Matt Mullican: A Drawing Translates the Way of Thinking

THE D R AWI N G CENTER

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Matt Mullican A Drawing Translates the Way of Thinking

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Matt Mullican A Drawing Translates the Way of Thinking

November 21, 2008 – February 5, 2009

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Curated by João Ribas

DR AW ING PAPERS 82

With a conversation between the artist and curator

October 13, 2008

I actually wanted to start by asking you a question that you asked yourself over 30 years ago.

Which I don’t remember, of course.

But I’ ll tell you what it is. You asked yourself, “Which is more real, a drawing of a real chair or a drawing of a chair that doesn’t exist?” [PL. 2] It depends on how you define “real” in relationship to the process of drawing. In a sense, what is the base of the drawing? Is it “what” you’re drawing or “how” you’re drawing? I think the chair that is not

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there is more real to the “how” question, and the chair that is there is more real to the “what” question. And I believe that drawing is more involved with the “how” than the “what.” Although, it’s a hard one to say because it shifts back and forth so often. It’s like a floating problem that ultimately cannot be answered.

Except through the drawing?

Well, in an ultimate sense, you can’t answer the question, you can only demonstrate it. You demonstrate that issue through the work itself. I was just trying to figure out what the reality was that I was drawing. Where was that reality? And in a sense, what was truer to that reality when there’s no obvious anchor? It goes into this issue of the super—I think I heard this in art school—this was the period of “super-realism,” where you actually had the artists that were painting—like Richard Estes, Chuck Close, Cunningham, and all those artists that were painting things that were absolutely real, and they were called super-realists. But that was real to the image. And then you had the other kind of super-realists, like Robert Ryman or Frank Stella, who were realists to the object. Both could be considered super-realists; it’s that there’re two different kinds of systems that were being dealt with. I was just interested in that question.

You began to add another interesting category. Beyond the epistemological or the ontological question, you also added this really interesting third idea, which is that you can have an emphatic response to something that’s totally modal. You can have an emphatic response to something that isn’t true or isn’t real.

Absolutely. That’s the whole basis of the fictional details. I’m pulling out a detail of something that doesn’t exist, so it’s a double thing.

It’s almost like taking an allegory and then tearing it to pieces. For example, I did a drawing of Death’s Cape in different states of physicality [PL. 26]. It was being burned, it was being torn up, it was being dumped in water, it was being stretched, it was being twisted. I did all these things with this object, and it was all taking after, say, Richard Serra, and the ways of manipulating material—you know, his list of verbs. Except what I was doing was applying this list of

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verbs to an allegory, which was exactly the opposite of what that group of artists was trying to do. They were trying to get rid of the allegorical reference, the metaphorical reference. And what I’m basically saying is that you can never get rid of it because that actual information you’re playing with is allegorical exactly because it’s not in the object; it’s being projected by you anyway. So as much as you want to separate yourself and imply that the object is a pure thing, it never is, because we’re always applying a reality onto what we’re dealing with.

It reminds me of two anecdotes, one of which is the story of Jasper Johns’ mother… …about George Washington, which I loved.1 These are little stories, which I told myself, that I heard in school, and which I tell students as well. And the other one—of course, there’re so many—from “This is Not a Pipe”: there’re just so many references to that kind of issue.

And then there’s also the idea of Glen 2 entering with his own sort of emotional life, and this strange history of people having totally emphatic or affected responses to inanimate objects or depictions, from Dorian Gray to this funny anecdote that Canova mentions in his memoirs: he discovered that there was a young boy who had come to the Musée des Beaux Arts to actually fondle one of his sculptures in sort of a weird, fetishistic way because he had fallen in love with a group of the figures. So it’s like imposing some kind of weird emotional life on an illusion.

But you know, that weird emotional life, we can’t help it. I don’t even think we know we do it when we do it—our attachments to objects and to situations that we have relationships to, that we don’t even know we have, that we participate in. You know that you like to do certain things, you like the pattern of that thing, and in a way you’re 1

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The artist’s mother, on seeing a painting of George Washington in a museum, supposedly said to her son, “Look, there’s George Washington.” Johns corrected her, replying, “No, that’s a painting of George Washington.” [PL. 11] “Glen” is the name Mullican gave to the stick figure that begins to appear in his drawings in the early 1970s, a precursor to the artist’s later, hypnosis-induced alter ego, “That Person.”

in love with that pattern of behavior, you enjoy doing whatever it is. And yet it’s just a pattern, it’s not real. I mean, it is real, but what you’re in love with is, in a sense, a reflection off of that pattern of behavior that is so beautiful.

When I first saw the Glen drawings, I was actually really moved at how quite expressive they are, and I had to take a moment to realize that there is ostensibly nothing being expressed.

Well there’s a funny thing with posture in the Glen drawings. You know, you can do that, you can get a lot out of a line that way. But then again, what is it that I’m pulling, that I’m dealing with? What’s the language that we’re dealing with here? In a sense, I’ve really learned a lot in the last five years as I’ve been dealing with this whole issue of the mirror neuron and how we project reality onto images that we see through our brains, that our brains themselves are mimicking the reality that we’re viewing. If you see two dancers on a stage, your brain somehow reproduces their brains, and the chemicals in your brain are similar to those in their brains, and thus you feel what they feel, to some extent. Not nearly to the extent that they feel it, but there is a participatory kind of response. I guess it’s this theory of empathy where your empathetic response to the situation allows you to participate within it. I mean, that’s the whole thing with sports and also pornography. If you have a live sex show on stage, it’s a lot more powerful than if it were on a screen, but it still works on the screen.

You also extrapolated that out to testing the physical limits, the actual physical reality of this completely imaginary, self-created, subjective universe, by actually conducting physical experiments.

Yeah, making it real. Burning the wood and filling the room with smoke, and flooding the space, feeling the rain, and walking in the fog, and things like this where you are in this space.

So is there a fine line between starting out with this principle and then this desire that you’ve expressed to enter the picture? Is the next logical step from this idea, this desire you’ve expressed, of “entering the pic-

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ture,” that it’s no longer just about the reality of the object but it’s also about somehow dissolving or displacing or eliminating the subject/object distinction?

It was a way of addressing this issue of reductivism that had been so prevalent in conceptual work: this minimalist point of view where things had been reduced, reduced, reduced and then one’s aware that there is a definite theatricality in that reduction. What I was interested in was accepting that theatricality and really going the exact opposite direction of it. To say that the paper itself is simply not the end result, it’s the image. And it’s not even the image, but it’s our emotional attachment to the image, it’s the way we feel in the picture or with the picture. And even going further and saying that that picture is real and that I am in that picture and it does have mass and weight and air and smell, and going the other direction totally.

I was doing it as a way to ask—for my generation at least—what are you going to do after, say, Lawrence Weiner? What are you going to do after all these artists—Joseph Kosuth—that had reduced the work and who were so aware of what they were doing when they were doing it? They were highly aware of how important what they were up to was. And then we come along and it’s all been done. The reductivist train had met its end and the artwork doesn’t even have to be made. In fact, nothing has to be made, nothing has to exist, it’s all perfect, it’s done, it’s finished, the bow is all tied up and everything’s perfect. And then we come along and we’ve gotta deal. I felt this was a way to say “Hey, it’s not so easy.”

I myself felt like this was simply a way for me to do something new.

And it really threw me straight into the psyche of the situation rather than into the physicality of it. Not the psyche in relation to the formal issue of art making but the psyche of, you might say, contemporary life. People think of me as someone who is on my mountain top doing my weird experiments with cosmology, stick figures, and symbols that all have to do with my weird subjective self. But I think of myself not in those terms at all. I think that my work really has a lot to do with contemporary life, and a lot to do with what’s happening

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out there now, and what the people are dealing with, what children are dealing with now, what my kids are dealing with in terms of the internet and how you define their world. This intertwining of virtual space and real space is getting very blurred.

There’s an interesting parallel I think also that looks backwards and forwards, which is the idea of this almost Borgesian impulse to catalog all knowledge, the attempt to parse out experience in a totalizing way, which is such an old idea, going back to the Encyclopedists.

Oh it goes so far back. It really really does. If you want to change cultures, and if you want to go into, say, the whole issue of the medicine man, in a sense they are manipulating the crowd in order to somehow reach the next plane of reality, whatever it is, in order to somehow fulfill issues that they haven’t fulfilled in this reality. Art, to a large extent—pictures, I won’t say art—picture making, the history of picture making, I think, at its core has to do with anticipating real things. If you want something to happen, you draw a picture of it and, lo and behold, it will happen.

For me it all comes down to the experience of what one is dealing with. When I was starting to do virtual reality stuff in the late 80s,3 working with these massive supercomputers and going to these conferences where people were going inside these spaces, which would later on evolve into Sim City and into—What is that Internet landscape that people go to and build houses in?

Second Life? Very Mullican-esque title, isn’t it?

Absolutely. So, when I was getting into this computer stuff, there were these people in this company, and this was in 1987–88, so it was really the beginning, and they were creating logos for CBS News, and they were creating these 3-D things that were evolving, and I saw all these different landscapes in the TVs, and I asked “So, 3

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Mullican began experimenting with early versions of computer-generated virtual reality systems in the late 1980s, creating artificial city environments such as Five into One (1991).

what’s that place called? What’s the technical term?” And they said it’s called “The World.” That is what it’s called; that’s The World. So when you’re creating something, regardless, that is The World. I had a poster that I had done less than ten years before called Mullican World, so it really applied so directly to what my interests were.

When I wanted to prove that stick figures live lives and I wanted to go into the picture, you had these people creating a landscape that I could walk into in a somehow more illusionistic way, where I’m actually looking down and around and looking up because I went straight into the virtual space. Another thing, I asked, “What are the computers called? What is the technical term?” And they called them Engines. These were the “Engines for The World,” you could say. All of their slang terms for what they were doing were so interesting to me.

It’s still such a mechanistic way of thinking, right? The metaphor is still the machine.

Yeah, it’s definitely still the machine. I remember when I made these landscapes. You could get lost in them because they were endless. You could really go far, far, far away and disappear, so lost you couldn’t find your way back. I went to Japan at this time and I remember talking to people and saying, ok, if you were to take this idea as far as you could—and it goes into these ideas in the very early notebooks—if you were to ask what is something that separates this fictional reality from our reality, I think it has to do with physical consequences of one’s self, that one felt that there was a separation, a gap. Someone like Jack Goldstein was always talking about distance, and we all talked about distance, but that distance is what really separates being in an illustrated reality versus being in a reality that can kill you, or can hurt you, or that can please you. So how do we make a virtual space that is consequential?

That was something that I was interested in, to the point of where you make a virtual space that is really indistinguishable from reality, to where there is no difference between the two. Then you go into William Gibson and all that stuff about how two realities are coexisting.

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Was your interest in hypnosis spurred by trying to collapse the distance?

Yeah, collapse the distance. Exactly. That was right on. There is a consequence. Consequence comes right in, and in the trance-state, what happens is that there is consequence, and when you see a performance of mine, you can feel it. That’s something that I’m working. That’s one of the reasons that I continue to do that, because the distance is collapsed and I have no distance on what’s happening.

Then I’m really interested in the subject matter that comes up within the trance-state.

Which is less about an outward reality and more an inward manifestation?

It’s almost like a collapsing of the mechanism of understanding, because what happened with the performances is that one is almost demonstrating the ways we get in the way of simply being where we are. So it’s, in a sense, paranoia and compulsive behaviors and schizophrenia and autism and Tourette’s and all these things that are almost chemical in how they get in the way of simply being in this beautiful place. And all that comes up in these performances.

There’s also a kind of banality that comes up in them that I find really fascinating—that you become quite interested in the performances in doing the most quotidian, banal things, and this almost desperate attempt to do them in a ritualized or specific way to get it right.

Yeah, well getting things right. He’s very much a child in that sense.

What he wants are really simple things.

Do you mean “that person”?

That person, yeah. He basically wants to exist in a consequential way and to have a beginning, middle, and end, and to have a reason, and to get things done, and to feel love, really. To love what he does. His mantra that came up in the first two years was “I love to work for truth and beauty.” [PL. 59] What does that mean? In a sense, it doesn’t

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mean anything because everything is abstract. Love is abstract.

Truth is abstract. Beauty is abstract. They’re all contextual and they don’t really mean anything. And yet, that’s what drives him. The most important word in his life is “love.” That is the most important word and it’s never been a word I’ve used in my work up until that point—and still haven’t. I only use it in the context of that person.

It’s odd because, in a way, it’s the stick figure talking. It’s the image talking. Me becoming the image, this is what the image believes in.

That’s the curious point of that transference, that it becomes about love, of all things.

The thing about that person is that there is no distance, there’s no theory. I have ideas about it, but it is almost as if one were to say what it feels like to be Glen, or to be the symbol, or to be the head and body. Well, for starters, you don’t know you’re a symbol, you don’t know you’re a head and body, you don’t know you’re a stick figure. That’s a non-issue. And that distance doesn’t exist. So what becomes important is how you feel. How that person feels, how the stick figure feels, how the head and body feels is the only thing that’s important. And so his objective reality is totally based in this kind of emotional setting and this crazy kind of desperation to be human.

To authenticate himself in a weird way.

Exactly, to authenticate himself. You can also think, What does Betty Boop do when she is being drawn by Max [Fleischer]? She talked back to the guy first and said how she liked something or how she didn’t like something, but what else? There’s an emotional kind of rapport that is created. But it’s definitely—there’s no distance.

In a way, this last group of works that have come up, it’s almost like the two—me and that person—have collapsed. My exhibition in London now is called Combination of the Two,4 which is a song by Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company. It’s a term that I’ve always been really interested in, and it’s the title of the show.

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Matt Mullican’s exhibition, Combination of the Two, was on display at the Karsten Schubert Gallery in London from October 8 to November 17, 2008.

It’s a funny show because you have the combination of the subject and then how that subject is interpreted or how that subject is represented. And that’s the combination of the two. Me and him.

And the difference between them?

I would say distance. In the end they’re very similar because I don’t have a whole lot of distance on my life and I don’t have a whole lot of distance as him either. But there is a difference in the distance from looking at him and being him. There is a difference there.

It’s interesting because that in a sense manifests itself in something I’ve noticed in a lot of your work: there’s a different hand at work, if you will. There’s a different kind of line between your own— You mean with that person’s work?

Yeah, and your own desire to catalog your own experience.

There you go, catalog my own experience as well. When he’s communicating to the audience, he sings a lot. He sings to himself and yet that’s a way he can communicate because then he is not taken to task. He is not expected to somehow make it real. He’s not going to be punished for saying the wrong thing if he’s just singing to himself. And when he’s drawing, when he’s writing, he writes in a way as if he were singing, and he does that because he doesn’t really want you to read what he’s writing. He would much prefer you to just look at the pictures and not get the other part. So he’s in between. It’s almost like a sing-songy: he’s as equally into the calligraphy as he is into the subject. The calligraphy simply is another level of expression.

Right, so it’s the literal part you were talking about before. You described the difference between, say, the reality of Richard Estes and the reality of Frank Stella.

Yeah, the super-realist kind of thing and how those two worked; that’s really important. The combination is important.

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I also want to ask you about the other side of your work that is relevant here too, which is the idea of creating your own universal language or a kind of lexicon, which both corresponds to a world, so it tries to match with a reality, but is again a kind of universal language, the idea of which also has a long history from Esperanto to Leibniz to the idea of algebraic grammar, which represents completely abstract quantities. So I’m wondering how this idea of your own sort of pictographic language came out of this set of interests. Is your own symbolic universe an attempt to make a sign system that corresponds with the reality that you became aware of through the modal logic of the drawing?

The impulse to make a language is a strong one. Kids do this all the time. Let’s make up our own language. Let’s try and get everything down in a new way because what happens is it simply separates this issue, as I said—projection—and makes it more palatable. And why does the man represent man? Because he has arms, legs, a head, and so forth. And I would break that down with the head and body, or I would break it down by separating it. One of the things I heard in school and I didn’t quite understand was that meaning itself was in language, that when we talk, when we think, that we think in words, words somehow define meaning in a way that pictures don’t, which I don’t believe. Maybe I misunderstood what the teacher said.

But the thing was that when I was kind of breaking down the symbolic forms, I was aware of how some things had meaning and some things did not. And I was trying to understand that chemistry. It had that quality about it, the chemical feeling of information.

If I’m trying to understand the parameters of what is possible in a picture, for instance, or if I was to picture say, the world reality, then here I am, ok, so let’s break it all up: we’ll have the psychological world, we’ll have the material world, and in the end—in the 80s—it became the five worlds: where you have the subjective world, the language world, the world-framed world, the world-unframed world, and you had the elemental world. It’s a way of cataloging; it’s a way of solving problems, if I’m going to be solving problems. It functions as a model to think with. And the symbols can do that; signs can do that. They’re simply there to be understood. You’re understanding it and your understanding of that understanding is also

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implied in the work itself. There’s nothing taken for granted. It’s like concrete poetry when the words are ceasing to be words and they become sounds and shapes. What happens when the symbols cease to be symbols? Well then you get into Malevich and all that, but they become something else. The impulse to somehow fill up the container, to really test the edges, to try to figure out what’s possible— I would say that anybody would want to do that. I mean, I can’t understand why you wouldn’t. If you are a physicist, you want to get to the smallest thing or the biggest thing. You want to just push the envelope to see what’s possible.

The problem is that once you see the smallest thing it totally and completely contradicts your picture of the biggest thing.

And that in a funny way is what happened with virtual reality when I did Five into One (1991) with the French Ministry of Culture.

When you’re in any one world—there are five worlds—and when you’re in the green world, all five worlds look green; when you’re in the blue world, all five worlds look blue; when you’re in the yellow world, all five worlds look yellow; and when you’re in the black-andwhite world—the language world—it all looks that way. So what happens is that each chapter defines the whole in its own image, in its own psyche. It’s a real psyche, but when you get out of that chapter, it no longer exists as a thing. So the virtual space changed as you went from one world to the next. Thus each part defined the whole through its own eyes, you could say, and thus they were five wholes as well as five parts.

We always are coming down to the fact that there is one whole, that the universe is somehow one thing in this great exaggerated idea, but it’s a million things, a billion things, a billion different universes. But we somehow always have to come down to the black and the white, and the up and the down, and the left and the right, which is a projection of course. To a large extent, that’s what my work has to do with—that kind of projection.

There’s an exhibition in Berlin called Notation at the Akademie der Künste, and it is an amazing exhibition because it is about this effort

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at understanding. So you have, for instance, Paul Klee’s drawings for his teaching—not for making art, but for teaching; they are different, they are not the same kind of thing. They’re beautiful—his regular drawings—but there’s a difference to it. A lot of the work in the show has to do with whatever it is that you do when you’re trying to get something across for yourself or for the person that you’re talking to or that you’re dealing with. It’s like a vocabulary that tries to understand things. I think that’s something that I figured out when I was doing the drawings for this show in London. I was very aware that I wasn’t just drawing. I was trying to figure this stuff out, trying to make these connections for myself. Maybe the consequence of that was that the drawings would have some vitality to them.

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Notebooks 1972–75

PL. 1

As a boy I used to wonder what the cartoon characters did when I didn’t see them on screen. I still do and if Mickey Mouse was looking around a corner did he actually see what was behind the corner. And if he hurt his foot did it really hurt. The reality of this was something for me to wonder about. And how could I cry if he was hurt and if I cried did he really hurt his foot. These questions are just coming back in my art. I’m starting to work with them. I feel there’s a lot one could do with it and see about ourselves how one could comprehend what’s happening. This also puts Lichtenstein on a whole new scale of literalism but he I think was involved in the materials the dots of a newspaper reality within unreality or vice versa. Boy oh boy, there’s just so much stuff to do and all on a piece of paper.

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PL. 2

Drawing of a chair in this room.

Which is more real? A drawing of a real chair or a drawing of an imaginary chair?

A drawing of a chair that doesn’t exist.

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PL. 3

I’m trying to get loose from the idea of working in art. I feel this to be very confusing in the way I approach the things I’m making with the source of the energy used being a set form of information, using either Drawings, Photos, Writings, Films, or any other materials I could use to formulate and summarize the information I’m working with this being art. This preoccupation with materials and processes seems to clutter up the phenomenon of what interests me. The idea of just researching the phenomenological without always trying to formulate it in terms of art. I’m just fantasizing when thinking of this for I don’t think I could do this for a while, I’ve been conditioned to be product oriented and not simply researching.

Packages are cool.

The materials and processes I’m now using happen to be classic in their history (DRAWING) but this is the only way I could do this work. So it serves two functions one being that reevaluates classical methods this being secondary and not to be considered the important aspect. The prime aspect of these has to do with the way I myself perceive my surroundings And the most important I really don’t know but when I do I guess when you can see striking similarities between myself imaging death, real death, “we’ll never see him again” and photographs of contemporary objects landscapes and such as beds, chairs, buildings, houses, trees. Each photo could be shot in or out of focus depending on the amount of objective depth I want the viewer to experience. You see the ideas I’ve just mentioned would really go very nicely on a gallery wall. This tends to be always in the back of my mind. I don’t seem to mind it.

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PL. 4

What you see, hear, feel, smell, taste is essentially where you are outside of your body. But this is not true in that our reality beyond our senses is conceptualized according to our senses. And if our memory was in at one time the present and perceiving means that memory and conceptual information also had a great deal to do with today’s reality. Mostly what I do is trust that when I see something I trust that it’s real and to do that I interject the smell through what I hope to be a leafy smell, this being illusion. In movies, books we conceptualize most all of our senses, this being imagination through words.

I at a certain level can work with these problems but it doesn’t seem to be using written words. I work better with 3D 2D examples of the ideas, illustrations that illustrate themselves.

I feel a great advantage in not being too explicit and not getting too far from the action I’m working with.

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PL. 5

As I can see it one of the most important things in drawing up till now was the process, this being style, draftsmanship, execution, shading, “how to draw.� Then came what to draw on and with, pencil, pen, charcoal, wash, paint, on paper, canvas. Each one of these materials had a set process behind it, so conceptually one made the decision to draw with an instrument and then prepared how to use it.

So what you’re drawing on the paper is the connection of the materials and the process or the jamming of these two concepts.

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PL. 6

There is a different gap between the reality of the subjective universe and the objective universe in which illusion can be considered more real than the actual objective reality, and which is the more real of the two?

This is as close as I’ve gotten to what my drawings are about in written form.

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PL. 7

In my drawings I’m making or creating an alternative subjective universe that can be only interpreted by my subjective eyes and it exists in the objective outside my body. Then for all I know the universe existing in the drawings does exist. This is a dangerous question. It questions our physical reality and how flimsily it’s put together with trust.

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PL. 8

The history of my drawings Is that they’re more conceptual than they are esthetic. I’ve been thinking about them much more than doing them. Tonight I started again doing them. I’m more pessimistic about them now. Why am I drawing them when a lot of the ideas can exist in the photographic medium? I ask that question.

The parts of the drawings Are 1. The frame: The section of the drawing that borders the unreal with the supposedly real. It sets up a subjective, objective universe within the drawing space. This space being purely within itself, no real objects are related except paper and pencil which is as minimal as drawing as object is fairly obscure.

The drawing: The idea of using the drawing as a medium has two advantages as I can see it. First historically it’s fairly neutral it’s not avant-garde medium but the way I’m using it (illustration as an end) is pretty untried as radical in terms of the avant-garde. It’s liked by people. It exploits the subject matter rather than the process.

Illustrations’ process are not the highpoint of their existence especially Art. The idea of producing objects in the drawing frame that could never be built except in the medium of drawing. Drawing out memories, etcetera, illustrating fantasies in a setting of the drawing space. Using the drawing psychological space to do things interests me. There are two ways of looking at them there’s the historical and how the drawings relate to past art and how they change it, and the idea of setting up an actual objective space to do things a place to show Art. Carry out experiments, fall asleep, interests me also, almost more than the historical way of doing things.

The fictional aspect: The idea the physical reality is based only on the drawings and that the objects shown don’t exist outside the frame gives them a personal reality of themselves an actuality that is in correspondence to the frame. The transition of symbol to object where the symbol doesn’t represent anything interests me. When you draw

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an objective fictional object the drawing is much more real in itself.

The unseen part: How does the inside of the frame relate to outside the frame in the same subjective place. What’s behind this wall? The sound of the cars outside. A sharp pain in the character’s stomach.

Heavy humidity. All the unseen aspects of the space on the paper that exist more on the conceptual level than in reality. I’m interested in the unseen outside the present frame of time and space.

The constant stage: I’ve set up a corner in space to plan out the ideas I’m interested in. First the elements of its reality. A constant story like element in a full 50 drawings. A constant part of the drawings.

Its reality is strengthened from drawing to drawing a pictorial space where lots of things can happen. I don’t know about the reality of the corner that much. It seems to clutter up the space like when I draw the fictional furniture there is a 3D corner of a studio space that already has a certain amount of space. Drop it or leave it. It looks too surreal for me also I dropped the clock from the drawings.

Impact: The drawings aren’t impressive they look like Art and rather dull art at that. They haven’t changed the mechanical way of drawing as much as the conceptual this being a second generation level they’re more difficult to get and get beyond the way they look. I’d like the way they look to have something to do with what they’re saying.

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PL. 9

A basic problem is that my head goes much faster than my head goes much faster than my hand, or faster than I want my hand to go. A conflict that is impressively grueling with the drawings. My ideas have progressed a lot further than the drawings and my current excitement is in the ideas not the drawing out of odd ideas so the old drawings lose a certain energy that the new ideas have so what I’m trying to do is make it so that the old and new are the same thing.

This means that I have to go through the trash of my old ideas which I feel I should do to keep the set of drawing ideas together. My drawing skill is also what I think the drawings demand and that’s also frustrating. I have to draw a lot more in order to get the drawings done perfectly and I’ll never consider them finished until their considered perfect.

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PL. 10

Drawing – 1. I have thought of the different realities I exist in and one of those is my imagination. It’s an old drawing two months ago but still exists in my head its drawing objects of my imagination of things then they’re exhibited in a space I’ve created on the page such as my 14min deep sound I draw my perception or interpretation of what a deep sound would look like time changed to actual physical length. I could do 3 or 4 drawings of my interpretation of sounds in this space. These are exciting to me. Then I could exhibit things from my imagination my memory and my interpretation of the future.

2. I’ve been doing these drawings for some time they’re abstract information of actual physical phenomena and deal with illustrating my abstract interpretation of them. They have a subtle reference to Dada in their execution.

43

PL. 11

Now its 4 days later and I’m thinking about the personality of symbols, the personality of objects. Another thing is how the photo of me in several photos, dead, dead, out of focus shots of my immediate environment to the drawings and so on. But right now I’m going to get into Jasper John’s mother’s head and use her way of looking at things. Okay she sees George Washington well we could ask the personality of him ask about the extensions of both the time frame and space frame in the picture. She could have an active conversation, she could get into the frame and talk to him and look around describing what she saw. The two things that come from this are that if she does this to the extreme she would be considered mad, such as talking with yourself. But then if she really goes into the space and starts describing things as if she was really there people would start paying attention. As I’m writing this I’m amazed that I’ve done these things without really trying to stick to them. I’ve stuck to the first pieces.

Only I could go real eccentric and have a really long thing with a picture. I would tape it with me it would be a very basic performance it would be a real relationship between personalities.

Oh I’m reminded of an idea that I want to impress on the people in several different drawings of the same object. Is the object different in each drawing or is it not? And what about several drawings of the fictional objects. Let’s explore that problem. In the first question my answer is that all the drawings are different and the object is the same. The object being drawn and the drawings of the object exist on a different level even on the paper itself. Well what about the different drawings of the fictional object? The object doesn’t exist outside the frame but it’s different in each drawing but it is the same object.

These could be brought into total paradox with this idea.

45

Plates

PL. 12

Untitled, 1972

PL. 13

Untitled (Real object in box), 1973

PL. 14

Untitled (Fictitious object in box), 1973

PL. 15

Untitled (Real object one foot outside frame), 1974

PL. 16

Untitled (Fictitious object one foot outside frame), 1974

PL. 17

Untitled, 1974

PL. 18

Untitled, 1974

PL. 19

Untitled, 1974

PL. 20

Untitled (Stick Figure Drawing), 1974

PL. 21

Untitled, 1974

PL. 22

Untitled (Magnets, an electromagnet) from the Fictional Reality, Physical Experiments series, 1974–75

PL. 23

Untitled (Mirror reflecting things outside the frame) from the Fictional Reality, Physical Experiments series, 1974–75

PL. 24

Untitled (Magnets and magnetism you can see a magnetic field) from the Fictional Reality, Physical Experiments series, 1975

PL. 25

Untitled from the Fictional Reality series, 1975

PL. 26

Untitled (Object under cloth) from the Fictional Reality series, 1975

PL. 27

Untitled from the Fictional Reality series, 1975

PL. 28

Untitled (Fictional Landscape) from the Fictional Reality series, 1975

PL. 29

Untitled (Where am I? What sort of place is this?) from the Fictional Reality series, 1975

PL. 30

Essex (Details from an Imaginary Life from Birth to Death), 1975

PL. 31

Untitled, 1975

PL. 32

Untitled, 1975

PL. 33

Untitled, 1975

PL. 34

Untitled, 1975–76

PL. 35

Untitled, 1977

PL. 36

Untitled, 1977

PL. 37

Untitled, 1977

PL. 38

Untitled, 1978

PL. 39

Untitled, 1978

PL. 40

Untitled, 1978

PL. 41

Untitled, 1978

PL. 42

Untitled, 1978

PL. 43

Untitled, 1981

PL. 44

Untitled, 1981

PL. 45

Untitled, 1981

PL. 46

Untitled, 1982

PL. 47

Untitled, 1982

PL. 48

Untitled, 1982

PL. 49

Untitled, 1982

PL. 50

Untitled, 1982

PL. 51

Untitled (Painted Big Chart), 1984

PL. 52

Untitled, 1984

PL. 53

Untitled, 1985

PL. 54

Untitled, 1985

PL. 55

Untitled from the World Frame series, 1993

PL. 56

Untitled, 1995

PL. 57

Untitled, 1965–2000

PL. 58

Untitled, 2004

PL. 59

Untitled, 2006

LIST OF WORKS

Notebook, n.d.

Details from an Imaginary Universe, 1973

12 5/8 x 9 3/8 inches

Collage on paper 12 x 17 inches

Notebook, n.d.

12 5/8 x 9 3/8 inches

Untitled, 1973 Marker on paper

Notebook, n.d.

12 3/8 x 8 inches

9 3/4 x 7 1/2 inches PL. 14

Notebook (The Elements and Structure of the

Untitled (Fictitious object in box), 1973

Physical Sciences), n.d.

Ink on paper

9 1/4 x 6 3/8 inches

14 x 17 inches

Untitled, n.d.

Untitled (Gravity, 50 Pounds), 1973

Ink on paper

Ink on paper

22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches

14 x 17 inches Courtesy of Mai 36 Galerie

Untitled, n.d.

Acrylic and graphite on paper

Untitled (Having a Broken Arm, Bones), 1973

19 5/8 x 25 1/2 inches

Ink on paper 14 x 17 inches

Notebook (Concepts and Ideas), 1971

Courtesy of Mai 36 Galerie

10 1/4 x 7 3/4 inches PL. 13 PL. 12

Untitled (Real object in box), 1973

Untitled, 1972

Ink on paper

Collage

14 x 17 inches

22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches Untitled (Smelling His Own Body), 1973 PL. 1–2

Ink, pencil on paper

Notebook, 1972–73

14 x 17 inches Courtesy of Mai 36 Galerie

Details from a Fictional Reality, 1973 Collage on paper

Dead Stick Figure, 1974

24 parts, 8 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches each

DVD Courtesy of Tracy Williams Ltd.

110

His Bronchi, Untitled (Stick Figure Drawing),

Taking Precautionary Measures, Untitled (Stick

1974

Figure Drawing), 1974

Ink on paper

Ink on paper

14 x 8 1/2 inches

14 x 8 1/2 inches

Courtesy of Tracy Williams Ltd.

Courtesy of Tracy Williams Ltd.

His Identity, Untitled (Stick Figure Drawing),

PL. 17

1974

Untitled, 1974

Ink on paper

Marker on paper

14 x 8 1/2 inches

11 x 14 inches

Courtesy of Tracy Williams Ltd. PL. 18

Is He Impulsive, Untitled (Stick Figure Drawing),

Untitled, 1974

1974

Ink on paper

Ink on paper

8 1/2 x 11 inches

14 x 8 1/2 inches Courtesy of Tracy Williams Ltd.

PL. 19

Untitled, 1974 Scared of Certain Animals, Untitled (Stick Figure

Marker on paper

Drawing), 1974

17 x 13 1/2 inches

Ink on paper 14 x 8 1/2 inches

PL. 21

Courtesy of Tracy Williams Ltd.

Untitled, 1974 Ink on paper

Secondary Appraisal of the Action, Untitled

8 1/2 x 11 inches

(Stick Figure Drawing), 1974 Ink on paper

PL. 16

14 x 8 1/2 inches

Untitled (Fictitious object one foot outside frame),

Courtesy of Tracy Williams Ltd.

1974 Ink on paper

The Speech Center in the Brain, Untitled

14 x 17 inches

(Stick Figure Drawing), 1974 Ink on paper

PL. 15

14 x 8 1/2 inches

Untitled (Real object one foot outside frame), 1974

Courtesy of Tracy Williams Ltd.

Ink on paper 14 x 17 inches

111

PL. 20

PL. 30

Untitled (Stick Figure Drawing), 1974

Essex (Details from an Imaginary Life from Birth

Ink and pencil on paper

to Death), 1975

50 parts, 13 7/8 x 8 1/2 inches each

Marker on paper

Courtesy of Mai 36 Galerie

14 x 51 inches

PL. 3–11

PL. 31

Notebook, 1973–75

Untitled, 1975

14 1/4 x 8 3/4 inches

Ink on paper 28 1/2 x 22 1/2 inches

Untitled (God creating gravity), 1974–75 Ink on paper

PL. 33

22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches

Untitled, 1975 Ink on paper

PL. 22

22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches

Untitled (Magnets, an electromagnet) from the Fictional Reality, Physical Experiments series,

Untitled, 1975

1974–75

Ink on paper

Ink on paper

22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches

22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches Untitled, 1975 PL. 23

Ink on paper

Untitled (Mirror reflecting things outside the frame)

22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches

from the Fictional Reality, Physical Experiments series, 1974–75

Untitled, 1975

Ink on paper

Ink on paper

22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches

22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches

Untitled (Object That Could Hurt Me), from the

PL. 32

Fictional Reality, Physical Experiments series,

Untitled, 1975

1974–75

Ink on paper

Ink on paper

11 x 17 inches

22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches Courtesy of Mai 36 Galerie

112

Untitled, 1975

PL. 26

Ink on paper

Untitled (Object under cloth) from the Fictional

22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches

Reality series, 1975 Ink on paper

PL. 25

22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches

Untitled from the Fictional Reality series, 1975 Ink on paper

PL. 29

22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches

Untitled (Where am I? What sort of place is this?), from the Fictional Reality series, 1975

PL. 27

Ink on paper

Untitled from the Fictional Reality series, 1975

22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches

Ink on paper 22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches

PL. 34

Untitled, 1975–76 Untitled (Drawing of what the man sees) from the

Ink on paper

Fictional Reality series, 1975

8 1/2 x 11 inches

Ink on paper

Courtesy of Mai 36 Galerie

22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches Notebook (Dance, Music, Theater), 1977 PL. 28

12 x 9 1/4 inches

Untitled (Fictional Landscape) from the Fictional Reality series, 1975

PL. 37

Ink on paper

Untitled, 1977

22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches

Colored pencil on paper 22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches

Untitled (Hair over my eyes) from the Fictional Reality series, 1975

PL. 35

Ink on paper

Untitled, 1977

28 1/2 x 22 3/4 inches

Ink on paper 29 x 23 inches

PL. 24

Untitled (Magnets and magnetism you can see a

Untitled, 1977

magnetic field) from the Fictional Reality, Physical

Marker on paper

Experiments series, 1975

22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches

Ink on paper 22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches

113

PL. 36

Notebook, 1979

Untitled, 1977

8 3/4 x 4 3/4 inches

Graphite on paper 14 x 17 inches

Untitled, 1980 Sign paint on paper

Notebook, 1978

50 x 38 inches

14 1/4 x 8 3/4 inches Untitled, 1980 PL. 38

Sign paint on paper

Untitled, 1978

59 1/4 x 42 inches

Oil stick on paper 22 1/8 x 30 inches

Notebook, 1981 8 1/2 x 6 1/8 inches

PL. 39

Untitled, 1978

Untitled, 1981

Oil stick on paper

Colored pencil on paper

22 1/8 x 30 inches

15 x 18 inches

PL. 40

PL. 43

Untitled, 1978

Untitled, 1981

Oil stick on paper

Acrylic paint on paper

22 1/8 x 30 inches

21 x 21 inches

PL. 41

PL. 44

Untitled, 1978

Untitled, 1981

Marker on paper

Acrylic paint on paper

22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches

21 x 21 inches

PL. 42

PL. 45

Untitled, 1978

Untitled, 1981

Marker on paper

Ink on paper

22 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches

22 1/2 x 30 inches

Untitled, 1978

PL. 47

Marker on paper

Untitled, 1982

8 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches

Oil paint on paper 28 5/8 x 22 5/8 inches

114

PL. 48

Untitled, 1984

Untitled, 1982

Sign paint on paper

Oil paint on paper

59 1/4 x 42 inches

22 5/8 x 28 5/8 inches

Courtesy of Tracy Williams Ltd.

PL. 49

Untitled, 1984

Untitled, 1982

Sign paint on paper

Oil paint on paper

59 1/4 x 42 inches

22 5/8 x 28 5/8 inches

Courtesy of Tracy Williams Ltd.

Untitled, 1982

PL. 51

Oil paint on paper

Untitled (Painted Big Chart), 1984

22 5/8 x 28 5/8 inches

Marker on paper 109 x 41 1/2 inches

PL. 50

Courtesy of Tracy Williams Ltd.

Untitled, 1982 Oil paint on paper

Notebook, 1985

19 3/4 x 14 inches

7 1/4 x 8 1/8 inches

PL. 46

PL. 54

Untitled, 1982

Untitled, 1985

Oil paint on paper

Gouache

19 3/4 x 13 3/4 inches

12 x 47 inches

Untitled (Hypnosis Drawings), 1982

PL. 53

Ink on paper

Untitled, 1985

3 parts, 107 x 60 inches each

Oil paint on paper 18 x 24 inches

Notebook, 1983 11 1/4 x 8 1/2 inches

Untitled, 1988 Silkscreen/etching

PL. 52

22 x 15 inches

Untitled, 1984 Ink on paper

Untitled, 1988

30 1/4 x 22 1/2 inches

Silkscreen/etching 22 x 15 inches

115

Untitled (Excerpts from the Dallas Projects:

Untitled, 1999

Language), 1988

Marker on paper

Oil stick on paper

36 x 24 inches

20 works, 20 x 20 inches each, 80 x 100 inches overall

Untitled, 1999

Courtesy of Tracy Williams Ltd.

Marker on paper 36 x 24 inches

Notebook (Working on a computer project), 1989 12 1/4 x 7 1/4 inches

Untitled, 1999 Marker on paper

Notebook, 1991

36 x 24 inches

9 3/4 x 7 3/4 inches PL. 57

Untitled, 1992

Untitled, 1965–2000

Computer print

Mixed media on board

12 x 8 1/4 inches

96 x 48 inches Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art,

PL. 55

Los Angeles

Untitled from the World Frame series, 1993 11 parts, 8 1/2 x 11 inches each

Untitled (Matt Mullican Under Hypnosis: Zurich),

Courtesy of Mai 36 Galerie

2003 Video, DVD-R, PAL

Notebook, 1994

70 minutes

12 x 8 1/4 inches

AP: 1/4, Edition of 16 + 4AP Courtesy of Tracy Williams Ltd.

PL. 56

Untitled, 1995

PL. 58

Graphite on paper

Untitled, 2004

17 1/2 x 10 inches

Marker on paper 31 x 23 1/2 inches

Untitled (Bulletin Board of Working Database Material), 1995

Untitled, 2004

Mixed media on bulletin board

Marker on paper

96 1/4 x 48 1/4 x 2 inches

23 1/2 x 31 inches

Courtesy of Mai 36 Galerie

116

Notebook, 2005 12 3/8 x 8 3/8 inches Untitled, 2006 Mixed media on bulletin boards 2 boards, 96 x 48 x 3 inches each Courtesy of Tracy Williams Ltd. PL. 59

Untitled, 2006 Marker on paper 11 x 8 1/2 inches Three Suitcases of Truth, Love and Beauty, 2006 Wood and metal trunk containing 2 pillows and 9 sheets collaged with ink on paper drawings 9 sheets, 103 x 89 inches each Trunk, 37 1/2 x 31 x 13 1/2 inches Published in an edition of 3 by Christine Burgin, New York Untitled (Learning from That Person’s Work), 2008 Ink and paper collage on bedsheet 96 x 48 inches each Courtesy of Tracy Williams Ltd. List of works in formation at time of publication. All works courtesy of the artist unless noted otherwise.

All plates photographed by Cathy Carver except PLS. 20, 30, 34, 51, 55, 57.

Cover: “Under Hypnosis,” The Kitchen, New York. Photograph © Paula Court, New York.

117

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Frances Beatty Adler Co-Chairman

The Drawing Center’s 2008–2009 exhibitions

Eric C. Rudin Co-Chairman

and public programs are made possible, in part,

Dita Amory

with the generous support of the Carnegie

Melva Bucksbaum

Corporation, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation,

Suzanne Cochran

and with public funds from the New York State

Anita F. Contini

Council on the Arts, a State agency.

Frances Dittmer Bruce W. Ferguson Barry M. Fox Stacey Goergen Michael Lynne* Iris Z. Marden

Special thanks to Tracy Williams Ltd., New York

George Negroponte

and Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich.

Lisa Pevaroff-Cohn Elizabeth Rohatyn* Jane Dresner Sadaka Allen Lee Sessoms Jeanne C. Thayer* Barbara Toll Candace Worth Brett Littman Executive Director *Emeriti

E D WA R D H A L L A M T U C K P U B L I C AT I O N P R O G R A M

This is number 82 of the Drawing Papers, a series of publications documenting The Drawing Center’s exhibitions and public programs and providing a forum for the study of drawing.

Jonathan T. D. Neil Executive Editor Joanna Berman Ahlberg Managing Editor Designed by Peter J. Ahlberg / AHL & COMPANY This book is set in Adobe Garamond Pro and Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk.

It was printed by BookMobile in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

L I B R A R Y O F C O N G R E S S C O N T R O L N U M B E R : 2 0 0 8 9 4 0 7 91 I S B N 9 7 8 - 0 - 9 4 2 3 24 - 0 3 -7 © 2 0 0 8 T H E D R AW I N G C E N T E R I M A G E S © M AT T M U L L I C A N

THE D R AWI N G CENTER

35 WOOSTER STREET N E W YO R K , N Y 10 013 T 212 219 216 6 F 212 9 6 6 2 9 76 W W W . D R AW I N G C E N T E R . O R G

T H E D R AW I N G PA P E R S S E R I E S A L S O I N C L U D E S

Drawing Papers 81 Greta Magnusson Grossman: Furniture and Lighting Drawing Papers 80 Kathleen Henderson: What if I Could Draw a Bird that Could Change the World?

Drawing Papers 79 Rirkrit Tiravanija: Demonstration Drawings Drawing Papers 77 Frederick Kiesler: Co-Realities Drawing Papers 73 Alan Saret: Gang Drawings Drawing Papers 61 Eva Hesse: Circles & Grids Drawing Papers 57 Persistent Vestiges: Drawing from the American-Vietnam War Drawing Papers 52 Nasreen Mohamedi: Lines among Lines Drawing Papers 51 3 x Abstraction: Homage to Agnes Martin Drawing Papers 49 Richard Tuttle: Manifesto Drawing Papers 40 Mark Lombardi: Global Networks Drawing Papers 29 Ellsworth Kelly: A Conversation Drawing Papers 14 Henri Michaux: Emergences/Resurgences

T O O R D E R , A N D F O R A C O M P L E T E C ATA L O G O F PA S T E D I T I O N S , V I S I T D R AW I N G C E N T E R . O R G

D R AW I N G PA P E R S 8 2

$18.00 US

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