Pictures are like pornography or drugs …

In a popular show on the Croatian national television network, the esteemed academic Miroslav Radman, the world’s leading expert in brain research, recently emphasized the importance of the senses and the sensory world, and was favourably disposed towards invoking the redefinition of René Descartes’ Cartesian model by replacing his famous motto cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) with senso ergo sum (I sense, therefore I am).

I was reminded of Radman’s recognition of the senses having ontological primacy for our understanding of the world, during my conversation with Matt Mullican, on the occasion of his visit to Split and the organization of his solo exhibition Entering the Picture in three edifices in Split, each constructed in different epochs thus having completely disparate physical and, historically speaking, functional aspects: the late antique Kula Gallery, the baroque palace of the Institute for Scientific and Artistic Work of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and originally a nineteenth century hospital in Split and today the site of the Museum of Fine Arts. Specifically, when I asked him if we perceive the picture with the body, Mullican responded without the slightest hesitation: “yes of course, but in the process, we get very emotionally involved!”. He went further, to the extreme consequences of my question, and corroborated his response with the plastic description of the way in which we experience the pornographic image. Pictures are like pornography or drugs, according to Mullican: people go online to remove themselves from reality and become sexually aroused, and in order to achieve that they usually look at pictures. According to his interpretation, pictures certainly manifest a connection with our bodies, so that in that sense they can also be understood as drugs, a kind of physical stimuli, particularly those effecting our neurosystem. However, even though we experience them physically, pictures are primarily mental, and we describe and convey them with language. We might already be able to understand the transgressive dynamic that characterizes Mullican’s way of thinking about the picture, its creation, but also the construction of exhibition narratives. So, in the mid-1970s, Matt Mullican came up with his pictograms as minimal ways of transferring meaning. He started with a series of pictograms, the subsequent iteration of which, in the form of colourful flags, almost evoke our contemporary gadgets and their screens with different applications, which initiate new processes and multiple communication options at the touch of a finger. This is precisely also the case with Mullican’s much earlier pictograms, however the processes and spaces he wants to activate are ultimately mental!

Nevertheless, we should return to the fundamental interest that Matt Mullican has constantly been affirming since the beginning of his decades-long work. Specifically, at the heart of his artistic vocation is an attempt to understand the structure of his thoughts, that is, to understand the nature of thought. And in that sense, he developed a subjective model of the five worlds which also includes the specific approach to cosmology. It is actually one world observed from different angles, in relation to which Mullican builds his own visual system, or visual codes of his works. He is interested in examining and describing the world through the cartography of signs and meanings. Elements of Mullican’s works constantly travel through different levels of his subjective model which results in the feeling of semantic dynamism and constant restlessness: they move from the elementary world i.e. the world of matter and material that are identified with the colour green (material world), through everyday life, which is schematic, lived automatically and represented with blue (world unframed), then the centrally positioned world of art, distinguished with yellow, in which things become objects of focused interest, their nature examined and understood symbolically (world framed), to the black-and-white world of language where the material connection of signs with what they signify is broken and subjected to different sets of relations and abstract thinking, and they are eventually immersed in the red world of subjectivity as the psychological and very abstract domain, the realm of pure fiction (subjective world).

Furthermore, one of Matt Mullican’s more provocative artistic narratives is the one about a cosmology that we find in his “red” world. It is not a cosmology per se (or by dictate!), rather it is a proposed cosmology, the inception of an utterly fictional and very open subjective discourse. As much as the cosmological structure established by the artist seems defined, it is nevertheless open to inscribing new meanings. Matt Mullican appeared with his cosmological ideas as a student in John Baldessari’s famous Post Studio Art class at CalArts. It was one of the most experimental models of art education in the United States, in which anything, or nothing at all, could become art. The cosmology as a radically traditional theme, immanent to all epochs of the conscious man, was apparently too lyrical for the contemporary conceptual artistic turmoil and progressive research, so it remained obscure and largely foreign to most of Matt’s colleagues. As he himself admits, the seeds of these themes would have been far more fruitful on European cultural ground than they were in the American cultural framework of the time. One has to wonder where did the interest in this transcendental theme of exceptionally long historical duration, come from? In his recollections, Mullican conveys vivid images of the house in Santa Monica where he grew up, filled not only with artworks of his mother Luchita Hurtado and father Lee Mullican, but also with objects from tribal communities of Mexico and South America, Africa and various other countries and continents, many of which were connected to cosmology, or were of a healing or other medical, even occult nature. They invoked a different perception and approach codes, possessed their own strength and had power of suggestion over the observer. In addition, looking at a photograph of his parents taken before he was born, Matt asked, full of childlike urgency, where was he “in” that picture and ever since, the resonance of that same question is present in his works to this day: “where was I before I was born, what is my earthly mission, where do I go after I die?” It, therefore, marked the beginning of probing beyond the objective and creating art with an almost fetishist concentration. In the exhibition space of the Museum of Fine Arts, Matt Mullican draws a diagram of his cosmology and adds a series of recent watercolours that represent excerpts from the artist’s subjective cosmological narrative. In such an exhibition constellation, we cannot but be reminded of certain Surrealist literary and visual procedures and the postulation of the subconscious as a particular method of artistic action, that is, through the automatism of thought without the control of reason or consciousness. Pursuing this parallel further, Matt Mullican truly does come remarkably close to the Surrealist experience because his dominant artistic focus is not on the object itself, but the content, and the content does not narrate the object, much less describe it. It is the question of drifting through the subjective experience and permeating that experience with that of other observers who are drawn into the communication process thus becoming active and motivated protagonists.

In this context, the imaginary character of Glen takes a separate position in the spectrum of Mullican’s subjective images! It is drawn by the artist on the wall of the Institute for Scientific and Artistic Work of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, inviting the observer into the layered semantics of this avatar born in 1973 in Baldessari’s post-studio class, which the artist portrays in a series of drawings of an interesting performative value. Matt furnishes Glen with history, the joys of life and its problems, different feelings… Simply put, content! Objectively, Glen is an extremely reduced figure and he embodies, with his skinny appearance, the artist’s psyche that lives the “physical” world. But it also does so through the motivated observer! Specifically, with out full immersion we become this figure because only through the empirical feeling of pain and empathy can we conceptualize the discomfort that Glen feels when he injures his hand with a large safety pin. In Matt Mullican’s words: “Glen is you, he is not me, he is you, you as me – that is Glen.” It seems that the artist’s ostensible distance enhances the observer’s subjective experience, but it complicates Glen’s future existence. On the other hand, it is interesting to note that Matt started to experiment with hypnosisas early as the 1970s, that is, with an induced state of altered consciousness. However, it was not until the 1990s that he would articulate the psychotic and hermetic entity he calls That Person. It is a genderless and ageless entity that emerges while the artist is in trance. That Person generally feels in a way that is completely different from the way the artist feels when he is not in trance, he takes pointless actions, shouts inarticulately, but also creates artworks. The entity that appears is completely independent from the artist’s body and its primacy, and finds the fullness of its level of interpretation within the subjective “red” world, thus associating itself with the non-finite space of the psyche. 

As we can see, there are several guidelines that connect Matt Mullican with Surrealist culture, and we can position his worldview and artistic thinking upon that discursive line. This is especially evident in the adoption of the technique of frottage (which the Surrealists were so fond of), that Mullican is known for to the art audience from the 1980s onwards. Through them he also visualizes the structure of his model of the five worlds, and the exhibits shown in the late antique space of the Kula Gallery are particularly suggestive. The way they are displayed there, as well as in the Institute for Scientific and Artistic Work of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, is immersive and draws the visitor into the labyrinth of Mullican’s art and its semantic layers. This brings us back to the title of the exhibition, Entering the Picture, but also to the beginning of this text. To clarify, the exhibition title refers to Mullican’s eponymous performance from the end of 1973, when he “enters” the Giovanni Battista Piranesi print and describes to the audience the experience of being inside the two-dimensional picture from the eighteenth century, that is, the feeling of being in it. Considering the nature and possibilities of the image, the artist resolutely claims that the picture can be entered and confirms this as the theme and the challenge of this exhibition. Therefore, excerpts from Mullican’s own life and artistic experience that he conveys in his works in various media, formulate this unique and inimitable sentence of his performative exhibition in Split through the simultaneity of different temporalities, from the period preceding CalArts to this moment in Split, and actually remain a broader platform of the observer’s decision as to whether to enter their complex configuration or to just aesthetically receive and experience their appearance. (text Dalibor Prančević)

Matt Mullican was born in Santa Monica, California, in 1951 and lives and works in Berlin and New York. He has had many solo exhibitions at important international museums including Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2018), Kunstmuseum Winterthur (2016), Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2013), Haus der Kunst, Munich (2011), and Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne (2010), among many others. The artist’s works can be found in major public collections: Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris; Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, and others.