Matt Mullican
23 May - 31 Jul 2008
© Matt Mullican
Notating Cosmology, 2008
123 drawings, marker on paper
109 28 x 21, 6 cm + 14 21,6 x 28 cm
Installation View ProjecteSD
Notating Cosmology, 2008
123 drawings, marker on paper
109 28 x 21, 6 cm + 14 21,6 x 28 cm
Installation View ProjecteSD
MATT MULLICAN
"Notating Cosmology"
23.05 - 31.07, 2008
ARTIST TALK: 23.05.08, 19.00 H
OPENING: 23.05.08, 20.00 H
Developed over a period of three decades, the works of Matt Mullican are considered some of the most influential contributions contemporary art has seen in recent years. His oeuvre is both mysterious and clear, and remarkable for the myriad of media used. Central to his work is the systematization, structuring and ordering of personal world views, that oscillate between subject and object, between personal and a universal. Mullican’s works circle around the perception as unconscious interpretation of sensible reception of realities. Underlying Matt Mullican ́s work is an artistic concept which encompasses a world view. His works can only be read in relation to each other. A relation that exists through language and signs, through repetition, rhyme and association. Together the works form a continually semantic network.
For his second solo show at ProjecteSD, Matt Mullican presents a new series of works, Notating Cosmology, where using the principle of the workbook, he revisits his idea of the “cosmology” (life/world view) as it has been explored along his artistic career since the beginning. Through more than one hundred drawings, collaged pages taken from the artist ́s workbook, displayed on one line all along the gallery walls, in a linear and narrative fashion, Mullican compiles his “world view” in an annotated form. The installation functions both as a tool and a storage device, where thoughts, observations, ideas, plans, sketches are collected, as it presents drawing as a means to elucidating ideas.
Mullican ́s first model of a cosmology dates from 1973, in a very simple drawing that played out his own life cycle: Mullican slides off the prenatal conveyor belt into “the world” that he will leave again upon his death. This idea of birth and death, poles of the life cycle is also present in the Birth to Death List (1973), a list of events in the life of a fictional woman, from her birth until her death, as told through a yuxtaposition of actions, everyday events and random experiences. These two works appear in the first drawings of Notating Cosmology, as early key pieces where the cosmology model was first sketched.
Mullican ́s further interest in creating models of understanding processes of perception, the way the world is seen, led him to devise a vocabulary of signs. Signs that were partially invented and formed subjectively, but also taken from the everyday world. With this language he was able to develop a system of references and to produce a series of charts illustrating a fictive cosmology. Arrays of pictographic symbols that seemed to denote physical, biological, epistemological, and belief systems. Mullican ́s cosmology chart involves then a five world system: the physical elements (pure matter), the world unframed (world of objects), the world framed (the creative forces, the arts), the language (the world of signs and terms) and the subjective meaning (mental activity). A whole world view that parallels and goes beyond the life cycle of the individual. Archetypical issues like heaven, God, life, destiny, material, and spirit, death and hell stand alongside one another and are given no moral evaluation.
The artist ́s fictive studio, the performances, all of Mullican ́s imaginary universe unfolds in its growing complexity as we move along the sequence of drawings in the show. Notating cosmology works as an inventory of notes, charts, sketches, texts and signs; a flux of language that enables the artist to locate his own ideas on a much larger cultural map. As he himself puts it: “The cosmology for me is a kind of subjectively driven map of how we fit into the universe”.
---
Matt Mullican was born in Santa Monica, California and currently lives and works in New York City. He received his B.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts in 1974 and has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and in Europe. In Spain his work has been shown at the IVAM Centre del Carme (1995) and the Fundació Tàpies, Barcelona (2001). Currently, he is included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and has two upcoming solo shows at the S.T.U.K. Kunstencentrum in Leuven, Belgium and The Drawing Center in New York. His works are located in important private and public collections all over the world.
"Notating Cosmology"
23.05 - 31.07, 2008
ARTIST TALK: 23.05.08, 19.00 H
OPENING: 23.05.08, 20.00 H
Developed over a period of three decades, the works of Matt Mullican are considered some of the most influential contributions contemporary art has seen in recent years. His oeuvre is both mysterious and clear, and remarkable for the myriad of media used. Central to his work is the systematization, structuring and ordering of personal world views, that oscillate between subject and object, between personal and a universal. Mullican’s works circle around the perception as unconscious interpretation of sensible reception of realities. Underlying Matt Mullican ́s work is an artistic concept which encompasses a world view. His works can only be read in relation to each other. A relation that exists through language and signs, through repetition, rhyme and association. Together the works form a continually semantic network.
For his second solo show at ProjecteSD, Matt Mullican presents a new series of works, Notating Cosmology, where using the principle of the workbook, he revisits his idea of the “cosmology” (life/world view) as it has been explored along his artistic career since the beginning. Through more than one hundred drawings, collaged pages taken from the artist ́s workbook, displayed on one line all along the gallery walls, in a linear and narrative fashion, Mullican compiles his “world view” in an annotated form. The installation functions both as a tool and a storage device, where thoughts, observations, ideas, plans, sketches are collected, as it presents drawing as a means to elucidating ideas.
Mullican ́s first model of a cosmology dates from 1973, in a very simple drawing that played out his own life cycle: Mullican slides off the prenatal conveyor belt into “the world” that he will leave again upon his death. This idea of birth and death, poles of the life cycle is also present in the Birth to Death List (1973), a list of events in the life of a fictional woman, from her birth until her death, as told through a yuxtaposition of actions, everyday events and random experiences. These two works appear in the first drawings of Notating Cosmology, as early key pieces where the cosmology model was first sketched.
Mullican ́s further interest in creating models of understanding processes of perception, the way the world is seen, led him to devise a vocabulary of signs. Signs that were partially invented and formed subjectively, but also taken from the everyday world. With this language he was able to develop a system of references and to produce a series of charts illustrating a fictive cosmology. Arrays of pictographic symbols that seemed to denote physical, biological, epistemological, and belief systems. Mullican ́s cosmology chart involves then a five world system: the physical elements (pure matter), the world unframed (world of objects), the world framed (the creative forces, the arts), the language (the world of signs and terms) and the subjective meaning (mental activity). A whole world view that parallels and goes beyond the life cycle of the individual. Archetypical issues like heaven, God, life, destiny, material, and spirit, death and hell stand alongside one another and are given no moral evaluation.
The artist ́s fictive studio, the performances, all of Mullican ́s imaginary universe unfolds in its growing complexity as we move along the sequence of drawings in the show. Notating cosmology works as an inventory of notes, charts, sketches, texts and signs; a flux of language that enables the artist to locate his own ideas on a much larger cultural map. As he himself puts it: “The cosmology for me is a kind of subjectively driven map of how we fit into the universe”.
---
Matt Mullican was born in Santa Monica, California and currently lives and works in New York City. He received his B.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts in 1974 and has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and in Europe. In Spain his work has been shown at the IVAM Centre del Carme (1995) and the Fundació Tàpies, Barcelona (2001). Currently, he is included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and has two upcoming solo shows at the S.T.U.K. Kunstencentrum in Leuven, Belgium and The Drawing Center in New York. His works are located in important private and public collections all over the world.