“Everything I do has to do with the interpretative world. It is, really, a very constructed world. I am very interested not in what we see but in what we think we see, in how we feel what we think we see, in what it is”, said Matt Mullican (b. 1951, Santa Monica, California, USA) in an interview with Michael Tarantino (see the catalogue for the one-man show at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art - MACS, 2000).
Like some of the 60s’ and 70s’ most innovating artists, Matt Mullican has chosen, as the starting point for his work, an area of research to which the traditional aesthetic criteria were clearly no longer being applied. His work has been developed in an undefined area placed between aesthetic opposite fields, between subjectivity and objectivity, between sign and meaning and, especially, between the culturally demarcated spheres of art and architecture. In this sense, his production - from performance art to digitally produced images - is, in fact, a function that connects the material sign (the significant) to ideas and facts. Mullican thus neglects the connection between signs and the exterior reality, circumscribing them to the meanings’ abstract level of sense. For him, the reality is always something you perceive, construction of the imagination, and the world is an experience alienated by symbols. Because of that, objects are, for Mullican, ideas, in a clearly conceptual perspective.
The traditional separation between idea and object is eliminated in his productions, stimulating the experience of private, intimate objects - which form the basis of all his performances, whether or not they’re conducted under hypnosis - and of public objects, revealed by digital means, produced by works with an architectural basis that permanently force the spectator to critically question his or her position towards the work and the world.
In this sense, the “Recent works” exhibition, opening May the 23rd 2003 at the Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art gallery, presents the most recent developments in the investigation of this personal ‘cosmology’, bringing together works from the past two years.
Being so, what is now being brought to the exhibition is this confrontation between the interpretative and the digital worlds, between the experience (World) and the reading (information) - the relation between the representation of space in relation to the interpretative emotion of “reading” that same space -, between the artificial logic of the mathematical codification of digital software and the reading of its data.
In this way, the two digitally produced animations - one of them being presented in a projection of minimal graphical appearance that is related to the previous one, developed around geographical charts, and the second consisting of a digital representation of a landscape presented on a loop in a plasma screen, evoking some of the previous production in the experienced relation between a character and the surrounding environment as well as in the attention to detail and in reducing the special effects, favoring its graphical and reality-mediating aspect - he brings forward the mistakes of a language of the signs in evaluating artificiality.
These two animations are directly connected with the two three-dimensional glass-made models presented as a “three-dimensional formatting” of language, the first one operating as a linguistic three-dimensional model of the projected image, and the second one working as a metaphor for a religious epiphany, introduced as an operating model for the author’s 'cosmology' by the means of conventional representation codes for space and structure.
The landscape extent of this 'cosmology' is shown in twelve lightboxes that present digitally created images of landscapes, oriented towards natural concepts such as sky/water or landscape, as opposed to the artificiality of their means of support and production, showing in what way and how much our reality is mediated by interfaces and information simulations.
In another video now being presented and dated from 2002, we see the record of one of Mullican’s performances, conducted under hypnosis (a therapeutic technique that the author has been applying to his artistic production since 1978), working for the revelation of a simulation experience and the demonstration of that same experience in a character in an altered state of conscience who is confronted with architectural space and with the world.
Finally, some of Mullican’s graphic and pictorial production (drawing and painting) will be shown: a painting and some enlargements from his notebook as extensions of the problematics that build the axis of production within the representation of his ‘cosmology’, in here through a more basic and less technologically sophisticated media, whose constituent elements are reduced to pictorial forms that later on find their places in a holistic chart.
Besides that, in-store you can see works by the artist dating from the 70s and 80s, from where much of his more recent production picks its vitality and the strength for legitimating the signification for the (highly codified by signs) mapping of a world where the individual walks. H.M.