Matt Mullican: Representing the Work
March 23 - June 8, 2019
NC-Arte, Bogotá, Colombia
Since the 1970s, the American-Venezuelan artist Matt Mullican has been interested in representing the ways people experience the world. For this, the artist developed a unique iconographic system to create his own cosmology. Combining elements from his imagination and personal research, Mullican's cosmology comprises "five worlds" and to each of these worlds he assigned a color and perception: the green world represents the physical and material elements, the blue is the everyday life, the yellow is the arts, the black is language and symbols, and the red is the subjective.
While his artistic search has taken the form of diagrams, sculptures, drawings, collages, computer generated images, flags, rubbings, videos, typographies, among others, all the works of Mullican’s five-decades-long practice depart from elements offered by the rational and unconscious mind. In fact, since early on in his career, he has incorporated hypnosis as a medium that has allowed him to openly reveal the elastic components that constitute his own unconscious identity. Hypnotized, Mullican’s body hosts a distinct character the artist has named That Person, whose gender, age, and mindset changes from trance to trance. That Person has also created a robust body of work, characterized by a particular visual, written, and performative language.
For NC-arte, Mullican produced Representing the Work, one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of his career. Using both floors of NC-arte’s building in downtown Bogotá, the exhibition was divided in four different bodies of work: a new large-scale installation composed of 64 painted bedsheets that represented hundreds of his and That Person’s work; a pavilion based on one of the graphic maps that represent "the five worlds," which contained new glass sculptures, ready made objects and drawings; a large-scale black and yellow flag that illustrated one of the artist's iconic diagrams; and a selection of recent and historical videos that document his performances and computer-generated works.
Similar to the way we experience a book, Representing the Work invited the viewer to navigate the many characters, stories, images, and objects that are part of the exhibition without necessarily having to understand or memorize every single element in it. Instead, Representing the Work exposed the complex relationship between reality and perception, offering a structure in which we can identify the essential aspects of the human condition.
On the occasion of Representing the Work in Bogotá, Matt Mullican offered two performances. A Performative Lecture at Universidad de los Andes and a performative reading of The Birth to Death List during the opening of the exhibition.
Special thanks to Matt Mullican, ProjecteSD, Peter Freeman, the Universidad de los Andes, all the local fabricators, and the team at NC-Arte, especially Claudia Segura, Felipe Uribe and Laura Gamboa.
While Mullican’s work has always explored different outlets to represent his own existence, Representing the Work, as its title implies, was a large scale installation that re-presented the trajectory of his work via numerous groups of images that follow a specific sequence organized by the artist.
Represented on the bedsheets are photographs that document his first performances and hypnotic trances, still images of fictitious architectural and urban spaces created with a supercomputer from the late 80s, as well as multiple pictograms and graphic explorations that address the concepts of life and death, the relationship between sign and form, as well as the division between fiction and reality.
By representing his and That Person's work in a single installation, the artist was not only immortalizing decades of his work, but he was also making evident various questions that lie at the core of his artistic practice: What is it that visual, verbal and written language really represent? Is this the representation of what we perceive through our senses and then process through our brain, or of how we perceive things? For Mullican, these questions encapsulate the fundamental problems at the center of art and language in general.
When I was a student at CalArts, I experienced a lecture by Richard Serra. He lost his slides and couldn’t show any pictures. He only had a whiteboard and it was the best lecture ever! I made a note to myself that I wanted my lectures to start at ground zero. So in the first part of the lectures I draw, in the second come the pictures and in the third come the video. At the beginning I’m in an empty space and I have to tell the audience who I am and what I do. The pictures act as a false memory, but they are very accurate. I see myself performing in that medium and I comment on it.
— Matt Mullican’s interview with Edith Jeřábková and Eva Kot’átková for Institut Úzkosti.
Matt Mullican (b. 1951, Santa Monica, California) lives and works in Berlin and New York. Mullican earned a BFA degree from CalArts in 1974, studying under the conceptual artist John Baldessari. He then moved to New York and quickly became one of the artists of the now recognized "Pictures Generation," along with Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, Barbara Bloom, Jack Goldstein, Robert Longo, Troy Brauntuch, among others.
Since his first exhibition in 1973, Mullican has shown his work in hundreds of museums and galleries around the world, including landmark exhibitions such as Documenta 7, 9, and 10 in Kassel (1982, 1992, 1997); Skulptur Projekte Münster (1987); A Forest of Signs at MOCA in Los Angeles (1989); the Whitney Biennial in New York (1989 and 2008); Traces du Sacré at Centre Pompidou in Paris (2008), 28th Sao Paulo Biennial (2008); The Pictures Generation at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (2009); Altas. How to Carry the World on One’s Back? at Reina Sofia in Madrid (2010); and Painting 2.0 at Mumok in Vienna (2016), among others. A major retrospective exhibition, Matt Mullican: The Feeling of Things, took place at the HangarBicocca in Milan in 2018.
Other large solo shows include the Camden Arts Centre in London (2016), Museo Tamayo in Mexico City (2013), Haus der Kunst in Munich (2011), and the Serralves in Porto (2001) among many others. He has also presented many permanent or long-term installations in public space around the world.
Mullican has taught at Columbia University in New York and the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, among others. Representing the Work is Mullican’s first exhibition in Colombia and is the largest show of his work ever presented in South America.