Matt Mullican
Subject Driven
Performance — Feb 4, 2018
- Price
- €3,- (excluding entrance fee)
- Location
- Stedelijk Museum Teijin Auditorium
- Time
- Feb 4, 2018, 2 pm until 4 pm
- Main language
- English
- Admission
- Tickets
SUBJECT DRIVEN
Subject Driven is an installation including typography, drawings, maps, paintings, video, found objects, and printed matter. These hundreds of items are arranged according to various categorizations, most notably color. Not only are the five rooms color-coded throughout, the five colors also assign meaning to elements that would otherwise appear neutral: green represents materiality, blue refers to everyday life, yellow to ideas, black to language, and red to the domain of the subjective. Despite its intrinsic resistance to interpretation or overt “theoretization,” this allencompassing work functions as a Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, in which cultural codes and signals that we normally take for granted can be recognized, read, and perhaps even deciphered.
MORE ABOUT THE ARTIST
Since the 1970s, American artist Matt Mullican has worked with the concept of communication systems – particularly language, symbols, and visual signage such as pictograms – and the intuitions that underlie our conscious perception of the world. His immense installation Subject Driven (completed in 2008) features an overwhelming amount of images and objects, ordered into subcollections in an almost encyclopedic manner. Mullican describes the result as a cosmology: a world of its own, or perhaps a mini-museum dedicated to artifacts from a world similar but not identical to late 20th-century Western society. The world invoked here is imbued with a “hidden” logic that makes familiar patterns of communication visible yet alienating. Mullican has also created many works and performances under hypnosis, similarly seeking to “tap into” our subconscious understanding of the phenomena that surround us all. Born in 1951 in Santa Monica, California, Mullican received his BFA from CalArts in 1974, and rose to prominence as a member of the Pictures Generation.
