The performative talks that the artist Matt Mullican has been presenting for more than four decades are the stuff of legend. And his most recent, That World and My Work—delivered yesterday (15 January) as the grand finale on the last day of his show at the Camden Arts Centre—didn't disappoint.
Although the event lasted for well over two hours, the time flew by as a rapt audience, including fellow artists Cornelia Parker and Jeff McMillan, were treated to a three-stage journey via blackboard, projected image and video. Mullican took us through his personal cosmologies, beginning with accounts of his family—his painter mother, now aged 96 and once described by the art dealer Leo Castelli as “the most beautiful woman in New York” is currently having her first show in 55 years—and ending with an often-grueling film of a recent performance in which the artist, in a trance-state, repeatedly bins and then obsessively retrieves a newspaper.
In between, Mullican provided an illuminating and entertaining account of a cosmos encompassing life, death, fate, heaven and hell in tandem with the evolution of his “post studio” art and ongoing investigation of the to-ings and fro-ings between subject and object, meaning and materials.
First, there were chalked-up diagrams on a blackboard including one of a pre-birth artist on a conveyor belt, where “I chose my parents”, along with his images of heaven, hell and fate. Then a series of 100 projected-images took us from the head of a corpse in a morgue—juxtaposed with that of a 1930s doll—to a diagram of the five worlds of meaning and materials, with Mullican using your correspondent’s keys as an extra prop.
The final immersion in his filmed performance was rendered all the more gripping by the artist in front of us interacting with his video-ed self, and seeming to slip into a parallel state of hypnosis before our eyes. All in all, a most stimulating way to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon, with Mullican signing off by reminding us that “the mind is a muscle”—having given all of ours a very comprehensive workout.