Untitled, 1986 - 1987

Basel 2018
Untitled

Georg Kargl Fine Arts

Installation
french antique glass, etched, unique, set of 4 (43 x 43 cm each)
44.0 x 380.0 x 5.0 （厘米）
17.3 x 149.6 x 2.0 （吋）
Matt Mullican's parallel universes have been emerging since the early 1970s as a sociological anthropology of unconscious processes of everyday life. Central to his work is the systematization, structuring, and ordering of personal worldviews that oscillate between subject and object, between a personal and universal worldview. In his multi-medial works, Mullican tries to grant language a significance that goes beyond its code, lending it a transparence in the use of images. In doing so, the symbolic basis of representation is not indicated by a sign system, but by objects that define the space as the experience of physical relations. His most compelling performances are done under hypnosis and are explorations of the soul leaving the body to live the lives of others: a successful business man, a child, a woman. In order to chart all his different experiences and observations, he uses methods of encyclopedic categorization and archiving, cosmological models, as well as plates of historical signs and other sign systems, to frame archetypical issues like heaven, God, life, destiny, material, spirit, death and hell which are standing alongside one another and are given no moral evaluation. In this unique installation of four glass elements from 1986/87, some of these signs are etched into the material and open up the artist's structural way of thinking. In its complexity, Mullican's work contains a tragic moment - the hopeless attempt to classify the world.