myriad of media and materials used. Mullican’s range of media and forms of expression extend from fragile models and bulky sculptures, drawings, collages, light boxes, and computer animation to glasswork and textiles, videos, and performance.
Matt Mullican was born in Santa Monica, CA, in 1951. He received a BFA from California Institute of the Arts in 1974. Over the last several decades, his work has been shown extensively in galleries and museums in the U.S. and internationally, and is included in the permanent collections of many major museums including The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, MOCA Los Angeles, The Ludwig Museum, and The Pompidou Center. He has also completed a number of public and private commissions in the U.S., Europe, Japan and Canada.
This artist talk is organized i.c.w. Galerie Micheline Szwajcer within the framework of Mullicans solo show at GMS (22.MAR.-05.APR.12)]
"Before public performances, Matt Mullican is relaxed by a hypnotist, placed into a deep trance, and asked, “What would you like to do?” When he steps onto the stage—“a white void,” as he describes it—he is no longer Matt Mullican, he is “that person,” a dissociated abstraction of the self. Performances are often similar to one another and usually include crying, drawing, cursing, shaking, vigorous rubbing, squirming on the floor, compulsive speaking, and lots of self-derision. The point, for Mullican, is to get far enough away from Matt Mullican that he begins to understand the phenomenon of himself.
Where this sort of preoccupation is usually associated with psychologists and philosophers, Mullican is squarely an artist, disinterested in academic pursuits and analytical theory. In addition to his Under Hypnosis performances, he blows glass, paints signage, designs computer software, and draws stick figures—a wide scope of media and methods Mullican connects through his exploration into the “projection of identity.” His work gained attention in the ’70s, after he graduated from CalArts and began constructing his own cosmology and conducting performative experiments on a cadaver—yelling in its ear, sticking his hand in its mouth, etc. He is often associated with a group of artists called “the Pictures Generation,” and is, above all, a postmodernist with a persistent interest in the basic human response to symbols and meaning." —Ross Simonini
Channeling something like the spirit of Doctor Daniel Paul Schreber crossed with Jorge Luis Borges, Matt Mullican’s drawings dominate the walls of The Drawing Center. Less an ordered retrospective than a selection of work from across the years, the exhibition is equal parts visceral experience and intellectual exercise. Mullican’s works on paper are paranoid, obsessive and possibly schizophrenic, yet they are also full of humour and intelligence. In many ways, Mullican’s practice is better characterized as picture-making than drawing. The marvelously diverse images range from the runic to the cosmological to the thoroughly modern. 
Mullican creates a singular background of myths and histories, and it is the dazzlingly hermetic nature of his world that makes ‘A Drawing Translates the Way of Thinking’ so Borgesian, in addition to Mullican’s preoccupation with cataloguing and a compulsion to order the world that is so strong it seems to edge back into chaos. Compulsion is at the core of the exhibition - and, with more than 200 individual works, the exhibition list is itself in obsessive ordering and confusion - whether that is expressed in the intricate images or the extended lists of words and numbers that repeat themselves throughout his work. Most striking is the video Untitled (Matt Mullican Under Hypnosis: Zurich) (2003), in which Mullican thrashes and contorts his body as he declaims a stream of repeated words and phrases. At the core of these phrases is a repulsion directed toward the body, Mullican repeatedly crying, ‘I stink, I stink.’This obsessive preoccupation with the corporeal reality of the body is found elsewhere in a series of drawings of stick figures that covers an entire wall. Each is captioned with phrases such as ‘His Ganglion (Part of the Nerve Cell)’, ‘His Fat Cells’ and ‘Smelling His Body’. It’s here, as in the video, that Mullican most strongly recollects Freud’s celebrated analysis of Schreber, the paranoid schizophrenic who believed his body was radiating sun beams (and who had fantasies of being sodomized by God). Like Schreber, Mullican is also fascinated by the idea of heaven and hell, of cosmology, and the way this vast territory of belief is sustained by the fragile human body. It’s the terrifying chasm between the two that is constantly expressed in the work, but also the ecstatic horror that occurs when the two are finally bridged. - Katie Kitamura
Matt Mullican’s art takes form as drawing, sculpture, video, painting, electronic media, and installation, but his contribution to the 2008 Whitney Biennial might be best approached under the loose rubric of performance art. Since the late 1970s he has used hypnosis in his work, and the process both informs and helps elucidate his practice, which explores the different ways we experience the subjective through media. In Mullican’s performances, which have recently taken place in settings arranged to resemble a studio and a home, his trance state can last several hours and encompass a range of behavior from the banal to the startling. Treating his psyche as a found object, he might pour himself coffee, pace the floor, grunt, sing, chant phrases (from curses to declarations about how he’s feeling), and—most tellingly—draw or paint in black acrylic ink on supports including large pieces of paper, bedsheets, and the wall itself.
While Mullican’s performances call up 1960s and 1970s predecessors such as Bruce Nauman or Joseph Beuys, the graphic meandering and biomorphic whorls in his drawings of the past decade hark back to Surrealist experiments with frottage and automatic writing. These abstract geometric forms are combined with more representational, repetitive imagery: grids of letters and numbers, transcriptions of song lyrics, and childlike pictures. Mullican has long been interested in the intersection of public sign systems with personal semiotics, and in the early 1970s began producing a series of charts illustrating a fictive cosmology. Arrays of pictographic symbols that seemed to denote physical, biological, epistemological, and belief systems, the charts were executed on canvas and as sculpture and diffused in formats such as printed media and public installation. Encountering them with expectations of legibility and comprehensibility, viewers found instead diagrams of a nonsystemic, idiosyncratic universe distinctly the artist’s own.
Installations of Mullican’s work often feature grids of his drawings hung side by side on makeshift walls in tightly packed rooms or corridors. These are spaces in which it seems possible to lose oneself, which, in a sense, the artist has done to create them. The predicate of his experiences under hypnosis is an ageless, genderless figure he calls “that person.” As he emerges in the work, “that person” busies himself with everyday routines but has his eye on the big issues; a statement in one drawing reads, “I love to work for Truth and Beauty.” Mullican’s work of the past three decades stands as an extended, and often profound, meditation on the notion of artistic subjectivity, and on the limits—and unexpected benefits—of distancing the ego from the creative self. - LISA TURVEY
Matt Mullican’s parallel universes have been emerging since the early 1970s as a sociological anthropology of unconscious processes of everyday life. Central to his work is the systematization, structuring, and ordering of personal worldviews that oscillate between subject and object, between a personal and a universal worldview. Mullican’s works circle around the perception as unconscious interpretation of sensible reception of realities.
As a dyslexic, Mullican tries to grant language a significance that goes beyond its code, beyond writing, lending it a transparence in the use of images. The relationship between signs and the signified, the relationship between word and image, indeed signification’s very degree of reality is the object of his work. The pictograms he develops, the icons, are the radical mediatization and recodification of symbolically abbreviated means of communication — just as writing functions as the encoding of processes of communication.
Mullican, who has participated in documenta several times, develops his cosmology as a model representing our lifeworlds and an exemplary attempt of constructing a comprehensive world model according to his subjective point of view, lending it artistic content. In so doing, the artist is fully aware of the emotional original of his cosmology, in various media and materials. Impossible to classify in terms of development, ever since his studies with John Baldessari the artist has continued to add new details to his imaginary universe. With the exploration of construction processes of the world of images and signs surrounding us, he undermines monocausal patterns of interpretation, linear connections and subverts teleological expectations.
For this exhibition, a labyrinthine architecture with colorful painted walls has been installed in the gallery, in which the various levels of cosmology are interlinked with one another using his own theory of color. Within this model, the color green stands for the level of physical elements, blue for the world unframed, yellow for the world framed (creative powers and art), black and white for language and red for the sphere of subjective meaning. The individual spaces of the cosmology are played out in processes that in part emerged under hypnosis. Spatial models like tin sculptures, written canvases, etc. open out-branching layers of subcategorization that in their detail trace out the course of an entire day, menus, or unconscious processes of feeling and thought.
Mullican works with the methods of encyclopedic categorization and archiving, by forcing these concepts over other structures they are made visible. Archetypical issues like heaven, God, life, destiny, material, and spirit, death and hell stand alongside one another and are given no moral evaluation. In its complexity, Mullican’s work contains a tragic moment — in the hopeless attempt to classify the world.
 
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| From Matt Mullican, Unititled, 1977 |
Matt Mullican's World
by Allan McCollumOur primitive impulse is to affirm immediately the reality of all
that is conceived, as long as it remains uncontradicted.[1]
"And there are no angels either, is that only a story too?"
"No, there are no angels, that too is only a story."
"But there are locksmiths, aren’t there? For who else would make the boxes?"
— From a conversation between a mother and her four-year-old child.[2]
Seen from the point of view of the social sciences, our sense of reality is acquired during childhood in the same way we acquire language — through communication with those around us. The "real world" is a domain we learn to inhabit only gradually, as we are taught the names of things appropriate to its sphere, as opposed to the names of those which are excluded; the relationships between things are discovered to be synonymous with the relationships between the word-symbols used to represent them; and as time goes by, we come to infer the nature of reality — just as we infer the grammar of our language — through our interaction with others. Because we learn reality this way, it must be described as a social construction — maintained by a community of belief, and transmitted from individual to individual, from generation to generation, through the use of symbols. Thus the everyday reality we take for granted is, at bottom, a kaleidoscopic interplay of signs and meanings, created out of — and bounded by — the conventions of those who came before us.
What is interesting about this sociological view of worldly knowledge is that it locates the real world within the symbolic field along with other realms of meaning in such a way that the difference between the real and the not-real becomes a matter of social convention — not as we generally assume, a self-evident differentiation proceeding from natural law. If we were to articulate and divide the continuum of experience in a different way — as anthropologists have discovered is done in different cultures — we would literally inhabit a different "reality".
Thus reality can be felt to have a provisional, synthetic quality; reducible as it is to a symbolic system, constructed from signs and social conventions, it is never quite as cohesive as we would like it to be — and its inherent precariousness compels us to expend a certain constant effort to keep it intact.
It is this inner process — constructing the world we live in and preserving its stability — which seems to be of special interest to Matt Mullican. His work, which is the product of a detailed, near-obsessive introspection, is devised as an elaborate attempt to duplicate externally the vast complex of inner representations which add up to his understanding of the world he lives in. Through the use of all conceivable media — drawings, readings, performances, posters, signs, sculptures, banners, etc. — he has undertaken to re-create for the outer senses a multidimensional picture of those normally unconscious, interior processes which are present in all of us. Through his work, we watch a drama unfold — one which we all experience in our day-to-day lives, but unconsciously — as he represents the way he constructs, assimilates, disintegrates, modifies, reconstructs, and generally works to maintain his personal sense of reality.
To "live in reality" is more than a matter of mental organization for the human animal; it is a matter of survival. Like the circulation of blood, it is a system which must operate at all times; and like most vital systems, it operates automatically, beneath the level of conscious awareness. It is an elaborate mechanism, which serves not only to hold a society together in the same cultural "world," but also to provide its individual members with reliable defenses against the frightening intrusions of "nature" — intrusions which constantly threaten to destabilize or destroy their realities, and their lives, from within and without. Its devices are tenuous, vulnerable, often slap-dash, and enormously dependent upon the human mind's ability to skip over and repress data which is inconsistent with its expectations. Maintaining a stable sense of reality involves great leaps of faith, frequent periods of amnesia, and well-guarded mechanisms of denial.
It's no wonder that this system operates unconsciously; to deal with these manipulations consciously would be as terrifying as having to consciously make one's heart beat. What if your mind drifted for a moment?! Likewise, what if you forgot to construct the stable world you live in one morning, and were overwhelmed by the fear of death before getting out of bed?
Not surprisingly, most of us consider that the less we have to scrutinize our sense of reality, the better off we are; but like certain other bedeviled members of society — scientists, philosophers, metaphysicians, etc. — Mullican has felt it necessary to submit these matters to the light of conscious and rational awareness. As it would be with any of us, however, his inner picture of reality is by no means rational; and it is with great difficulty that he tries to represent it in objectified form. Thus his work becomes ever more urgent and obsessional as it develops; the more comprehensive his project becomes, the more contradictions arise for him to resolve; the more he tries to define things with any certainty, the less certain his criteria become, and so on. In this way his work is constantly growing: every move he makes to simplify his investigations creates new orders of complexity. If one could count the number of artworks Mullican has produced towards the goal of representing his world, it would run into the thousands.
The SignsIt is only because man originally felt himself identical to all those like him … that he came to acquire the capacity to distinguish himself as he distinguishes them. . . [3]
. . . before any formation of the subject, of the subject who thinks, who situates himself in it, [there is] the level at which there is counting, things are counted, and in this counting he who counts is already included. It is only later that the subject has to recognize himself as such, as he who counts.[4]
A large part of Mullican's work is an ever-growing ensemble of single images, which he refers to as his "signs".[5] Not without irony, these signs are represented in a familiar style: that of those idealized, featureless pictographs we see in such public places where a commonality of language may not be taken for granted, as in international airports. Designed to take the place of words, these pictographs can represent a large range of concepts; they can direct us to a baggage area with a picture of a suitcase, or to a restaurant with the image of a knife and fork. Mullican, of course, has added many images of his own to this "wordless" vocabulary.
It is to a very primitive level of understanding that these kinds of pictographs appeal, by necessity of their purpose, which is to be universally recognizable. What is interesting in this context is that this level of understanding is rooted in a certain stage of the child's early psychological development. This particular stage is characterized by the child's beginning to assimilate those basic schemes of classification which are inherent in the way his environment is organized by those members of society engaged in his upbringing, and which serve to isolate and establish separate identities for the objects which make up that environment. It is to this level of object-relations that Lacan is referring in the above quotation, where things are "counted," and where the counter includes himself as another item in the tally — before, as he explains, yet separating himself out as "he who counts".
Taken as a whole, Mullican's sign-making is a clear expression of this phase of understanding: he has produced hundreds of single signs representing the "objects" of his world, from pork chops to sexual acts to metaphysical ideas. Included prominently in this lexicon, of course, is the human form.
Since it is only after this stage of counting things that the subjective self is established as the center of awareness in the psychology of the child, the depiction of the human form in this pictographic vocabulary — counted as one type of object amongst others — can be seen to represent the "self" in precisely this presubjective way of understanding.
For example, when I recognize that the masculine figure represented on the restroom door in a certain sense represents myself, I am simultaneously accepting my membership in a class of like objects — in this case, people who are "men" as opposed to "women". This little picture of a man is as much myself as it is any other man, no more and no less; it is "me" as I am located amongst "them" — but not "I" as opposed to "them". The pictograph, by virtue of its neutral identity, appeals to and coincides with that phase of my ego's construction situated prior to the transition from myself-as-object to myself-as-subject. Because the image represents myself only insofar as I am included within a scheme of classification I learned as a child, my identification with it transcends any need for a sense of "self," and engages my attention on a purely infantile level.
I am interested to stress the psychological character of this pictographic code not only to point out its appropriateness to communication without language, but also to suggest that because Mullican uses this style of pictography, he is able to address the viewer on a very specific level, or phase of human "knowing". The primitive, childlike character of this phase sets the tone for his entire work.
This phase of knowing has a number of qualities peculiar to itself, two of which are of particular relevance to Mullican's work. First, it can be seen to coincide with the limits of conventional self-knowledge. For insofar as this phase is established prior to the precipitation of a "self" capable of this knowledge, the scheme of classifications established here will necessarily represent the boundaries of that self. In other words, a self-knowledge which has grown out of the recognition that one occupies a particular location within a social ordering cannot turn around and trace itself back beyond the boundaries of that original location.
Second, this phase of knowing has difficulty with distinguishing between the "real" and the "not-real". Because it originates in that stage of development where there is no discrimination between a self-as-subject and a world of objects, the phenomena appropriate to these two spheres — which should be relatively sorted out to the more mature phases of the mind — tend to become intermixed. That is, what we call subjective and objective realities are confused in the more primitive, immature mind. It is easy to see that the precariousness of our sense of reality is rooted in this phase of knowing.
It is this underlying preoccupation with the world as viewed from a presubjective position which separates Mullican from so many artists of his generation; for where other artists might use their work to invite us into a world of personal imagery, with which we may identify only by constructing analogies to our own private worlds, Mullican, by invoking a more primitive phase of knowing through his style of pictography (and the simplicity of his imagery), draws us into a network of identification where the original boundaries of our worldly knowledge can virtually coincide. He can do this because, as noted earlier, these boundaries are inherent in the schemes of classification society provides us, and which all of us, as members of the same society, must assimilate before that which we call "knowledge" can make its appearance.
******** This simple "counting" of things — while it could go on indefinitely — isn't enough to construct a world. Mullican's signs represent widely diverse concepts, some which belong to the realms of objective reality, and some of which do not. Such a runaway taxonomy could only create a meaningless world of jumble and chaos. Appropriately, however, Mullican guides this burgeoning proliferation into a totally comprehensive system. Through this larger ordering, he attempts to sort out and establish differences between the subjective and objective worlds, the real and the not-real, etc. In this way, he works to define and identify not only the everyday reality in which he lives, but the metaphysical dynamics which underlie that reality.
 Untitled, 1975-76. |
In the observable human propensity to order reality there is an intrinsic impulse to give cosmic scope to this order, an impulse that implies not only that human order in some way corresponds to an order that transcends it, but that this transcendent order is of such a character that man can trust himself and his destiny to it.[6]For those of us who are not professional theorists in the area of metaphysics, the question of cosmic order probably doesn't occupy too much of our moment-to-moment thinking. Nevertheless, we all carry within us some notion, however vague, of there being a general orderliness to the "scheme of things"; it is impossible to imagine getting through the day without a certain taken-for-granted sense of there being some stable arrangement to phenomena at large. Included in this sense of order, of course, is some idea or feeling about how we ourselves, as individuals, fit into the scheme; whether we believe in science, religion, or common sense, we feel that there is a place for us, and that our existence is provided for in some greater natural design than is apparent to the senses.
If someone were to ask us for a detailed description of how everything fits together, we would probably find ourselves short of ready answers; after all, our lives depend upon our taking certain things for granted. For Mullican, however, who is attempting to reconstruct his internally-pictured world in an external and communicable form, his individual sense of universal design must be articulated. However childlike or untenable his personal cosmology may be, it plays an extremely important role in his life: it is the matrix of all his experience, the organizer of his world. Without it there would be no relationships and no possibility of meaning.
There are two basic diagrams Mullican uses to represent his cosmology. One I will call his "World View"[7] and the other his "Cosmology Proper"[8] Both versions take the structure of the perceiver's consciousness to coincide with and provide the order for the universe at large; that is, because he sees there are different levels of awareness towards the world, the world itself can be sorted out into different categories. In this way, each category of his world coincides with the perceptual attitude appropriate to his cognizance of it. For example, the location of the "arts" in the scheme of things coincides with an attitude of awareness in which subjective realities are allowed to interact with the objective world; whereas the location of the "elements" coincides with the retreat of subjective involvement, towards what we might call a disinterested, objective point of view. Man stands at the center of Mullican's universe, then, and the qualities of his world reflect the qualities of his perception.
The "World View" diagram represents the cosmological system as it should seem to an individual engaged in simply living his life: a sort of common-sense view of the world. The diagram, which has a vertical orientation, is made up of three relatively distinct levels, although these levels are to be understood as overlapping into one another; that is, the shift from one level to the next is a gradual one.
The middle level represents the life-world of the individual: his daily activities, the objects in his environment, and his relative awareness of himself engaged in his life. Pictured within this level are people, buildings, the sun and moon, etc. Here we have the simple, immediate world of everyday reality.
Moving upwards and downwards from this middle level we progress into the realms of the mental and the physical, respectively. Beneath the level of everyday reality, we move through the world of inert matter, through the elements, molecules, atomic and sub-atomic particles, and finally into an undifferentiated area Mullican refers to as "Pure Physics". This level is mainly characterized by its systemic breakdown into simpler and more fundamental phenomena, its comparative lack of reflexive consciousness, and by its ultimate transgression into an area beyond any real accessibility to our consciousness. It is out of this level that the body develops from conception, and into which it deteriorates after death.
Moving upwards from the level of everyday reality, we pass into the various symbolic realms. Depicted here are signs representing language, value systems, the arts, science, history, myth, religion, etc. At the extremes of this level, these symbolic phenomena fade into a realm Mullican calls "Pure Meaning". This level is characterized by its progression through an increasingly simplified order of psychic operations, its gradual dissociation from all reference to the material world, and its culmination in a formlessness beyond all possibility of knowledge. Mullican identifies this level with the unconscious, spiritual aspects of existence, and associates it with both the source of life before birth and the ultimate destination of life after death.
There are at least three strands of correspondence which connect the upper and lower levels of this chart: they are both ordered according to a greater and greater simplification of processes, they both progress beyond the reach of awareness, and they both lead to the ultimate fringes of the life span, birth and death. Because these correspondences exist, Mullican is able to organize his cosmology into a circular pattern, which in this form can represent the dynamics of the universe as a continuous cycle. This version, which I'm calling the "Cosmology Proper," places the corresponding aspects of the upper and lower levels of the "World View" model in direct connection with one another: the breakdown of psychic operations into simpler and simpler processes interfaces with the analogous breakdown of matter into energy; the outer reaches of both levels, which are beyond consciousness, coalesce into one another to form a single, undifferentiated value, or void; and the fringes of life — birth and death in the material and spiritual sense — culminate at the same point. It is this final culmination that closes the circle, thus constructing a slightly different model: here we have a repeatable and continuing life cycle.
The cosmology of the "World View" diagram, which is depicted with man at the center, is translated by this circular diagram into an organization of universal relations which operate through man, and may therefore be called a cosmology in the more sophisticated sense of the word, as it might be used in metaphysics. At this point, Mullican's cosmology aspires to the status of those transcendent metaphysical systems upon which theologies and religions are generally based.
In fact, Mullican includes a "religion" in his world, and very prominent amongst his collection of signs is a religious symbol of sorts, which represents this circular cosmology. The symbol simplifies his chart into an emblematic design, in which a circle is divided into four equal quadrants. These quadrants, which alternate from black to white, represent four basic phases of awareness; they are, roughly: the pre-subjective; the subjective and objective in interrelation; the purely subjective; and the purely objective. This circular symbol is often represented in the form of a rectangle, similarly divided into four black and white quadrants. What it stands for, however, is the same; a cyclical, universal order in which all phenomena are characterized and arranged according to their relative status as compared with the objective or subjective point of view. Mullican's religion, then, based upon his cosmology, is the organizer of his orientation between the objective and the subjective, the known and the unknown, the real and the non-real.
Here again, we recognize Mullican's concern with the problematically tenuous relationship between reality and non-reality. Throughout his work, he focuses his attention along the fluctuating and permeable border which separates these two spheres, and his concerns as an artist are inseparable from his obsession with this primary differentiation.
It follows, then, that it is the structure of his cosmology which governs the whole of his work — not the conventions of the various media he utilizes. It is the artistic disciplines themselves — painting, drawing, theatre, etc. — which become as compositional units in this larger, cosmological scheme. In all of his work that involves duration, for instance, a narrative order is generally used which follows the sequence of the cosmological cycle; even the way he organizes his drawings, photos, and other graphic works upon the wall reflects this more comprehensive scheme. Everywhere in his work, then, the themes of moving from the known to the unknown, from the real to the non-real, from birth to death can be seen to prevail.
In a certain sense, then, what Mullican gives us is not quite art, but rather a complex and ambitious attempt to recreate the composition of that consciousness which precedes it, and through which its creation is possible. In Mullican's work, art seeks its place in the universal order of all phenomena.
Specifically, Mullican places art within the realm of the symbolic, as we might expect. The world of art describes a "fictional" reality however, since he recognizes the anatomy of the "real" world to be made up of signs and symbols, the world of art and the world of reality obtain a queasy interchangeability. As transformational and unsteady a world as we recognize our fictional realities to be, how much more precarious is the world of reality, for which we en masse forfeit control by suppressing any knowledge of our own complicity in its construction as a symbolic system?
The symbolic activity of art, then, is for Mullican simply a play within a play; it is an acknowledged form of symbolic creativity set against an unacknowledged, but equally symbolic form of creativity we unquestioningly refer to as everyday reality. Mullican seems to view the polar worlds of reality and non-reality as an interrelated unit, with each implying the other, and by so doing, relying upon the other for its identity and meaning. It is this bipolar construct as a whole, this integrated dichotomy where the real and the non-real continually define each other, that locates and identifies the world of everyday reality and its relationship to the world of art. In other words, the non-real, or the fictional — as exemplified in the world of art — cannot be separated from the real, or the factual; they are two aspects of the same symbolic system
To Mullican's eye, then, the comfortable position of "reality" from which we perform as spectators into the contained arena of symbolic activity we call "art" is itself an unstable, fluid, and precarious world made up of those same signs and symbols which offer us such exotic entertainment; and these two symbolic worlds, separated only by conventions of belief, are forever in danger of collapsing into one another in an undifferentiated chaos, wherein all things would become equally real and not real — a situation we can only associate with madness or death.
In view of this danger — in which a work of art is seen to continually run the risk of becoming confused with the real world — the function of Mullican's cosmology becomes clearer. It is a set of guidelines for organizing his experience — which, if followed, prevents the collapse of reality.
Confrontations With Everyday Life
Warranted systems have ever been the idols of aspiring souls. All-inclusive, yet simple; noble, clean, luminous, stable, rigorous, true — what more Ideal refuge could there be than such a system would offer to spirits vexed by the muddiness and accidentality of the world of sensible things?[9]The "ideal refuge" of cosmological schemes, Mullican's as well as those constructed by human societies, have a way of being no more specific than is minimally necessary. They tend to provide general outlines and broad categories into which all phenomena should fit somewhere, but the specific work of assigning the details of experience to their proper places is largely left to the individual who takes the particular system to heart.
It is this kind of project which makes up the remaining part of Mullican's work: the coming to terms with life's details. Here the consoling belief in a stable and elegant universal order, and the security of having names for all things and things for all names must come face to face with the world of everyday experience — a world where the misunderstood, the marginal, the unnamable, and the uncanny lurk around every corner. The everyday world, however it may be invented and re-invented, is regularly discovered, on a personal basis, to be irreducibly emotional, contradictory, and mysterious.
It is at this point that we can begin to see just how universal and human a dilemma it is that Mullican dramatizes for us in his work. Survival for all of us means that we must know reality — and yet how can we, when such knowledge itself is but a precarious construction riding upon an unruly substrate of unconscious desires, biological drives, and primeval fears? These forces are so alien to normal awareness that we must choose between hiding them from ourselves, or being overwhelmed by them completely. Either way, we may not know them — we are them.
It is to attempt to resolve these kinds of contradictions that cosmologies are created in the first place, and if we tend to forget the heroics involved in simply getting through life, Mullican is intent on reminding us.
Many of life's experiences are easy to place into an orderly scheme of things, as long as situations remain routine. But many are not so easy. For example, the predictability of everyday reality is disrupted nightly, as each of us enters into the world of dreams. It is often only with difficulty that we are able to re-enter the "real" world upon waking, and certain dreams may govern our moods and our perceptions throughout the day. We like to think we can "explain" dreams, but it is doubtful that any of us are completely satisfied with our own explanations. The elegance of our cosmologies aside, be they Spiritualist or Freudian, we generally manage to deal with them most satisfactorily by simply forgetting them! Everyday life is filled with such small crises: accidents, misunderstandings, the confusion of fantasy with reality, the overwhelming power of one's emotions, sickness, neurosis, etc; and sometimes, we are confronted with truly major disruptions of our taken-for-granted realities, such as natural cataclysm, war, insanity, and — the ultimate break in the routine of everyday life — the intrusion of death.
So it is these marginal situations in life, where the notion of predictable order is most difficult to maintain, that Mullican commonly chooses to confront in his work. He does this as a matter of course, as he organizes the details of life that are not dealt with in the more abstract cosmology. In this fleshing out of the general categories represented in his signs and his charts, he recapitulates the process we all go through in coming to terms with life-in-the-world. This recapitulation is accomplished through the various media of art, as the particular qualities he attached to the different aspects of life are represented in such art forms as seem appropriate: photography for "real" things, posters and banners for "symbols," drawings for imaginary or "fictional" things, theatrical performances for "events," and so on. These various media have their particular location on the "Cosmology Proper," and their use, in itself, is one of the initial steps in his representation of the details of life as he begins, essentially to "act out" the cosmology.
Confronting details is commonly problematic, as any case of turning general theory into specific practice will reveal; with cosmologies and other metaphysical systems, it's often preferable not to look at anything too closely, or too many unanswerable questions arise — questions which make us doubt the validity of what we like to believe we "know" about reality. Most of Mullican's work presents us with such contradictions as we would rather skip over in our thinking, lest we should suffer doubt about our fundamental capacity to know.
 Matt Mullican / Framed Section of an Angel's Wing (1978) |
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A good example of this focusing in upon what should remain vague is his drawing, "Detail of an Angel's Wing".[10]
In this simple pen-and-ink rendering, we are shown a "close-up" of the
feather structure of an angel's wing, in the tradition of Audubon. Now,
there is no apparent reason an angel's wing shouldn't be represented in
this manner; winged angels have been depicted by artists for hundreds of
years, and scientific illustrators have given us detailed drawing of
this type over and over again. The fact is, however, that ornithologists
don't study angels, and, maybe more to the point, theologists don't
generally analyze their body parts. Angels don't need circulatory
systems, skeletal structure, and so on — they are spiritual beings, and
to ruminate over their physiology is to miss the point. And yet to
investigate such details in the real world of science is virtually a
moral imperative. In this drawing, two perfectly common realms of
knowledge are brought into conflict, and questions arise as to the
efficacy of either science or religion to explain the world in detail.
To the degree that we might depend upon either of these two systems to
provide us with answers, this drawing should inspire doubt about how and
what we can "know" of the world. It is this imminence of doubt — and the uncomfortable, sometimes frightening feelings that go along with it — that characterizes the tone of Mullican's more detailed representations of his everyday world. As viewers, we are led with each of his works further and further into the realms of doubt which occupy such gaps as exist between our ways of knowing; little by little, we are made to focus upon those small leaps of faith, those brief moments of amnesia which serve to erase contradictions, and allow us the belief that we can know and understand the details of our worlds. One of his pieces which dramatically illustrates this effect is a sort of tableau,[11] in which he has reproduced life-size a photograph of the cadaver of an elderly man. The cadaver, which has been partially dissected, is Iying on a laboratory slab, and the picture has been taken from above, giving a view which is uncompromisingly harsh. The photo is almost a caricature of an invitation to objective scrutiny — of a subject, of course, about which it is virtually impossible to be objective. Set adjacent to this photo, which hangs on the wall, is a table upon which have been placed some 1500 captioned drawings, the purpose of which, one infers, is to illustrate the life history of the deceased. Each drawing is of a simple stick-figure man, in varying positions, with an equally simple statement written beneath it; statements such as, "pricking his finger," "his thymus gland," "his motivations," "acting as if a child," and so on. We naturally recognize that these illustrations are inventions of the artist's, and are fictional — but we find that their plausibility as actual descriptions of this dead man's life history is enough to generate a true feeling of poignancy. As we peruse through these drawings, the feeling grows, until it begins to conflict with our knowledge that the illustrations are fictional — they could, after all, just as well be the "real" facts. The stick-figures, which operate in a way similar to that described earlier regarding the depictions of the human form in the pictographic "signs," invite us into a close identification with this man — a man whom we are told once loved, and was loved by others. These drawings slowly inspire real sentiment, or even grief, as this wealth of fictional data accumulates in our minds to achieve a strange, synthetic reality. |
 Matt Mullican / Untitled (Stick figure drawings), 1974. Pencil & ink on paper, 35,5 x 21,6 cm each. Left: Being guilty Right: Looking at his own body (his arm) |
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What occurs, I believe, is a recognition of how our knowledge of any
human being — his fears, his joys, his life, his death — is as
synthetically constructed in our minds as is this more obviously
fictional representation. The question we must present to ourselves
becomes: if I am experiencing what seems to be authentic feelings about a
clearly fictional depiction, how may I assess the authenticity of my
feelings — or my knowledge about the people I "know" to be real? If we should suspect that this false poignancy is but our natural response to the photograph of the cadaver, which undeniably creates a dramatically eerie atmosphere around the whole piece, we might be further impressed by another of Mullican's works, in this case a performance,[12] in which he recites a list of simple statements, similar to the captions of the drawings, but with no reference, visual or otherwise, to the existence of any actual person. The reading (which is done in a subdued light) begins with the statement, "Her birth," and continues through around 200 or so cryptic phrases, ending with "Her death". These phrases describe what could be isolated memory images, or "moments" in a person's life, such as, "Hearing her mother upstairs," "Her best friend's brother," "Thinking about her son's life," or "Forgetting her age". The entire life of an unknown and undoubtedly fictional person is condensed into ten minutes worth of short, evocative statements, which are paraded through our mental apparatus almost faster than we can represent to ourselves the images which they invariably invoke. The accumulated effect of this assault on our image-forming capacity is an unquestionable growth of empathic feeling, or nostalgia; it is a feeling we would not have anticipated experiencing as a result of listening to a purely rote reading of such simple phrases which refer to a completely fictional human being of whom we know nothing, and have learned nothing. Again, we recognize an authentic and powerful poignancy in our response — not of the familiar sentimental sort that we are accustomed to feeling while, say, watching a melodrama, where we have willfully suspended disbelief, but a response which bypasses our will in the way spontaneous feelings develop in more appropriate circumstances, i.e., real life. |
Essex (Details from an Imaginary Life from Birth to Death), 1973 |
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| Her birth Her family Her house, home Learning to crawl The heat from the kitchen stove Learning to walk Hearing her mother upstairs The street noises coming in the window Learning to talk The rug on the living room floor The trees growing in the backyard Learning to use her hands Feeling hungry after her nap The sunlight hurts her eyes Her fourth birthday The salt on the dining room table Smelling the fresh autumn air Bleeding after skinning her knee Entering school The pillow on her parent's bed Making friends Traveling to the mountains Crying when feeling lost The people living down the street Learning to read words The dining room table The sky was a light shade of blue Learning arithmetic Her best friend's brother Feeling hungry after skipping lunch Learning to ride a bike The full moon lights up the night sky Learning about gravity in school The light in the hallway Catching her breath after running home Entering the sixth grade-becoming older Their pet dog The door between her and her older sister's room Having to go to the bathroom Noticing that the tree in the backyard is changing color Feeling the glare of the sun on her eyes They got two inches of rain that week Playing handball at school The street light Feeling proud of her schoolwork Looking at herself in the mirror entering the seventh grade Playing in the backyard The food cansin the kitchen cabinet Going to the school dance Tasting that there's too much salt in the salad Thinking about going steady Experiencing puberty Scaring the dog by slamming the door There were so many stars she couldn't count them all Looking out her bedroom window Finding new friends in school | As the year progressed the days got shorter Visiting her aunt's house Getting a boyfriend and going steady Brushing her teeth Her dog dies Getting an electric shock Riding the bus to school Entering the drama club Her boyfriend's little sister Going to camp over the summer The sound of the record player in the living room The air felt thick that morning Becoming sick-not going to school Making out Hearing her parents argue Getting a younger sister-thinking to herself Getting scared Going to parties often Entering high school Hearing static while talking on the phone Taking care of her little sister After gym she was very tired Burning herself while cooking The telephone ringing in the hallway Spending the summer at a beach hotel The ocean seemed endless A large man passing her on the sidewalk Thinking about the people she has yet to meet Learning to drive a car Remembering the time she hurt herself Skiing Touching her right eye with her index finger Family moves to a new neighborhood The sound of an airplane flying overhead Talking a bath Becoming interested in history Fantasizing about marriage The dining room table set for eating Going to the movies Hugging her father Entering college, moving away from home Her roommate Falling asleep while studying Her roommate's home town stars The amount of time it takes to walk to school Majoring in history in college Getting a boyfriend The sound of the record player in the next room Staying up, watching the sunrise from her rooftop Cutting her hair Studying the history of her country Getting married in the afternoon Their front door Quitting school Moving to a new house | Her husband's family The manhole in the street Thinking of her in-laws Her husband's work Boiling water while cooking Getting a job for herself Looking at, herself in the mirror Receiving a letter from her parents Having her wisdom teeth removed Watching the light refract through the kitchen window Eating lunch A pencil on her desk at work Knowing she is going to have a baby Thinking of her parents Her baby is born Moving to a larger house There is lots of green around the new house Her husband's mouth Stubbing her toe while running Her son's baby shoes February twenty-sixth Feeling thirsty one hot afternoon Her husband's boss Another birthday, she is getting older Getting her hands wet Thinking about her son's life Making love with her husband Smelling the fresh autumn air Thinking of her childhood The telephone wires Her son's learning to walk The people living next door Trying to find her glasses The covers on their bed Having another baby, a girl Not eating very much She only had an hour to get home Her son's school work Visiting her husband's sister The noise from a large truck Her daughter's fourth birthday Looking at herself in the mirror Her thirty-fourth birthday Sensing that her son is in danger Renewing an interest in history Her daughter's left hand Taking a shower Dreaming that she spoke foreign language Thinking of her husband's childhood An object in the back seat of their car The floor she stands on October fifth Her husband shaved regularly Traveling to a large city Her son's graduation Taking a photograph Reading a book in the study Her husband's current income Dropping a dish-watching it break Kissing her husband The days seemed to be going by faster Having trouble breathing | The new living room furniture The sidewalk around the corner Touching the wall Her father dies, sudden grief The backyard flooded during a heavy rain Looking at herself in the mirror Her son's marriage Brushing her teeth Starting a garden Her daughter's graduation The broken glass in the basement door Swimming An itch in the lower part of her back Her daughter's school in a foreign country Spending half the year at the ocean Looking at a photograph of herself as a child Being scared to enter a dark room Having a grandchild Feeling older Remembering schooldays A glass of water They have retired Their son's independence Touching herself Cooking a "hearty meal" Forgetting her age Their house Going for a trip around the world Hair turning white Her daughter's marriage Working at her desk Wondering where that person lives Being visited by her daughter-in-law's parents Noticing that the sky is a light shade of blue The red car down the block Catching her breath Watching TV Taking a nap in the hot sun Her husband dies Moving Thinking about her eventual death Scaring the dog by slamming the door A family reunion during Christmas Going for a walk in the garden Feeling old, not caring Looking at her feet Not being able to see clearly Bleeding after skinning her knee Thinking of the faces of her parents Cooking vegetables The door between her and her sister's room Looking at her eyes in the mirror The floor she stands on Thinking of her husband Looking at herself in the mirror Thinking of her death Her death |
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How one may confuse knowledge of imaginary reality with mental imagery of objective reality is further illustrated by Mullican himself in another brief performance.[13] In this piece, he pins to the wall a drawing or photo of a typical living room interior which he has clipped from a magazine, or other popular source. He then proceeds to describe in realistic detail what he could not possibly know about the rest of the house, such as what one discovers when one walks up the stairs, or through the closed doors, etc. These descriptions are rich in personal observations and feeling, yet it is clearly evident that he is spontaneously creating these discoveries as he goes along; like a man in trance, he allows his imagination to operate beyond his conscious control, and virtually "dreams out loud" this unknown house in ever more elaborate detail. Recognizing that the house is imaginary, we still respond to his descriptions with the same mechanism of suggestibility we would expect of ourselves if we were being given "real" information about a situation we assumed to objectively exist; that is, we construct our own mental imagery of the house right along with him, in spontaneous response to his words. Again, we must question our everyday beliefs concerning how successfully we may know anything the evidence for which we receive by way of language, symbols, imagery, and so forth. This is surely an unsettling question — considering that the bulk of what we experience as our "knowledge" is of exactly this type. The degree to which one's imagination may construct one's experience in situations which are not so unequivocally fictional as those just described is investigated by Mullican in another performance in which he utilizes the techniques of hypnotism.[14] For this piece, a number of actor-participants are hypnotized and given suggestions to perform certain improvisational sketches, such as, "Learning to talk," "Moving into a new house," etc. As is typical of so many of Mullican's performances, in that they involve duration, the cycle of his cosmology is recapitulated in the sequence of these improvisations, which begins with a "Birth" and ends with a "Death" sketch. The suggestions in this piece have been extracted from the list of statements described earlier, except in this case, the list is "acted out". The difference between an actor performing an improvisation under normal conditions and under hypnotic suggestion is that the latter performer believes his actions are "real," even as he creates them. It is as if his preconscious censoring mechanism, or what Freud called his "reality function," has not only surrendered itself to the will of the hypnotist, but has also allowed his own personal ensemble of unconscious fantasy and memory images to insinuate themselves into his experience of objective reality. For example, if a hypnotized subject is told, say, that a certain box contains something very terrifying — but not told exactly what that object might be — his imagination, working unconsciously, will provide that terrifying object to his experience in full form, according to his particular psychological history, upon opening it. Whole-hearted belief, then, is called into question as a practical criterion for knowledge of reality in this performance. We watch one of the female performers tremble with real emotion as she acts out a younger version of herself and touches hands with her "first love" (played by the artist in a non-hypnotic state), yet we know her experience is not "real" in any sense with which we are comfortable, or even familiar. In the final improvisation, in which a young actor not only becomes old but changes his sex to perform "an elderly woman dying," we find ourselves truly fearing that — due to his trance state — he might just die himself, through some biological misinterpretation of psychic signals generated from the intensity of his belief. In a way quite symmetrical to Mullican's rendering fictional characters "real" to our experience in some of his previously described pieces, this performance has the opposite effect of turning real people into fictions — not only in the sense that we see actors performing in made-up situations, but also, because of their hypnotically induced "belief," also in the sense that they literally become fictionalized versions of themselves. They believe in the hypnotist's suggestions and they believe in their unconsciously manufactured circumstances — to the exclusion of all the contrary evidence which is plainly visible to the audience. They become as puppets, or ciphers — like the stick-figures in the cadaver drawings. When we consider that the hypnotic state is no more than an alteration of one's normal, waking state — specifically, a reorganization of one's attention — it is easy to wonder to what degree we are all "puppets," constructing our realities according to the wills of others, the suggestions of society, and our own unconscious fantasies. From the work described so far, it can be noticed that the idea of death plays a large part in Mullican's work; more specifically, it is the paradoxical notion of a "fictional" death which arises over and over again. While it might seem that the notion of a fictional death should be no more abstruse or disturbing than a fictional "life" or "birth," it is notable that we cannot experience our own death in the sense that we experience other major events connected with our existence; that is, it can never be remembered or recounted, as is the case with other aspects of our lives — it can only be anticipated intellectually. The contemplation of our own death, therefore, can never truly involve allusion or reference to anything in our real experience, and thus must share the qualities of fictionalization. Fictional characters who are fictionally dead, then, are dead to us in a way that is strikingly similar to the way real people can be dead in reality. In other words, although we may console ourselves in believing that we can know the difference between real life and fictional life, the difference between real and fictional death is more apt to escape us. Whenever Mullican installs a gallery exhibit or does a performance, he usually reserves a part of a wall to display a sampling of his personal collection of "pictures" — magazine clippings, movie stills, snapshots, sketches, found objects, etc. Depictions of death, fictional and real, are always prominent in these arrangements, and there are two particular photographs that are nearly always mounted next to one another. This pair of photographs, which has at times been shown as a single work,[15] comes very close to capturing the whole of Mullican's dilemma in his trying to sort out the differences between reality, the representation of reality, and fiction. |
 Matt Mullican / Untitled (Doll and Dead Man), 1973. Two gelatin silver prints, 25 x 20 cm each © Matt Mullican, Courtesy Tracy Williams, Ltd. |
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One photograph, usually hung on the left side, is a portrait of the
cadaver of an old man — the same cadaver used in the piece described
earlier. The cadaver appears slightly deteriorated, with its eyes quite
permanently closed. It is clearly dead. On the right, reproduced to
about the same size, is a portrait of a hand-painted, antique doll —
possibly the same age as the old man, in the literal sense, although the
face is that of a child. The doll's eyes are wide open, making it look
remarkably alive. At first glance, the juxtaposition seems to make perfect sense — the pictures represent life and death. But the question inevitably emerges: which represents which? The doll, which looks alive, is certainly not, and never has been. It is made of inert matter, and is surely further from life than the cadaver, which is a real human body. Yet on the other hand, the doll is staring right at us in a very lively, if uncanny way, whereas the cadaver looks as dead as dead can be — and is dead, for sure. The cadaver could represent life compared to the invariable inertness of the doll, but, then again, the doll is certainly not dead, since it was never actually alive in the first place. Is a dead body more dead than "dead" matter? Or less dead? Is a living fictional person more alive than a real dead one? It begins to dawn on us that neither the doll nor the cadaver may be described as being more dead or alive than the other; what we are left with is an intensely provocative pair of photographs on the wall, and a perfectly appropriate pair of concepts, "life" and "death," which should describe the opposition depicted, but can't. The truth, of course, is that we are trying to compare beings from two different worlds: the doll, which is alive only in a world of fiction, and the cadaver, which is dead in a world of fact. As simple a truth as this is, however, it is a difficult one to hold on to. The strength of this piece lies in the strong emotions it arouses; it really feels like we should be able to compare the two pictures on the same ground. This feeling, I believe, arises from our powerful wish to locate death — "real" death — within the realm of fiction. Who of us wouldn't wish that death were only a fiction, and that this old man, who in spite of a life of work and suffering never wanted to die, could open his eyes again and deny the reality of his death? Is it fair that this little wooden manikin, who has come by life so easily through the skill of a dollmaker and his paints, should continue to live on indefinitely when the old man must succumb to such a sad and permanent death? Shouldn't we be able to give this poor cadaver some of the doll's life, when the doll has so much to spare? It is no surprise that the wishes which arise in response to this pair of photographs are like the wishes of a child: in the face of death, we are all children, unable to understand. The child that each of us was, who found the difference between the objectively real and subjectively non-real to be so confusing, is the child that endures within us throughout our lives. In this piece, Mullican has traversed the entire span of his cosmology: from the presubjective, unconscious desires which bestow life upon the inanimate, to the harsh, objective facts of material death. The wide scope and sheer amount of Matt Mullican's work makes it difficult to treat in a single writing — I've only described a small portion of it here. His subject matter is not simply his feelings about life, but his coming to terms with the whole of his existence; in order to understand himself and the world he inhabits, he is working to reconstruct it in every aspect, piece by piece. He has embraced a project that demands not only that he be Mullican the Artist, but also Mullican the Scientist, Mullican the Theologian, Mullican the Philosopher, and so on, until every bit of his knowledge, conceived from all possible angles, has somehow found its way into expression. The world he constructs through his art is complex, poignant, frightening, and sometimes wondrous — but no more so than any of the worlds each one of us constructs, from moment to moment, as we create "reality" for ourselves. The difference is that Mullican is able to translate the particulars of this intimate, deeply personal process into such a clear and communicable presentation that he not only constructs an ascertainable place for his private world in the realm of public discourse, but also proposes to deconstruct our own personal realities as he does so. Allan McCollum, New York, 1979. |
| Footnotes:
[1.] Alfred Schutz, "On Multiple Realities." 1945, reprinted in Alfred Schutz, On Phenomenology and Social Relations, University of Chicago Press, pp. 252. [2.] Melanie Klein, "The Development of a Child," 1921, reprinted in Melanie Klein Love Guilt and Reparation & Other Works/1921-1945, Dell Publishing, pp. 4. [3.] Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, 1962, Beacon Press, pp. 101. [4.] Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1973, W. W. Norton & Co., pp. 20. [5.] The signs date from 1975 to the present. [6.] Peter L. Berger. A Rumor of Angels/Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural, 1969, Doubleday, pp. 56. I would also like to acknowledge Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality (Doubleday, 1966) and Berger's The Sacred Canopy; Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Doubleday, 1967) as having been helpful to me in formulating some of the basic themes of this essay [7.] First designed in 1978, with occasional modifications since then. [8.] First designed in 1974, with periodic modifications up to the present. [9.] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Mentor Books, pp. 331. [10.] First drawn in 1974. [11.] Shown at Artists Space, 1974. [12.] First performed in 1973. [13.] Performed in 1973. [14.] Performed in 1973. Performed at The Kitchen Center, 1978. [15.] Performed in 1973. First shown at Artists Space, 1974. |
MATT MULLICAN
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1991,Five into One |
Matt Mullican�s Five into One consists of the creation of artificial cities which are pure landscapes of signs and stylized forms in bright colours. All Mullican�s work is founded on a codified universe and on different efforts to project himself into the space of the work. There is thus an obvious affinity between his imaginary world and the techniques of synthesis. For Mullican, the current technical limitations of the system � for example, the loss of a certain amount of detail � are not a problem but a constraint that is there to be exploited. He has created five imaginary worlds in which the only inhabitant is the user. These five sets of symbolic information each have their own specific colour: red for the subjective, yellow for museums, for example. And these worlds may be travelled through in any direction and at any speed. "It is not a map of the city, it is a city as a map." Even if the artist does offer a few landmarks, the experience is disorienting. What interested Mullican, according to his own account, was to create space out of nothing. And indeed, entering this particular image-space is like entering memory or entering into the fabric of an idea.
In the interactive virtual environment entitled Five into One, the visualization is calculated in real time. The symbolic levels of interpretation of the universes created by Matt Mullican, each of which identified by a colour, make up a cosmology. But it only a model, a trompe-loeil, an interface between the artist and his ideas. The second world is a without structure, all in blue. It contains various different elements all referring to daily reality. Here for example, there is an orderly succession of houses, one of which may be visited.
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| © Exhibition view, Paris 2009 |
MATT MULLICAN
"Five x Five"
The Galerie Nelson-Freeman is pleased to present a new exhibition of the American artist Matt Mullican. Since the 1970s Matt Mullican has worked on symbolic representation formalized by a language based on international signaling symbols and invented signs. Matt Mullican’s works have been exhibited on various occasions in Europe and the United States. After a retrospective in the Serralves Museum in Porto, at the Antoni Tapiès Foundation in Barcelona and the Mondern Art Museum of Oxford, his works were shown at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne in 2005. Part of his work was shown in 2006 on the occasion of the « Model Architecture » exhibition at the Lentos Kunstmuseum in Linz, and in 2007 he presented a performance under hypnosis at the Tate Modern Gallery in London. In 2008 he participated in the Whitney Biennial, and a major exhibition was devoted to him at the Drawing Center in New York (November 2008 - February 2009).
Entitled « Five x Five », Matt Mullican’s third exhibition at the Nelson-Freeman Gallery focuses on the Theory of Five « Worlds », which the artist has developed over the past 35 years. Represented by different colours and a complex system of signs, symbols and diagrams, these worlds refer to five fundamental notions. The « Elemental World » evokes nature and the elements. It is represented by the colour green. The « Unframed World», everyday life and the relationship to the elements of our environment, is represented by the colour blue. The « Framed World », the conscious manifestations of the arts and sciences, is represented by the colour yellow. The « World of Language » - signs, language, and coded meanings - is represented by black and white. Lastly, the « Subjective World » evokes the psychological relationship between the Framed and Unframed Worlds. It is represented by the colour red.
Using this model of five « Worlds » as the structure of the exhibition, Matt Mullican divides the spaces of the gallery into five parts so that each part contains five works each from five different series: « Learning from that person’s work (Rubbing) », « Evolving Charts, stained glass », « Untitled (Chart on glass pieces) », « Untitled (Experiment with light) », and « Bulletin Boards ».
When Matt Mullican holds performances under hypnosis, giving free rein to the emotions of his subconscious, he reveals the existence of « That Person ». He thus seeks to approach a new definition of « Reality » and invites us to reflect upon the question of the essence of being. In his process of creation in his studio, the artist puts himself into a trance – a sort of controlled schizophrenia – enabling him to work under the influence of « That Person ». It is in this way that he created a series in 2005 entitled « Learning from that person’s work », composed of a combination of images glued onto sheets, in the form of large panels. Each panel contains nine patterns matching the themes in which « That Person » is interested, such as love, beauty, work, or truth. In this exhibition we find five excerpts from this series, presented in the form of rubbings on canvases.
Just as our world is organized according to a multitude of arbitrarily pre-established signs to which we subject ourselves, Matt Mullican deconstructs all this ubiquitous imagery which we are imbued with, and proposes us his own interpretation of the world according to the matrix of his total experience: his own scalable cosmology. Dating from the Middle Ages, the models of cosmology represent another way of organizing reality. In Matt Mullican’s systems – they are reproduced here on objects made of glass and on five stained glass windows - we find three levels: the center, representing the world of individuals, their activities and the objects of their environment; the top representing paradise; and the bottom, hell. These levels overlap, combine and evolve according to each work so as to reorganize reality.
Parallel to this interpretation of the world that he proposes to us, through a series created in 2001, « Untitled (experiment with light) », Matt Mullican pursues experiments with light. On these positive films divided into five diptychs on shelves, we find patterns of cosmology, crystals, and cuttings from newspapers.
The series « Bulletin Boards » is made up of drawings for which the artist used a new tool, the « brush pen », as well as notes on travels. Through these sets of figures, letters and sinusoidal lines, we can grasp the development of Matt Mullican’s mastery of this tool.
Words and signs follow upon one another, are superimposed, and interpenetrate, leading us toward a world somewhere between reality and the imagination. Pictograms, cartographies, maps, writing, postcards are all occasions to reinterpret the world and its challenges.
www.galerienelsonfreeman.com The Galerie Nelson-Freeman is pleased to present a new exhibition of the American artist Matt Mullican. Since the 1970s Matt Mullican has worked on symbolic representation formalized by a language based on international signaling symbols and invented signs. Matt Mullican’s works have been exhibited on various occasions in Europe and the United States. After a retrospective in the Serralves Museum in Porto, at the Antoni Tapiès Foundation in Barcelona and the Mondern Art Museum of Oxford, his works were shown at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne in 2005. Part of his work was shown in 2006 on the occasion of the « Model Architecture » exhibition at the Lentos Kunstmuseum in Linz, and in 2007 he presented a performance under hypnosis at the Tate Modern Gallery in London. In 2008 he participated in the Whitney Biennial, and a major exhibition was devoted to him at the Drawing Center in New York (November 2008 - February 2009).
Entitled « Five x Five », Matt Mullican’s third exhibition at the Nelson-Freeman Gallery focuses on the Theory of Five « Worlds », which the artist has developed over the past 35 years. Represented by different colours and a complex system of signs, symbols and diagrams, these worlds refer to five fundamental notions. The « Elemental World » evokes nature and the elements. It is represented by the colour green. The « Unframed World», everyday life and the relationship to the elements of our environment, is represented by the colour blue. The « Framed World », the conscious manifestations of the arts and sciences, is represented by the colour yellow. The « World of Language » - signs, language, and coded meanings - is represented by black and white. Lastly, the « Subjective World » evokes the psychological relationship between the Framed and Unframed Worlds. It is represented by the colour red.
Using this model of five « Worlds » as the structure of the exhibition, Matt Mullican divides the spaces of the gallery into five parts so that each part contains five works each from five different series: « Learning from that person’s work (Rubbing) », « Evolving Charts, stained glass », « Untitled (Chart on glass pieces) », « Untitled (Experiment with light) », and « Bulletin Boards ».
When Matt Mullican holds performances under hypnosis, giving free rein to the emotions of his subconscious, he reveals the existence of « That Person ». He thus seeks to approach a new definition of « Reality » and invites us to reflect upon the question of the essence of being. In his process of creation in his studio, the artist puts himself into a trance – a sort of controlled schizophrenia – enabling him to work under the influence of « That Person ». It is in this way that he created a series in 2005 entitled « Learning from that person’s work », composed of a combination of images glued onto sheets, in the form of large panels. Each panel contains nine patterns matching the themes in which « That Person » is interested, such as love, beauty, work, or truth. In this exhibition we find five excerpts from this series, presented in the form of rubbings on canvases.
Just as our world is organized according to a multitude of arbitrarily pre-established signs to which we subject ourselves, Matt Mullican deconstructs all this ubiquitous imagery which we are imbued with, and proposes us his own interpretation of the world according to the matrix of his total experience: his own scalable cosmology. Dating from the Middle Ages, the models of cosmology represent another way of organizing reality. In Matt Mullican’s systems – they are reproduced here on objects made of glass and on five stained glass windows - we find three levels: the center, representing the world of individuals, their activities and the objects of their environment; the top representing paradise; and the bottom, hell. These levels overlap, combine and evolve according to each work so as to reorganize reality.
Parallel to this interpretation of the world that he proposes to us, through a series created in 2001, « Untitled (experiment with light) », Matt Mullican pursues experiments with light. On these positive films divided into five diptychs on shelves, we find patterns of cosmology, crystals, and cuttings from newspapers.
The series « Bulletin Boards » is made up of drawings for which the artist used a new tool, the « brush pen », as well as notes on travels. Through these sets of figures, letters and sinusoidal lines, we can grasp the development of Matt Mullican’s mastery of this tool.
Words and signs follow upon one another, are superimposed, and interpenetrate, leading us toward a world somewhere between reality and the imagination. Pictograms, cartographies, maps, writing, postcards are all occasions to reinterpret the world and its challenges.
Matt Mullican at Haus der Kunst
Artist: Matt Mullican
Venue: Haus der Kunst, Munich
Exhibition Title: Organizing the world
Date: June 10 – September 11, 2011
Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.
Images:
Press Release:
With his artworks Matt Mullican aims at understand the order of the world. The starting point of his artistic concept is the examination of the relationships between reality and how it is perceived. In his objective to determine the meaning of things Matt Mullican relies on the encyclopaedic method; using it he is able to categorize what he sees and finds.
His artistic activities concentrate on two areas: On the one hand there are the artworks which include a variety of display formats, such as drawings, banners, sculptures, videos,photography, installations and graphic works; on the other there are the performance projects in which Matt Mullican usually employs the consciousness-expanding technique of hypnosis.
Form, reality, perception
With the more visual part of his úuvre Matt Mullican creates his personal “model of acosmology,” the basis of which is a cartographic structure consisting of a colour and signsystem. In this system green represents the subject; blue our daily world, which is full of countless images of certain objects; yellow stands for things that are detached from the individual object, for abstract conceptions or ideas per se; black and white represent language and red the level of subjectivity. Matt Mullican combines this colour symbolism with a system of found or created pictograms which offers – in addition to symbols for ordinary things – symbols for Heaven, God, Before Birth, Life, Fate, Demon and Angel, Death and Hell. In so doing Matt Mullican – like an encyclopaedist ñ lives the illusion that literally every human state and activity can be integrated into and represented in his model.
The nature of this undertaking makes it impossible for Matt Mullican to conclude hisattempt to explain the world. He nonetheless persists in his attempt and continues topursue his goal. His visual úuvre can, therefore, be regarded as a utopia of eternity, where the mysteries of human life could be solved, the universe could be totally comprehensible and where humans could vanquish death thanks to their all encompassing knowledge.
Hypnosis, trance, performance
Matt Mullican executes performances under hypnosis. Before undergoing hypnosis, he speaks with his hypnotist about what he wishes or should do under hypnosis – for instance having breakfast, sing, read the paper, draw or paint the wall – and then does these things following the hypnotist’s directives.
Hypnosis is described as an altered state of consciousness that differs significantly from’normal’ daytime consciousness. Usually daytime consciousness censors many unconscious capacities, thereby making them inaccessible. In the trance of hypnosis it is possible to have contact with these normally dismissed elements.Matt Mullican claims that he achieves a deeper understanding of self through hypnosis.He leaves in limbo, however, the exact nature of this gradual progression. About his hypnosis-alter ego he speaks with reserve. He literally says: “that person”, “mentally disturbed”, “Pinocchio”, “he wants to live so badly”, “he doesn’t exist.” The integration andthe acceptance of the hidden personality elements seems a long way from being complete.
The drawings he creates under hypnosis are characterized by spontaneous gestures. They are in part representational, in part abstract, and consist of few lines; freely drawn curves, loops and almost calligraphic characters are dominant. In this manner, in which round letters are connected seamlessly, Matt Mullican draws menus, numerical series, charts and lyrics.
Selection of works
Works of fundamental significance for Mullican’s development since the 1970s have been selected for the exibition, including
- Key works such as ‘Untitled (Doll and Dead Man)’, ‘Birth to Death List’ and ‘SleepingChild’, all from 1973;
- Pictograms and banners;- A black-and-white version of the large-scale Dallas Project;
- Found objects, such as pantograph and generator;
- The Mullican Posters with the basic terms Heaven, God, Before Birth, Life, Fate,Demon and Angel, Death and Hell as the important components of cosmology (Untitled [Mullican Posters], 1984);
- Drawings of a human figure executing various activities ñ cutting his forearm off,drinking a glass of water or thinking (Untitled [Fictional Reality, Physical Body], 1974-75);
- Drawings of the stick figure, Glen, in which the encyclopaedic compilation of activitiesis complemented by internal states, such as “feeling socially inferior”, “meditating” or”being curious” (Untitled [Stick Figure], 1974);
- Found comic book images, which have been removed from their original context andall of which depict a dead figure, thereby picking up on one of the basic themes of cosmology (Untitled [Dead Comic Book Characters], 1974);
- Additional work series that focus on the theme of mortality (such as Untitled [Xeroxesof Death, Heaven, and Hell], 1974;
- An installation generated out of an encounter with his hypnosis-alter ego (Learningfrom that Person’s Work, 2005);
- 449 magnesium plates with images of an encyclopaedia from Edinburgh (Untitled[New Edinburgh Encyclopedia], 1991);
- The MIT computer project and accompanying light boxes (from 1989).
A large number of boxes with archaeological finds are integrated in the presentation. This material, in part not yet processed, comes from the depot in the State Archaeological Collection, situated adjacent to Haus der Kunst.
Matt Mullican is planning to embellish Haus der Kunst’s facade with a colour tunnel that is made of monochromatic banners, and permeable to light and air. The colour palette istypical: green, blue, yellow, black and red. A banner is to hang between each pair of columns, bathing the section of the traverse behind it in the according colour.
Matt Mullican will conduct a performance under hypnosis in Haus der Kunst (Sunday, July10, 2011 at 7 pm).
After the exhibition opens a companion book will be published by DuMont and will include images of the exhibition in addition to interviews conducted by Koen Brams and Dirk Pultau with the artist
Matt Mullican
by Roger White
Works from the ‘70s and ‘80s
Tracy Williams Ltd. May 2–June 21, 2006
Matt
Mullican, “/Mullican Life/Mullican Death/” (1983/1984). Sign paint on
paper. Two works; each 59×42 inches. Courtesy of Tracy Williams, LtdSince the mid-seventies, Mullican has performed while under hypnosis, made huge banners, used charts and murals to depict a visually schematized private cosmology, and explored virtual reality with the aid of a supercomputer. But beneath the postmodernist multiplicity of his output one finds some classically modernist tropes: the artist as myth-maker, the disordering of the senses, and the exploration of the self. What unifies his divergent set of practices and products is a skewed but serious inquiry into how we give meaning to representations.
Made while Mullican was a student at Cal Arts in the seventies, the earliest pieces in the show have the studious look of ongoing research. Two large Homasote bulletin boards, to which are pinned notes, drawings and newspaper clippings, summarize the development of the artist’s thinking. His brainstorming often takes the form of list-making: of possible art objects (“buttons, badges, tabs, ribbons, emblems…”); types of music, (“music describing the ascension to heaven, music describing the vibes of the room you’re in”); and potential performances (“eating, standing in line, swimming…”). Reference photographs, such as a reprinted group portrait of a 19th-century amateur theater group or newspaper clippings of dead soldiers on a battlefield in Libya, suggest the broad range of themes Mullican would later explore in his mature work.
Matt Mullican, “/Untitled (Charts, Lists, and Drawings)/” (1970–1977). Ink, marker, collage on paper, Xeroxes, and buttons on bulletin board. 96×48 × 2 7/8 inches. Courtesy of Tracy Williams, Ltd.
A critical turn occurred when Mullican began to systematize the results of his research into a graphic language—part international symbol, part high school play banner–that illustrated idiosyncratic terms from his emerging cosmology: life, death, the subjective, the world framed, heaven, and so on. Throughout the decade he refined and elaborated his sign system, presenting it in forms as disparate as the etched marble relief of intertwining glyphs or the computer-generated lightboxes in the gallery’s front room.
Mullican’s work in the eighties touches on various themes of the decade without fitting easily into any of its accepted categories. His employment of near-readymade forms—signs, banners, printed ephemera—coupled with the relatively hands-off look of his iconographic work puts him formally in a camp with artists like Haim Steinbach, Sherrie Levine and Allan McCollum. However, where those artists sought to check the ahistorical hubris of their neo-expressionist peers, voicing doubts about the capacity of art to represent the world, Mullican dived headlong into a project to systematically chart the meaning of the universe. It made Julian Schnabel seem a paragon of modesty.
One of the marks of the amateur cosmologist, from Judge Schreber to Matthew Barney, is that he always figures centrally in his scheme of the cosmos. One could say that a cosmology is an author-centric picture of the universe. Mullican is no exception. It’s no accident that above every term in his system, we find his name, like a qualifier: we have “MULLICAN / LIFE,” “MULLICAN / DEATH,” and, naturally, “MULLICAN / MULLICAN.” Mullican’s work is distinguished precisely by its reflexivity, which produces a blurring of categories and an intriguing short-circuit of criticality: Mullican is simultaneously a scientist and a subject in his own experiment, which is also a play and even a spiritual quest.
Matt
Mullican, Untitled (Before Birth), Untitled (Death), Untitled (Sign),
Untitled (Heaven), 1980, sign paint on paper. A Society for Contemporary
Art Acquisition Selection.
Matt Mullican is a multimedia artist based in New York and Berlin. He has exhibited regularly in international museums and galleries including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
What most interests me about Mullican's work is his endeavours at creating order in a confused world.He makes inventories of found objects, such as newspaper cuttings, flags and book matches and integrates them in seemingly ordered systems. His approach to the ordering of these 'found objects' is similar to encyclopaedic systems. The basic fundamentals of his system of order consist of five areas that define the different forms of perception: the naturally evolved, the world of objects, symbolic values, signs and concepts, and emotional relationships.
Mullican invents systems of signs and tries to show how they work in a world so inundated by images and symbols.
- MARIE VARLEY
Matt Mullican, 88 MAPS, 2010
Illustrations executed by Ryan Good, Production Manager and assistants at Matt Mullican Studio, New York and printed by Eloïse Bogard and assistants at Three Star Books, Paris.
Silkscreens by Jean Villevieille, Saint Etienne, France
American artist Matt Mullican delivers an epic overview of forty years of his own symbologies in the artist’s book edition he has created for Three Star Books. It is a masterpiece on several levels. First, in a continuation of other productions by the Parisian press, Mullican deftly shows how the thing itself, the artwork pointing to itself, functions as its own best history. In dozens of colored plates rubbed by hand with a special graphite crayon custom made for the artist in the United States, over wooden and paper matrixes created by the Mullican studio, a catalogue of the principal signs in Mullican’s prolific private software language have been mapped out. A visionary in the employment of computer imaging techniques since the 1970s, Mullican has developed pictures that look like circuit breakers, mapping programs, virtual worlds, and equivocations between language, signs, and pictures. Mullican catalogues his astonishing research into images of arresting essentialism. Executed in a finite range of colors (red blue yellow and green), on American paper made by the French Paper Company, the format of the plates and feel, is like that of a newspaper such as the Wall Street Journal.
Mullican’s new grammar conjures up everything from ancient alphabets and Etch-A-Sketches to pictograms that might decode our own time. Ranging in shape from simple squares, triangles, and circles, to dizzying jumbles of interlocking forms, from works that seem to run parallel to the paper plane, to others that point to extra-terrestrial worlds, Mullican’s cosmology is no less than a vision of a universe both utterly hermetic and private, as well as a clue to the nature of thinking itself.
In elegant counterpoint to a recent Three Star book produced with Italian artist Maurizio Catalan, Mullican too offers an art historical overview and catalogue, of his own work. Mullican’s artworks, however, are each represented text-less, and full bleed on the picture page, as separate and new works, in addition to being reproductions. Their status as new originals is underscored by their reproduction in hand-made form. Playing not with texts and the forms of art history, but with the ability of reproductions to be the material of art, Mullican creates new possibilties for a way to describe art and write art history. The images represent works produced in a wide range of galleries and museums, or for other publishers and editions’ workshops, and in media ranging from concrete, glass, and fabric to many other materials.
Each page sequence, carefully rubbed by hand by assistants from the Three Star Books and Mullican Studio, is both a copy and an original, both a drawing and a print, both a book and a picture. The matrixes were carved in New York and the “printing”, or rubbing, has been done in Paris. The final selection of twenty-eight out illustrations are placed in a box constructed of cardboard and covered with an orange cotton material, a color not found in the book, and decorated with an original drawing by the artist. Some of the pages are double-page folios, others fold out into multiple-panel frames.
Whether seen in light of similar efforts by 16th century mapmakers, or as the latest in virtual imaging techniques, this cosmology by Matt Mullican is a remarkable technical, geometric, and artistic achievement that testifies to the artist’s ability to be both utterly subjective and particular, while offering universal truths.
Sample pages:
MATT MULLICAN, Im Gespräch / Conversations,
Mai 36 Galerie, DuMont Buchverlag
Questions about the meaning of life and the order of the world are at the core of the work by the concept artist and sculptor Matt Mullican. He has worked on an artistic systemisation of his world view since the 1970s that he tries to capture and visualise in expansive installations. His art forms a dense system that makes completely surprising points of view possible. For the first time these interviews demonstrate the basic ideas of Mullican’s ‘Five Worlds’ concepts: the city, cosmology, hypnosis, collecting and collaboration.
MATT MULLICAN, 12 by 2
les presses du réel
With emphasis on archives and experimental work, the exhibition 12 by 2 showed for the first time forty years of the work of Matt Mullican and his doppelganger, That Person, who appeared under hypnosis.Two essays examine this complex body of work, trace the history of hypnosis in art and show links with anthropology. Finally, an interview of the artist highlights his activity as a collector, among other things.
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