ART-PRESENTATION: Matt Mullican-Banners
In a continuous attempt to explain and structure what is around him, Mullican has been working since the early 1970s to develop a complex system of models and vocabulary that he calls the “five worlds,” corresponding to different levels of perception and represented by five colors: green for physical, material elements; blue for everyday life (the “world unframed”); yellow where objects become valuable, as in art (the “world framed”); black and white for language and symbols; and red for subjectivity and ideas.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Skulpturenhalle Archive
In 1986 Matt Mullican was introduced to a group of computer-graphics specialists in California who were interested in working with an artist as a means to broaden their approach to this medium most often used in film and television animation. Optomystic studios gave Mullican access to the innovative Connection Machine-2, a Thinking Machines supercomputer designed by leading researchers in artificial intelligence. With the assistance of technical directors and programmers who entered his initial notebook drawings into the computer system, Mullican integrated his images and ideas with unprecedented flexibility within the three-dimensional environment of the computer. The results, inexpressible in other, more trad tional mediums, reflect the compatibility of the internal logic of the computer and the multi-dimensional and hierarchical vision of the artist. When the visitor enters the Matt Mullican exhibition “Banners” at the Skulpturenhalle in Germany, he is immediately surrounded by huge, colorful banners of nylon fabric, suspended from the walls and the roofbeams, spanned across the ceiling and spread out over the floor. Visitors find only a narrow pathway between these hanging screens, meandering from the entrance through the hall, and have to follow it in order to walk deeper into the forest of banners. The first impression is that of entering a constructed world rather than just another exhibition. For the colors and signs repeat and seem to relate to each other according to some law of their own. At the same time, this is no real, tangible world presented in an exhibition space; it is an abstract world to be deciphered. It seems accessible, because the signs appear familiar, and yet at the same time hermetic and legible only to those who know the code. Matt Mullican uses the poster as a form of expression aimed at the public. Pictograms representing music, theatre, film and painting reveal themselves to us immediately, while others are pure inventions. By placing his name alongside them on the posters, Mullican combines elements of reality with his own subjective world. Mullican recognised the banner as a particularly effective vehicle for bringing a message to the street. The visual syntax is pared down to the minimum and is instantly legible. What distinguishes his banners from the carriers of national symbols and battle insignia is that they serve to present his models of the world. Using signs. Mullican has constructed cosmologies and world models. The first cosmology was based on ideas he had conjured as a child. Black figures on red banners represent god, souls, angels and demons. Glass models redolent of scientific instruments illustrate the cycle of human life on its journey between birth and death, heaven and hell. Mullican’s second cosmology shows five interrelated worlds, the banners bear signs portraying the elements, objects, the sign itself, and the head that represents the subjective mind. The signs recur, hewn in stone, as figures on a field of play. In earlier exhibitions, Mullican presented his banners in a row, aligned next to each other, so that they could be read individually and as a sequence. In this exhibition they form narrow canyons through which the visitor must forge a path. Banners touch and overlap, forming an interactive context in which the combination of signs perceived by the observer becomes unpredictable.
Info: Curator: Dieter Schwarz, Skulpturenhalle-Thomas Schütte Stiftung, Lindenweg, Junction Berger Weg (Near Raketenstation), Neuss/Holzheim, Duration: 5/4-11/8/19, Days & Hours: Fri-sun 10:00-18:00, https://thomas-schuette-stiftung.de
