Paper Monument

from Issue Three

Matt Mullican bears the consummate art-insider’s pedigree: his father, Lee Mullican, is a well-respected painter; he attended the California Institute of the Arts in the 70s and studied with John Baldessari; he participated in Documentas IX and X and was shown in the 2008 Whitney Biennial; he has excellent gallery representation and an impressive critical bibliography; he even has an artwork commissioned in black granite in the 50th Street subway station in New York City. In the summer of 2005, he was invited to be a Visiting Artist at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine, where he lectured on his life’s work—from his earliest student experiments, through his seminal sculptures and installations of the 80s, up to new drawings and video-taped performances from “Learning from That Person’s Work,” an exhibition he’d just mounted at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne.

I was there. His lecture turned out to be the surprise controversy of the summer at Skowhegan, where our cohort was rumored to have been the most professional and well behaved in recent memory. Before you cock an eyebrow, remember that 2005 was perhaps the historical apex of the American MFA system, which excelled at producing refined and competent young artists ready to meet and greet the contemporary art world. Back then, it paid to be affable and business-like; it was a time to be on your insider-y best behavior.

Charming and gracious in person, Matt Mullican has been performing and lecturing for nearly thirty years, and by now it’s often difficult to distinguish the two activities. In Skowhegan’s fresco-filled (and thus named) Fresco Barn, Mullican spoke in a room packed full of young artists and mosquitoes. Although he employed the usual implements—dry-erase board, slide projectors, podium, video projector—his manner of speaking was pretty unusual: he breathed heavily into the microphone, paced around, closed his eyes, requested that somebody turn off all the lights in the room (sending us into complete blackness), borrowed some keys which he annoyingly jangled, and drank directly from a water pitcher while nervously laughing at himself. At one point he even called the audience “distracting.” His busy manner brought to mind the million different things he had done over the course of his career, and that night he managed to talk about most of them.

Matt Mullican, he said, was always interested in the big questions of art—life, death, representation, consciousness. What are you actually seeing when you look at an object? What lies beyond the frame of an image, or a world? How is it that an objective and a subjective reality are both experienced within one’s body? He also felt it incumbent on himself, when he was a student at CalArts, to deal with the then-novel idea of a post-studio practice. So instead of painting or sculpting about these questions, he would address them with whatever materials were at hand, using anything and everything he pleased to make art—sometimes using nothing but himself. The result has been a weighty exploration of ontology, epistemology, and even spirituality, broken up into a series of eccentric, sometimes even whimsical investigations.

Mullican spent a lot of time in the 70s performing experiments with a stick figure named Glen(n). In the drawing of a studio he made (to provide himself with a post-studio studio), he set about proving that Glen(n) was real and could feel pain. He made hundreds of drawings to explore Glen(n)’s vitality: making Glen(n) prick himself on the finger, for example, and demonstrating the difference between life and death by drawing a dead stick figure in the room with Glen(n), who was (ergo) alive. (As further evidence of Glen(n)’s autonomy, Mullican claimed not to know if his name was spelled with a single or double n.)


He later went to visit a cadaver at the Yale University School of Medicine, to consider what being dead does to a non-drawing-based person. Where does the subject go when the body becomes an object? Where are his perception and sensuality? Where does he go when only it remains? Some thirty-five years later, he continues to use the photographs he took of that corpse in his work.

Mullican experienced a breakthrough in his art by thinking about dreams. In one dream he had, he was jumping, and according to his perceptions, it was a real experience. He realized that when you dream of a space, you are ultimately its creator—the architect, the interior designer, the demiurge—but this creativity remains beyond your conscious control. This insight led him to conceptualize art as an investigation of things and experiences that are both immaterial and real. He did performances in which he imagined being in a fantastical situation—for example, ascending into heaven or descending into hell—and described it for the audience. During the performance, he would discuss the physical and sensual attributes of his experience as if he were reporting the most familiar sensory stimuli.

In the early 80s, these performances and investigations culminated in his best-known work: a fully developed, comprehensive, private cosmology, which he elaborated throughout the decade in ever more expansive forms, from hand-painted banners and signs to computer-generated virtual renderings to enormous outdoor sculptures in marble and stone. This color-coded system of graphic, simplified pictograms covered every aspect of experience: BIRTH, LIFE, DEATH, HEAVEN, HELL, WORLD, SIGN, and so on. Some of the pictograms were marked MULLICAN at the top to indicate that this cosmology was Matt Mullican’s cosmology, and his alone.

Mullican has also used hypnosis as an art-making tool throughout his career. In 1982 he hired a professional hypnotist to guide actors through scenarios in which they were to experience all the stages of a life, from birth to death. Audiences responded poorly to these performances, Mullican said, because they felt he was subjecting the actors to unnecessary psychological pain, that he was being a “fascist.” Mullican, not wanting to upset his audiences, corrected this problem by making himself the subject of the hypnotic induction.

“Learning from That Person’s Work,” Mullican’s exhibition at the Ludwig Museum in 2005, grew out of a series of such performances. In a typical piece, the artist is hypnotized and given an open prompt (such as “Good morning!”), after which he begins his experience as, in the artist’s words, That Person. That Person has a childlike demeanor and his voice is distinctly different from Mullican’s—it’s higher and whiny, and features a lot of wheezing and smacking. That Person also does a lot of rocking and pacing, and obsessive grunting and moaning. In the way he demonstratively, almost indecently enjoys his cup of coffee or bottle of water, or, as in the 2005 “Breakfast” performance in Cologne, in the way he loudly and incessantly howls the greeting “Gooood Mooorning, Viiiieeettnam…,” That Person resembles someone suffering from mental illness—or at least mental illness as it is typically portrayed in films and TV shows.

But what That Person primarily does is make drawings—lots and lots of them. Sometimes they’re small and intimate; other times they’re huge, mounted on bed sheets or made directly on the wall. They’re mostly calligraphic. That Person’s cosmology is much lighter than Mullican’s—his artwork explores Truth, Beauty, Love, and Work—but it’s also full of sentimental references to pop and domestic culture: collages of starlets and Pottery Barn interiors, texts taken from Starbucks packaging. It also displays an obsession with numbering and order, and with describing the correct way to participate in society; for example, a detailed set of drawings on “First Aid in the Workplace” apparently cribs from a first-aid poster. Most interestingly, That Person produced some self-portraits “from the inside out”: whimsical, nearly symmetrical, Artists of Gugging–like curlicued faces.

That Person has a distinctive hand, both in script and in drawing, that is quite different from the blocky lettering and simplified, hard-edged shapes that Mullican employed in his earlier icon works. It’s robust and flowery, and has been described as psychedelic. In some cases, it’s nearly feminine in its swoops and curves and bulbous endings to letters and numbers, and it’s totally self-absorbed in the joy of forming its characters. When That Person is writing down recipes or the lyrics to love songs, his script is pared down a bit; each letter reaches the same height and width, and words directly abut one another, making the text difficult to decipher. It recalls children’s first attempts at writing and evokes an innocent, naive will to communicate. That Person is, in Mullican’s words, an outsider dying to become an insider.


When he showed video footage of one of these performances during his lecture at Skowhegan, the audience’s response was remarkable: he’d managed to deeply offend and upset a number of participants in a number of ways. Some were disturbed by Mullican’s characterization of That Person as “kind of a psychotic, schizophrenic, autistic person. He’s definitely disconnected from reality. He’s doing everything he can to be normal and to be fun, but he cannot help himself.” They accused him, in the Q&A, of exploiting people with real mental illnesses. Others were upset that he didn’t totally make sense, and that his account of his practice was incoherent or insufficiently self-critical. Matt Mullican’s “Matt Mullican” persona resembled, at times, That Person’s; it was spectacularly incongruous with the obedient, considerate, diligent, and responsible demeanor of the art-world insider, at least that month. Others were just upset. Mullican had spent the entirety of his three-day stint at Skowhegan meeting with the artists there, giving very generous studio visits and encouraging everyone to reach past their limits, past what they knew to expect, and he’d conveyed a pretty clear idea of himself as a person and as an artist. But during the lecture—as he laughed at himself on video and scoffed in reply to a question, “I’m not, like, this crazy guy”—the way the artwork meshed with the artist caused a lot of concern. Forget That Person—who was this person?

How do we describe the relationship between Matt Mullican and his doppelgänger? Recalling the title of the Ludwig Museum show, we might see them as disciple and master: That Person can teach Mullican (and us) a lot, about life and art. He’s wise, in the way that outsiders (supposedly) are. You could also think of That Person as something like Mullican’s studio assistant-turned-muse, since an un-hypnotized Matt Mullican now bases most of his work on That Person’s. Or, perhaps, That Person is one of Mullican’s experimental subjects, like Glen(n) the stick figure: an icon or sign whose ontological status is under investigation. The very fact that so many people at Skowhegan were concerned for That Person’s feelings—some even accused Mullican of exploiting him—indicates that the artist had tapped into something weirdly genuine and genuinely weird.

Mullican has taken the idea of a post-studio practice a step further, to examine what a post-artist practice would look like. This poses a healthy challenge for the viewer. How do we approach an artwork if the artist has no connection to a community—or even to a real pathology? On what basis do we interpret it, if its maker is ultimately unknown and unknowable? That Person is neither a fully paid-up insider, nor an authentic outsider. He has no name, possibly not even an ego, and at any rate has no ability to have a direct dialogue about his practice with anyone who might see his work. He can’t be embarrassed, or censure himself. He’s free to address directly the anxieties and obsessions that society stipulates we work through before we’re given our membership card. He’s real, but intangible.

In the end, That Person is less like Mullican’s teacher, employee, or product, and more like his ward—Mullican helps him exist in society. Matt Mullican tackles the outside, the objective, while That Person handles the internal, the subjective. While Mullican is speculating about the function of artistic practice and where meaning comes from, That Person is expressing what life means and what should be important to us. These complimentary arms of practice seek to conjoin the artist and the art into a concrete set of actions and values, a kind of conscious unconscious. The Skowhegan lecture and its dramatic reception made it clear that Mullican was working on something more profound than many artists ever take on—or, at least, on something you wouldn’t learn to do in art school these days. Irresponsibly and selflessly, he only took partial credit for it.

By breaking the unspoken covenant of professionalism binding the group that night, Mullican opened a trove of collective anxieties—about authorship and responsibility, insider-ness and outsider-ness, and, most significantly, the authenticity of our self-assigned identities as artists. But as the rest of my colleagues were busy interrogating Mullican, I was noticing that I felt envy towards That Person (in a way that would be ridiculous if directed at Mullican). That Person is like a perpetual novice who is umbilically connected to an established professional, their symbiotic relationship privileged and free. In That Person, Mullican had essentially adopted an emerging artist. It just wasn’t any of us in that room. All responsible thoughts about Mullican’s art aside, maybe that was the real pisser.