To its own surprise, Matt Mullican’s new body of work is vibrantly colored. A departure and a release of sorts is also his most laborious work to date. Produced in his Berlin studio, “August 9, 1908” consists of very large rubbing paintings, a technique he has been using since the early 1980s. A first rubbing transfers the image to be painted; a second rubbing draws contours around the painted areas with an oil stick. Below, the artist describes his painstaking process, how the project came about, and how it fits into his work as a whole. “August 9, 1908” remains on view at Peter Freeman, Inc, in New York until April 15. On April 1 at 5 p.m., the gallery will host a live performance during which the artist will have breakfast in a state of trance.
I WORKED WITH LITTLE NEMO for about three years, and I’ve been working with cartoons for fifty years. In 1973, I was cutting details out of comics, mostly romance comics rather than superhero comics. It wasn’t so much the subject that interested me, but the location: the city it’s in, the house you’re in, the air you breathe, the gravity pulling you down, the light reflecting off the trees, the smell of early morning. If Superman flies through the air, I’m more interested in the air he goes through than whether he can fly.
I was born in 1951. I grew up with the first generation of television in the late 50s and early 60s. Cartoons like Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse were part of my childhood. Growing up, I questioned the reality of these characters, and in the early 70s I became interested in the lives these characters represented. It is about feeling and participating in the performance. What is it like to enter the picture, to enter this house and to go up to the rooms, to a house that you really don’t know? In these images, Little Nemo is in his room. He shouts to his friend Pip in the garden: CCome on, my mom made us breakfast and you are welcome to eat with us! Pip enters the house and Nemo’s mother serves them porridge. She says, This cereal will do you good, it will make you fat. The drawings are very regulated, the table is set, there is a grid on the wall behind them. It’s all at right angles and well planted. There are twelve frames on this page, which appeared in the Sunday Herald column. The date is August 9, 1908. As they eat, Nemo and Pip grow bigger and bigger, and in the fourth frame, their chairs have broken. In picture six or seven, they fall to the ground. The following image is seen from the lower floor: they are falling through the living room with the objects falling with them. The salon has pictures, vases, a clock; it has ornaments, so it’s not utilitarian. It’s aesthetic, and they crush that. The field was destroyed. In the next image, they go through a hole in the ground, they crash into the basement. It’s total abstraction now. Everything is upside down, and they go through a hole in the ground. They crumble into the ground, you see their feet sticking out, with the whole house behind them. The last image is the mother looking at the rubble saying, Oh my god what are you kids doing now, the whole place is destroyed. In the last panel, Little Nemo wakes up; he fell off his bed.
It’s really about the material of things taking over. It’s about gravity, about matter exploding, that’s one of the reasons I was drawn to this comic. Another is that in his representation of abstraction, everything is equalized. You have pieces of walls, pieces of furniture, pieces of artwork, pieces of everything, all doing the same thing: disappearing and falling. We are in 1908, the beginning of cubism. This comic comes from Central America, the Sunday comedies, and yet it represents a new world: the Freudian analysis of dreams was barely ten years earlier; Einstein’s theory of relativity was happening at the same time. That was before Mondrian and Kandinsky broke it all down. The other touchstones I want to mention are Bruce Nauman’s video Tony sinks into the ground, face up and face down1973, and Alighiero Boetti All1987–88, where everything in the picture plane is delineated.
When I was a student at CalArts, there were two notions of superreality. One was about the object – a superrealist would be someone like Frank Stella, Donald Judd or Robert Ryman, the object being all there is. The other type was superrealist painting, like Richard Estes, Chuck Close, and all those people who did photographic looking works. You had these two representations: the object and the image. I wasn’t so much interested in the shape, but in the understanding or the feeling of seeing that shape. Not in what I look in a photo, but in how I feel.
This show was a monster to do. All colors had to be masked separately. All of the reds, all of the blues, all of the blacks, all of the yellows, all of the oranges, all of the purples, all of it: every color in every image has to be masked. Once masked, it is rubbed in relief under the canvas. The surface is lively because the friction is picked up on the structure of the canvas. The whole show is basically a work, a page of this comic. In that sense, it’s very different from the last show, where I had generators, flags, prints, drawings. Usually my colors have meaning – green represents the natural world, blue represents our collective world, yellow represents cultural setting, black represents language, and red represents subjective experience. Here, the colors have no associative meaning. They really have to do with the collapse of the system of understanding through the light that you look at.
I participated in an exhibition of “painting” in my life. One. I have done hundreds of paintings, exhibited in many, many exhibitions, but I am not a painter. I have a cosmology. I work with virtual reality. Painting as such does not interest me. I don’t think Mondrian was a formalist in that sense: I don’t think the subject of what he was doing was painting. It’s about the world. I am a symbolist if there ever was one. Symbolism goes back to the beginnings of art. I am anything but the object. Because as Philip Guston said, painting is of the mind, as Leonardo said, painting is of the mind. And yet there I was, on the first wall of Pictures Generation at the Met [“The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984,” 2009]. I was there only because I use the word “image” in my work. What interests me a lot is not the object of the image but the psyche of the image, the psychic relationship to the image. I first captured an image during a performance at Project Inc. in 1973. I put my mind to it and immediately it was 11am. I was fourteen, and it had rained the night before, and I was describing what it was like to be in that photo, at that time, to an audience. This Peter Freeman show opened in March 2023, and Glen, my stickman, was born in March 1973 – my first foray into the fantasy world.
– As said to Laura Hoffman
