English version This exhibition by Matt Mullican (Santa Monica, 1951) is the first survey in Mexico of the American artist’s over forty-year-long practice. Since he was a student at the California Institute of the Arts (Los Angeles, 1972-1975), Mullican, along with others of his generation, began a post- conceptual art practice, whose particularity was to question the precepts that govern representations of reality and fiction. These artistic processes were informed by a reflection on the way that subjectivity influences our perception and cognition of the world.

Mullican’s project has been centered from the outset on the examination of the reality “inside the image”—an examination that became more consistent after he made a series of drawings of a stick-figure character named Glen. Other important projects of his are Light Patterns (1972), Details from a Fictional Reality (1973), Dead Man and Doll (1973), Birth to It’s not the world that you Death List (1973) and Dead Comic Book Characters (1974). see, it’s the world that I see Mullican’s continuous meditation on the reality inside the image led him to other strategies involving signs in the form of theories or cosmologies. representing the world that Like a kind of databank for the creation of projects in various media, Mullican’s cosmologies include patterns, colors and signs as well as you see. maps, flags, virtual cities and architectural typologies. These systems of obsessively recombined signs are speculative philosophical intuitions; Matt Mullican as such, they are subjective ways of explaining and lending meaning to the world’s events and phenomena. “That world” thus “refers to the subjectively created view of the outside world based on our view from the inside,” to quote Mullican.

Mullican’s first, deliberately childish cosmology from 1973 is based on a question: what exists before and after death. Ten years later, he made a more abstract version of the same piece, displayed in five differentiated orders. Many of the pieces shown in That World/Ese mundo focus on the second cosmology, which reveals the world through a system of colors 3 and script. The exhibition reviews Mullican’s artistic process, examining different stages of a symbolic system that connects subjective worlds with the objective world through aesthetic, cognitive and biographical elements as well as psychological experiments with hypnosis.

Matt Mullican addresses the outside world from the point of view of his own subjectivity when he turns his perception of reality into objects, models and repetitive patterns that are reproduced in a circular fashion. In examining this constant in his art practice, That World/Ese mundo focuses on projects that speculate about life inside the world of images and signs; it also features Mullican’s phenomenological turn with virtual images, the architectural spaces of his cosmologies, and documentation of his performances under hypnosis, which explore the mazes of his psyche.

Untitled, 1977

4 5 THAT WORLD/ESE MUNDO

For Matt Mullican there are various aspects to reality, and thus the world around us can be explained in many different ways. These approaches to the outside world show us that our social organizations, the sciences, culture, and languages are all systems that shape and describe what we understand as the “world.” However, we have other worlds, or subjective realities, that influence our relation with external things. Mullican’s work seeks to question the factors that affect our perception and cognition of reality, as well as the ways in which we relate to that world which we distinguish as if it were something independent from ourselves.

What Do We Understand as “World”?

To think of a possible answer to this question in the context of this exhibition, we can refer to the essay entitled “Matt Mullican’s World” (1980) by Allan McCollum, a colleague of the artist:

It is this inner process—constructing the world we live in and preserving its stability—which seems to be of special interest to Mullican. His work, which is the product of a detailed, near obsessive introspection, is devised as an elaborate attempt to duplicate externally the vast complex of inner representations, which add up to his understanding of the world he lives in. Through the use of all conceivable media—drawings, readings, performances, posters, signs, sculptures, banners, etc. —he has Untitled (Chart) , 1982 undertaken to re-create for the outer senses a multi-dimensional picture of those normally unconscious, interior processes which are present in all of us.

6 7 […] The symbolic activity of art, then, is for Mullican simply a play within a play; it is an acknowledged form of symbolic creativity set The world is not the object. It consists of our projection onto certain against an unacknowledged, but equally symbolic form of creativity objects that we are familiar with. The world does not give us we unquestioningly refer to as everyday reality. Mullican seems to anything. It is rather a combination of receiving and projecting. view the polar worlds of reality and non-reality as an interrelated unit, with each implying the other, and by so doing, relying upon But if all I see are light patterns, then where is life in those patterns? the other for its identity and meaning. It is this bipolar construct as Life exists in our subjective experience, in the senses. Therefore, a whole, this integrated dichotomy where the real and the non- pictured reality is equal to reality. The fictional is equal to the real continually define each other, that locates and identifies the real… Everything is abstract and it is only through our history and world of everyday reality and its relationship to the world of art. In culture that we construct a reality. other words, the non-real, or the fictional—as exemplified in the world of art—cannot be separated from the real, or the factual; they are two aspects of the same symbolic system.1 Matt Mullican

According to McCollum, it is evident that one of the recurrent themes in Mullican’s work is the boundary between the representation of reality, fiction, and reality itself, which ultimately leads us to question the division between the subjective and objective world. Mullican’s question rests on whether that world we see might not just be our projection of our surroundings.

Is There a Subjective Reality and an Objective Reality?

1 Allan McCullom, “Matt Mullican’s World”, http://allanmccollum.net/allanmcnyc/mattmu- llicansworld.html (Accessed on September 18, 2013).

8 9 DEATH BETWEEN REALITY I was attempting to prove that stick figures lead lives.

AND FICTION […] I have to tell you about my first major statement, which predates Details from an Imaginary Universe, the Birth to Death List and the first cosmology. It was the idea that all I see is light patterns. I had Since his first pieces with the character of Glen, his appropriations of deconstructed the world to simple patterns and I made artwork Dead Comic-Book Characters, and the image Dead Man and Doll about light reflecting and light emanating. When you say that all (1973), Mullican has used representations of death to ponder what the you see is light patterns, you remove all subject matter. There is difference is between reality and fiction. no difference between me looking at you and me looking at a ladder.

At what point do we begin to differentiate between the real and I understood that light was all about surface; it is about analyzing the fictional? the surface. I became interested in what’s going on in the surface, in that picture. The next group of work was the stick figures. I was in a class called Post-Studio Art, so I didn’t have a real How can a doll—an object of fiction—be presented to us as a studio. I had an imaginary studio, and in it I had about five hundred living being next to a dead man who is nonetheless real? drawings. Initially, I only had about fifteen. I had a stick figure in those drawings, and his name was Glen. I wanted to go into that picture. What is the difference between reality, the representation of reality and fiction? Matt Mullican

10 11 Concerning the dilemma of the representation of death between reality and fiction, Allan McCollum wrote the following:

It can be noticed that the idea of death plays a large part in Mullican’s work; more specifically, it is the paradoxical notion of a “fictional” death which arises over and over again. While it might seem that the notion of a fictional death should be no more abstruse or disturbing than a fictional “life” or “birth,” it is notable that we cannot experience our own death in the sense that we experience other major events connected with our existence; that is, it can never be remembered or recounted, as is the case with other aspects of our lives—it can only be anticipated intellectually. The contemplation of our own death, therefore, can never truly involve allusion or reference to anything in our real experience, and thus must share the qualities of fictionalization. Fictional characters who are fictionally dead, then, are dead to us in a way that is strikingly similar to the way real people can be dead in reality. In other words, although we may console ourselves Untitled (Dead Man and Doll), 1973-74 in believing that we can know the difference between real life and fictional life, the difference between real and fictional death is more apt to escape us.2

2 Idem. 12 13 TWO COSMOLOGIES There are only two cosmologies. The first cosmology was drawn in 1973. It is based on my childhood beliefs and it deals with what happens before birth and after death. Then there is the overall How do we form our awareness of reality? cosmology, which involves the five worlds. That is the real, profes- sional cosmology, which I drew for the first time in 1983. It tries to break down and decode the universe. Now these are the only two At what point does our self become conscious of our place in models. Of course, I redrew them hundreds, maybe thousands of the world? times…

Another thing I believed when I was a child was that fate controlled my life. I believed that Fate had a television set on which he saw me, and that he had a big lever, which he pulled down. The lever would have my birth date on it, September 18, 1951, and my death date, 2014. Right about that time, around 1973, I was also involved with the cadaver and that brought me to invent the personality of death. Fate meets Death at my death and they decide if I will go to heaven or down to hell.

Matt Mullican

Page 14: Notating the Cosmology (detail), 2009 14 15 In his first cosmology from 1973, Matt Mullican represented himself on an airport conveyor belt where he “chooses his parents,” and then arriving at a place where life and fate meet death, in a struggle between angels and demons over his soul before it goes to heaven or hell.

Just like the cosmogonies of ancient cultures, Mullican’s cosmologies at- tempt to explain how the world functions based on a vision. These inter- pretations, far from seeking to convert new followers, attempt to reveal characteristics that are unique to humans in their relation with the world. With the second cosmology (1983), Mullican’s intention became more organized insofar as the colors and symbols in the piece correspond to various aspects of a circular structure divided into five sections: 1. Green: the physical world of the elements; 2. Blue: the world without a frame (The World Unframed); 3. Yellow: the world of culture and signs (The World Framed); 4. Black: the world of language; 5. Red: the world of subjectivity, consciousness and the spirit. By means of this arrangement, Mullican strives to establish differences between the subjective and objective worlds, the real and the not real, etc. With this process, he attempts not only to lend meaning to day-to-day reality, but also to reveal the metaphysical aspects under the surface of the world we perceive.

, 1974 Choosing My Parents My Choosing 16 LOCATING MULLICAN The minimalists were completely absorbed in the breaking down of the object and I, as a young artist, had to follow them. So my IN ART HISTORY ideas were very similar to that, only my work does not have to do with concept. It has to do with sensation. Obviously, there are concepts within my work. I cannot help that. We are all concep- tually driven creatures. But my work was never about a formal object-making. It is simply a way of decoding the world.

I am a post-conceptual, postmodern artist. I will have distance in everything I do.

To say that the pictured reality is real makes absolute sense in the following of minimal and conceptual artists. They were saying that the picture does not exist. They claimed that the object is all that exists and that beyond the object there is the idea of the object, which is close to the picture but it is not. Lawrence Weiner was objectifying the idea to the point where the statement of the object was the object itself… It is simply a way of decoding the world. You could say that the minimalists were dealing with the surface of the mirror. They wanted to break it down. My work is not about the mirror at all. I deal with the reflection in the mirror. For me it is about going into the mirror and trying to understand what I am looking at. The world is not the object. It consists of our projection onto certain objects that we are familiar with.

Untitled (Real object in box), 1973 Matt Mullican

18 19 Though his work has never been cynical—and Mullican has never practiced THE CITY AS MAP the critique of representation the way other postmodern artists have— his work distances itself from the modern conviction of the artist as AND THE MAP AS CITY creator, or of art as the expression of subjectivity. In any case, his work deals with systems of objectification and subjectivity with which we relate to the world. On the other hand, his statement positions him in a The histories of the sciences and religions, are they our narrative specific place in the history of Western art, relating him principally to the descriptions of the world? conceptual art and minimalism of the 1960s in Los Angeles and New York—cities where Mullican began his practice. Are models of knowledge subjective frameworks established as objective conventions to construct reality?

The MIT Project is an attempt to do what the Dallas piece did— to talk about the concerns of my work, from the material to the symbolic to the subjective to the cosmology—but to do it all via a real place.

But I am also a realist in a way. I try to understand the subjective mechanics.

[…] To make a model of something that’s a way of understan- ding the real thing. Whatever the real thing is. I’m very aware that reality is subjective, that anything I say is subjective. Everything is personal. Everything is filtered through my own history to my own psychology.

Matt Mullican

Untitled (Fictitious object in box), 1973 20 21 After his projects with images, objects and fictional characters in the 1970s, and with the construction of his second cosmology, Mullican’s work became more symbolic than sculptural. The images then became maps and architectural settings that one could walk through. This shift became more evident in the architectural proposals Dallas Project (1987), MIT Project (1990) and Computer Project (1989). In the first, the artist made monumental images of an encyclopedia with oil paint using the frottage technique. The MIT Project consisted of an actual construction that the public could enter, based on his cosmology of the five worlds. In between these two works, his experiments with virtual reality were also important: for instance, in Computer Project (1989), he uses virtual reality as a means to achieve his obsessive goal of “entering” the image.

Mullican’s urban typologies recall the ancient maps of tantric, pre-modern or Christian cultures, in the sense that these traditions attempted to explain the world and the order of the universe. On the other hand, these projects have a clearly encyclopedic character, where diverse sources of knowledge merge in artistic systems that combine metaphysical, anthro- pological, chemical and psychological visions. The use of these devices nonetheless involves a distanced but subjective vision of the universe.

This stance, in which the artist reveals a world through his own inner world, does not imply the rehabilitation of the romantic artist as a creator or demiurge. Instead, Mullican’s proposed perspective, based on his taxonomy and symbolic orders, is analytical. Rather than lecture on an all-encompassing theory, the artist makes us reconsider our representa- tions of the world at the same time as we are establishing parameters to lend shape to the real.

Untitled, 1989 22 23 Dallas Project (third version), 1987 The work Learning from that Person’s Work is an installation that explores HYPNOSIS: LEARNING FROM Mullican’s alter ego, which he calls That Person. This character is the product of long hypnosis sessions to which the artist subjects himself. THAT PERSON’S WORK Mullican’s interest in these other figures began with Glen. The artist has been doing performances under hypnosis since 1978, examining as- pects of his subjectivity and the human psyche. This piece, however, assigns the creative process to That Person in such a way that the alter ego allows the artist to assimilate and study unknown aspects of his In many ways, entering a virtual reality is similar to going into trance. own psyche. That is why I often show the videos of the virtual environment, next to a video of myself in a hypnotic trance. Both of them are That Person’s calligraphic drawings, made on bed sheets hung in a maze- projected. Both of them are illusions. The hypnosis is about emo- like installation, are somewhat reminiscent of the Gothic aesthetic or Art tional space and the virtual city is about architectural space, but Nouveau, but also of street graffiti. The piece came out of an exhibition they are both equally invisible. at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne in 2005. Like Glen, these pieces reflect the artist’s interest in the split between reality and fiction, whose It is not really theater and it is not really performance. It is almost final meaning rests on our uncertainty about whether the world we like psychotherapy on public view… It is a spectacle of the psyche experience is a product of an inner projection. Carrying this research being unfolded. That is why I do not like applause at the end of to its ultimate consequences, Mullican’s projects under hypnosis are the piece. an exploration of the artist’s subjectivity, of the labyrinths of his psyche somewhere between the subconscious and the conscious. The hypnotic performance illustrates the subjective in my work, the red area. Generally that area is empty in my charts… It deals with the craziness of our interpretation of how objects function and what they mean. So it is an interpretation of the ego and of madness. It is a representation of the subjective, the only place in my work where I really have a pure relationship to that subject.

Matt Mullican

26 27 PICTOGRAMS AS A PRE-SUBJECTIVE POSITION

Heaven, God, Fate, personality of Life, personality of earth, air, stones, water, metal, jello, blood, bones, Death, Demon, Hell, Angel, Soul, Birth of the Universe, wood, carbon, decay, fire, explosions, matter, Creation of the World, beginnings of Life, Creation of molecules, atoms, shape, color, pattern, sound, touch, Man, Greek Temple, Knights in armor, Spanish galleon, pain, pleasure, taste, smell, absence of everything, image of a city, rocket into space nothing exists, void

money, flags, pendants, uniforms, armbands, banners, trophies, plaques, badges, emblems, buttons, advertisements, book jackets, cards, letterheads, television, trade-marks, international signs, languages

Theater, Dance, Music, Film, Photography, Painting, Drawing, Sculpture, Books

communications center, office, building, government building, sports stadium, theater arts center, subjective museum, sign museum, world framed museum, world museum, element museum, schools, food store, sex store, house appliance store, street, factories, city dump, mines, oil rigs, house, living room, telephone, records, books, couch, bedroom, shower, bath, soap, toilet, kitchen, refrigerator, stove, sink, dining room, food, animals, plants, clouds, mountains, deserts, stars, planets

Source: Documenta 7, (Kassel: D b+s V P. Dierichs, 1982), 234. A sign of a man represents all men and no singular man.

Two pieces of wood that look like a person are obviously not one.

If all I see are light patterns, where is the life in it? Rather than state that the picture is a physical fact with physical boundaries, I interpret it as if it is what it represents. I can walk into the When interpreting two pieces of wood as a head and body, I realize that the picture with my imagination and consider the given pictorial context; person that I see in the wood exists in me. Upon further reflection, I see that I can smell, hear, feel what is being represented. the persons I see in the movie, photograph, drawing, and sign exist within my I wanted to prove that stick figures live lives; that they can eat, sleep, feel vision of them, for they are all equally dead, and if all I see are light patterns, pain; that they are born, grow old, and die; so I invented a pictorial studio with life itself can exist within our image of it, and stick figures being images a pictorial artist to do pictorial work within it. He did physical experiments themselves may live within our vision of them. that demonstrated his capacity to feel, both physically and emotionally. Each medium is related to in a way that is appropriate to its form:

I may cry when looking at a movie.

I know a photo to be evidence of an actual person.

It’s easier to draw an angel than take a photo of one.

Source: Documenta 7, (Kassel: D b+s V P. Dierichs, 1982), 383. The pictograms designed by Matt Mullican imply a certain irony in their childishly pop appearance, while they also posit a pre-subjective ap- BIBLIOGRAPHY proach to the world, a psychical condition that exists prior to our learning of written language. Thus, our identification of imagery, which connects figures to things, is a schematic mechanism of visual identification, tran- scending the conventions of language that lend each culture its own Matt Mullican’s statements are excerpted from the following interviews: identity. Mullican’s symbolic pictograms were made to point out, sig- nify and explain the outer world based on iconic, abstract and universal Documenta 7. Kassel: D b+s V P. Dierichs, 1982. visual conventions. Mullican’s visual language evokes the pictograms we see at airports and on streets the world over. His combinations seem Ulrich Wilmes, ed. Matt Mullican. Conversations. Dumont: Haus der Kunst, strange and familiar to us at the same time, since we recognize the 2 011. symbols but do not know exactly what the relationship between them is, as if we were looking at an ancient codex. To understand Mullican’s Nikki Columbus, ed. “Matt Mullican in conversation with John Baldessari cosmologies, then, we need to familiarize ourselves with his signs and and Ulrich Wilmes.” Subject Element Sign Frame World. Nueva York: Skira the conventions he establishes to explain the world based on his vision, Rizzoli Publications, 2013. which is equivalent to the process of creation of that world, something that appears as if outside our perceptual frame. ­______.“Matt Mullican in conversation with Michael Tarantino.” Subject Element Sign Frame World. Nueva York: Skira Rizzoli Publications, On this subject, Matt Mullican’s colleague Allan McCullom points out: 2013.

It is this underlying preoccupation with the world as viewed from a pre-subjective position which separates Mullican from so many artists of his generation; for where other artists might use their work to invite us into a world of personal imagery, with which we may identify only by constructing analogies to our own private worlds, Mullican, by invoking a more primitive phase of knowing through his style of pictography (and the simplicity of his imagery), draws us into a network of identification where the original boundaries of our worldly knowledge can virtually coincide.3

3 Idem. 32 33 Credits Matt Mullican. That World/Ese mundo Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes October 23, 2013 to March 23, 2014 Rafael Tovar y de Teresa Curator Willy Kautz Consult our program of activities at President www.museotamayo.org Curatorial Assistant Facebook: museotamayo Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes Carlos Lara Twitter: @museotamayo María Cristina García Cepeda Museography Instagram: eneltamayo General Director Rodolfo García Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo Design Paseo de la Reforma 51 Xavier Guzmán Urbiola Lídice Jiménez Uribe Bosque de Chapultepec, Assistant General Director of Architectural Heritage corner of Gandhi Installation México, D.F. 11580 Jorge Alvarado Arellano Magdalena Zavala Bonachea Daniel Reyes Ramírez Opening Hours National Visual Arts Coordinator Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 to 18:00 Maintenance Staff General Admission $19.00 Carmen Cuenca Carrara Edgar Cabral Ortiz Free for students, teachers, and senior José Leonardo López Cruz Director of Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo citizens with valid ID Andrés Rivera Sundays: free Jorge Sánchez Plácido Pérez Cué Audiovisual Media Media and Public Relations Director Jacobo Horowich Juan Martín Chávez Vélez

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Educational Studies Xatziri Peña

Editorial Coordination Arely Ramírez Moyao Cover: Subjective Objective Chart, 1979 Communications Back: Untitled, 1985 Sofía Provencio All images are courtesy of the artist. Beatriz Cortés