FONS ÀUDIO #36
Matt Mullican
Using both autobiographical strategies and complex systems for classifying the world, Matt Mullican (Santa Monica, California, 1951) explores the different ways in which subjectivity manufactures and organises reality. His work is an architecture of practices built up over the years, assembled with different languages such as drawing, video, installation, architecture, and performance.
The desire to enter images –to break through the surface of matter so that content can become inhabitable space– is a key to understanding his early performances under hypnosis, the emergence of characters such as the stick figure Glenn, and his groundbreaking city simulation and virtual reality projects.
‘M.I.T. Project’ (1990-2009), a work from the MACBA Collection, began as a spatial adaptation of one of Mullican’s cosmologies. It consists of a quasi-architectural three-dimensional space divided into five compartments, with a series of objects systematically arranged in each, as in a cabinet of curiosities. Each section is organised according to a colour code. The green zone is ‘the elemental world’, for example, containing minerals, mounted butterflies, embalmed animals, and a human skeleton.
The red zone, symmetrically opposite, is ‘the subjective’ realm and sets up a kind of ideal polar opposite in which there is no matter, only pure meaning. The three remaining spaces are like steps from form to content, and focus on the in-between stages of ‘the iconic’ (black and white), ‘the world framed’ (yellow) and ‘the world unframed’ (blue), which includes a giant flag, a steam engine, and a boiler.
Mullican’s work runs through him in first person. He uses himself as a medium, while keeping his distance from simple biographical dramatisation. He approaches his unconscious as a found object. In the videos ‘Matt Mullican under hypnosis’ (1996) and ‘Untitled -Matt Mullican under hypnosis: Zurich’ (2003), also in the MACBA Collection, he goes on stage and improvises under the effects of a hypnotist. Over the years, this recurring practice led to the emergence of “that person”, a multifaceted entity of indefinite age and gender, a lover of beauty, coffee, and everyday rituals who has the capacity to disrupt any taxonomy or rational ordering system.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Rogelio López Cuenca that we were unable to include the first time around.
Manolo Laguillo
Manolo Laguillo is a photographer, essayist and professor of photography in the Fine Arts Faculty, Universitat de Barcelona. His stark, deserted urban representations illustrate processes of change in the contemporary metropolis. In FONS AUDIO #37 Manolo Laguillo talks about his methods of working with large format cameras, about his walks in the city outskirts, about puddles, asphalt and ruins, about the qualities of colour and black and white, the sensuality of prints on paper, and the links between music and photography.
Ignasi Aballí
From obsessive classifications to anti-paintings, from a constant probing of the role of the spectator to imperceptible modifications, Ignasi Aballí’s work is both hermetic and accessible. A delicate balance between concept and form that draws inspiration from everyday life, literature and film in order to talk about absences, filters, fictions and limits.
Rogelio López Cuenca
Rogelio López Cuenca looks back at some of the key aspects that led to the creation of three works now in the MACBA Collection: 'No (W) here Postcards' (1998), 'Beaux Arts' (1992), and 'Musée Élan' (1989).
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Matt Mullican that we were unable to include the first time around.
Patricia Dauder
Patricia Dauder creates essential structures as a result of long-term work processes that allow her to set up a fluctuating dialogue between observation of the physical world, experimentation with matter, and the analysis of systems of representation. In FONS AUDIO #35 Patricia Dauder uses the work Model #1 as a springboard into her creative process and into aspects such as travelling, ruins, colours, textures, and other interests that shape her cosmologies.