Matt Mullican. More Details from an Imaginary Universe

Matt Mullican (Santa Monica, CA, 1951) uses diversified media such as performances, drawings, paintings, banners, tapestries, stained glass panels, murals, relief, lightboxes, posters, computer generated films, maps, charts and architectonic models, collections of objects, bulletin boards with photographs and news, texts and poetry, to represent an understanding based on a world vision that resists the apparent dissemination of the media.

The multiplicity of media strengthens the consistency of the articulation of an aesthetic and the power of its fascination. As a true mythologist, he introduces us to a cosmology which proposes models of understanding and is not deterred by the monocular perspective of the apparent world chaos, imposed by a culturally established concept of reality. The artist undertakes a long and complex journey until he reaches the questions which, in a similar way, we all face in the decisive moments of our lives, when reasoning is usually restrained by common explanations. The meaning of life and death, questions such as ’what was I, before I was born?’, or ’why do things happen the way they do?’ haven’t just a biographical significance, but suggest major aspects of the discovery of man’s secret soul.

It is under the auspices of language that society builds reality, which is necessary not only from the cultural point of view, but also from that of individual survival. Individuals select and distinguish, ignoring the arbitrariness of language, as well as the rigidity the sign acquires in the system. Together with conventions and the suppression of the idea of reality, the belief is held together and alive in relation to that reality. Thus, it is the minimum element of language, the sign, that Mullican chooses to be the decoding instrument for the bewildering world, only to immediately turn it into a map, ideal and rigid in its reconstruction.

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Banners and colour patterns occurred due to Mullican’s research in the early 70’s, when the artist was interested in symbolism and the perception of light. Highlighting points such as the bodies over light and the one reflected, life structures and mainly the idea that, behind physicality, of light and colour, there are abstractions and mental networks, Mullican inaugurates a procedure that consists of reducing reality to light patterns. The idea of pattern, the assumption that everything is made up by patterns, from nature to cultural behaviour, takes him further – from series, like the pictographs, to sets of objects, such as the bulletin boards with photographs or the collections.

Maps are also a highly significant part of Matt Mullican’s work. Linearity, the choice of primary colours together with green, black and white, or geometrical shapes, are means he has used here and will afterwards expand to other works. The use of schematic figures, despite appealing to universal forms, shows the decisive influence that signs have in conveying information. The development of these programmes of communication systems is now achieved through computerised media.

Most of Matt Mullican’s performances take place under hypnosis. While he draws or handles symbolic objects, he comes closer to unconscious states, regressing to former stages of life. The result of such actions is twofold: if it is true that, at a subjective level, the artist deals with matter from his own experience – which could easily relate to the idea of unconscious automatism, as it is represented in art throughout this century -, it cannot be denied that the acts themselves are a most relevant aesthetic consequence: if the artist and his material body are the subject, they refer to the fictionalisation of identity, since his physical wrapping is alienated from conscience. […] Thus experience and sign are carefully separated, drawing the line between objective and subjective.

The originality of Matt Mullican’s work lies in its closeness to collective and original values and archetypes, in a utopian quest for symbolic models of universal reading. Indeed, one of the challenges the artist sets himself is how to represent the fragile articulation between individual conscience and reality in culture. He stands at a pre-subjective level, favouring a world stability, rejecting every belief activated by the historical avant-garde in the necessity of a continuous emergence of the absolutely new.

Acting like a detective of knowledge, and recycling themes from History or Anthropology, the parallel between this artistic method and the one used by social sciences stands out in procedures like organisation, division, distribution and ordering, the establishment of series, as well as the description of relationships, maybe the most important. However, closeness becomes superficial due to the evident existence of artistic idiosyncrasies, such as the assumption of a close communication between order and chaos, the rejection of conceptual hierarchies and the attitude of escaping a disciplining method in the use of the various languages.