That Other Person, That Other Space
Adam E. Mendelsohn
Matt Mullican, "Untitled" (Animated Fictional Details, Shadow), 2002 Computeranimation, DVD, ed. 1/3 + 1 A.P. (incl. monitor and DVD-player).
If the thought of looking at Earth from outer space excites you and you’ve got a spare $190,000 stashed away, then I recommend you go ahead and book your flight on VirginGalactic. If you’re still interested in looking at the universe from the ground, or don’t have the spare cash, then it might be worth checking out Matt Mullican’s work.
For "Nothing Should Exist," works never before seen by a Manhattan audience, Tracy Williams presented a survey of new pieces that belong to a wider body of work Mullican has been producing since the 70s. I had a chance to get properly acquainted with the work, which is beautifully mounted in Williams’ intimate, parlour-room style West Village brownstone.
At the entrance, a video work called Untitled (Matt Mullican Under Hypnosis: Geneva) (2004) was playing. I happened to walk in at the moment Mullican crawls on all fours, screaming at a piece of tape that he is sticking to the floor. Amusing and bizarre, Under Hypnosis is an example of a working method that Mullican has been practicing for more than 30 years. Using hypnosis, Mullican becomes something he calls "That Other Person," a figure who has provided substantial source material for his work. What seems like irrational behavior is often actually an investigation of banality. Mullican has said that routine and habit are simply alternative trance states to the one he occupies when he becomes "That Other Person." It’s more or less a traditional working method whereby one travels to the field and collects evidence for evaluation. In this instance, the field is Mullican’s own brain.
Untitled(Computer Generated Details and Landscapes) (2004), is a collection of alien, acidic colored computer-generated landscapes in light boxes. The landscapes are made by ancient computer software that creates an environment based on data entered by the operator. Here, the software itself has been used as a found object. Next to these was Untitled (Collected Objects) (1970-2004): a pair of vitrines containing a human skeleton (purchased by mail order from India, something that you can’t do now), a coyote skeleton, crystals, insects and a nautilus. It’s a little hard to make sense of this piece, and indeed the entire show, unless you know what Mullican’s five worlds are.
The five worlds are a system that Mullican has designed for interpreting situation and objects.
5. "Material without meaning" — Collected Objects belongs to this world. Mullican’s analogy for this world is "a set of keys in an atomic frying pan that melt until they have no meaning."
4. "In the world being used" — behavioral interaction with objects, for example, using your keys to get in to your house.
3. "The World Framed" — when an object is no longer used but is displayed simply as an object that represents value. An example, Mullican says, is "the keys to Elvis’ house being auctioned."
2. "Signs or icons" — a picture of a key.
1. "Meaning without material" — our relationship to the keys we carry in our pockets. The work involving hypnosis would belong to this world.
Installed in the first room upstairs, was a series of ten old-school animations set on endless loops on plasma screens. Untitled (Animated Fictional Details) (2004) consisted of ten ‘elements’: Water, Into and Out of Landscape, Maple, Clock, Straight Color Evolving Chart, Boiling Pot, Death, Sky, Shadow, and Cosmology. Death, represented here as a basic stick figure nonchalantly standing in a room, falling to the floor and then repeating that action endlessly, is absolutely hilarious in its dumb, deadpan, inevitability. Hanging as they were, there was something of the future antiquity about them – the basic computer animations already charmingly dated, the classical subject matter dealt with by naive computer software, the cutting edge plasma screens, and the wonderfully modernised period room, all made for a sense of being frozen outside of time. Sticking with the theme of death, was Untitled (Dead Comic Book Characters) (1974) an example of a compulsion Mullican had as a kid where he would cut out all scenes of death from his comic books.
In the last room was an entire wall covered in smallish digital prints that are stills from digital video operated by Mullican whilst under hypnosis. Untitled (Learning from That Person’s Work) (2004) documents what That Other Person finds interesting, and many of the images seem to be to do with looking inside things — looking through the top of a toaster, looking under the covers, looking in to boiling kettles. What is an interesting visual document also gives us another perspective of what’s going on when Mullican is practicing his controlled schizophrenia. In Reconstructing the Fifth World (2004) there are some melted phones and answering machines in a vitrine. Ilustrating the notion of "material without meaning" it is also a stunning metaphor of technology hi-jacked by its own materiality. A communication meltdown.
It’s tricky actually to say what Mullican’s discipline but it might be called the act of recording. Or, perhaps more simply, drawing. Mullican’s work is a highly personal system of notations that try to address the terribly unfashionable question of what it is exactly that we’re doing here. "Nothing Should Exist" is self-examination and a really hard look at the relationship between man and objects. The more you get to know Mullican’s work the more it unfolds like a series of complex schematics for interpreting the world. The title of the show, ‘Nothing Should Exist’ is a statement that’s a half finished sentence begging to be finished: Nothing should exist, but it does, so now what?"
