Mullican Under Hypnosis, a conversation

KH: As an introduction, I’d like to give a brief description of the stage from my memory. I interpreted this design as the frame for a lose script or a choreography, performed under hypnosis. Before Matt Mullican entered the stage, I remember seeing a backdrop of large scale paper covering the back wall, a simple desk and a chair. On the desk, we found supplies for brewing fresh coffee, a newspaper, and paint supplies. A blanked had been thrown over the chair. There might have been some more items and pillows on the floor.

Matt Mullican came in, holding on tightly to a bundled up blanket and a sketch book. As the performance unfolded, I was able to make out a rough script. I interpret this script as: A day in an artist’s life: Artist just got up, makes coffee, reads the news, makes art, reflects on what he created, and goes to sleep. Then, he left the stage.

ZR:
We've all seen Mathew Mullican's Hypnosis piece or a version of it so just a few thoughts immediately: the opening conceit is that the performance is done under hypnosis, this information is in both the gallery print and is widely known, yet my first impression of him as a performer was not of a man under hypnosis - which is immediately interesting for a number of reasons, the first of which is that I don't have any idea what hypnosis looks like! Yet, because of the format, I'm suddenly in a position where every action/sound/behavior is thrown into question: is it or isn't it really hypnosis? As someone watching this it is both interesting and a distraction - because what he's doing is very compelling to watch.

KH:
That's interesting. It might be safe to say that most spectators from the art audience don't know what hypnosis looks like, either. I certainly don't. From this angle, the piece turns the mirror onto the audience, and their assumption of “the subconscious” and “artist as creator”.

Let's take the process of art creation: Indeed, right in front of me I saw take shape of what I heard before, myths of the artist genius as a creator: The angry man turned child when playfully executing his work, followed by existential crisis. If I saw this as a theater play, I would walk out not having learned anything.

But here, the hypnosis seems to guarantee authenticity. And I find myself admiring Matt Mullican for his courage and taking a genuine risk to expose his basic emotions to a quite possibly cynical audience.

AC:
It is certainly a risk to lay bare for an audience one's inner dialogues and processes, as it appears the hypnosis does. From an artistic standpoint, though, I would also argue that it releases one from a certain amount of responsibility at the same time. The performance itself is the artwork, with the drawing/painting created serving more as a record of the performance, thus what one would normally term the "art-making process" is the actual artwork. However, this actual artwork is being performed by a person with, ostensibly, no conscious control of his actions thus the normal questions of skill associated with artwork dissolve. The process is set, thus the performer's only responsibility is in applying himself to the process and allowing events to occur as they will. One cannot argue that he is a better or worse performer, because he really is no longer a "performer." He is really more of a personality or psyche, and one can argue that he is a more or less interesting psyche, perhaps, but not that he has developed a greater skill in his art.

In a sense, the only true control that he seems to have over his situation, perhaps, lies in his decision to actually undergo hypnosis and his choices regarding the arrangement of the space (the placement, as well as choice of objects). And it is never really revealed to the audience whether he personally chose how the space was set up, so the amount of control he has in this whole process is rather ambiguous. The more I consider the performance, I realize I can describe it, and explain what was interesting or uninteresing as an experience, but the performer himself evades any normal critiques because of the question of control.

ZR
I think it’s safe to presume that he was in control of the set up – it would make for a fascinating performance if he weren’t – and I think that’s the point where this revolving door of control/non-control hits it’s limit. For whatever reason, he made a series of choices before hand, he put out the coffee, the paint, the pillows, and decided these were the things he was going to have an experience with.

KH:
Historically, we can find many examples of artists choosing to lose intellectual control during the creation of their work. This loss of control was usually compensated by a conscious editing process that followed. Only after that editing process, the work was exposed to a larger audience.
There often was a smaller, possibly exclusive circle of people witnessing the process of creation. This audience could be observers, as during the happenings of Viennese Actionism. The audience could also be a small group of collaborators, even people who simultaneously are creating, as in experiments of the Surrealists.
Still, the accepted terms seem to be create-edit-show. (Of course, these don’t need to be linear.) To me, it’s during the editing process that the work is being crafted into academic value. That is, intellectual justification for the piece as a valuable contribution to a contemporary dialog.
Now, what do we do with a piece that’s clearly part of the academic art context, but withdraws from editing? We disregard it because it doesn’t play by the rules. But is that really what happens in Mullican’s Hypnosis pieces? I doubt it. He certainly minimizes the editing during the performance itself, though, as we mentioned in the very beginning, we can’t tell for sure how conscious he really is under hypnosis. He has at least thirty years of experience with performing under hypnosis, enough to tighten up the frame for each piece beforehand, and possibly during the live event. Mullican’s Hypnosis performances, whether the artist is fully aware of it or not, offer a very interesting contribution to questioning the usual rules of art making. I believe that at large, they throw out a product that lends itself for rich theoretical discussion.
ZR:
I think what’s interesting about this thing about being in or out of control under hypnosis is that it proposes that the field of our conscious experience is a limiting factor – that the total bandwidth of possibilities is, on a day to day basis, reduced – and that through hypnosis Mullican is drawing on the total range. Those were the criterion for my criticisms of the ‘truth’ of his hypnosis: is he self-conscious (where that term means vain, concerned about his appearance)? Is he concerned about what the painting looks like? Does he ham for the audience when they laugh? Almost invariably the answer was no. He was inside the experience, the range was opened

AS
First, I should preface this by saying that I did not see the Whitney performance. The one I experienced was titled "The Corner's Corner" at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions now 8 years ago, though it was exceptionally memorable. Assisting for this show was my first work experience after college. For the project, Matt underwent hypnosis in a miniature version of the house in Malibu where he grew up. My role was to help in drawing up its floor plan and building the structure in the gallery. I was sent to measure this house, literally corner to corner. During this process, I met not only Matt, but also his mother Lucia, who was then mourning the passing of her husband, modernist luminary Lee Mullican. Their house had an aura of authenticity, lived in and genuine, a distant relative of the modernist aesthetic common in our households today.

The floor plan was then scaled down, abstracted and constructed to fit into the gallery space. A little mouse maze just for Matt, its walls were only 3 to 4 feet high, painted in bold colors often associated with his installations. There, for one evening, he underwent hypnosis, and performed in front of an invited audience of sixty, consisting of family members and friends of the artist, his gallery Grant Selwyn, and LACE.

This element of intimacy struck me then, and I am reminded of it now, in comparison to the scale of a Whitney event. Then, I questioned the notion of a targeted audience, especially in terms of institutional ethics. At that time, LACE was a 22 year old non-profit, with the mission of bringing art to the greater LA community. Although documentation was exhibited during the eight-week show, it only confirmed that the performance did not translate, the public was put at a further remove from the actual event.

Now, in retrospect, I've become more empathetic towards the problem of a specified audience. The thematic backdrop for the performance was Matt’s childhood. Perhaps he needed the construct of an intimate audience, the way he chose hypnosis as the medium, to perform an experience that was impossible to authenticate by the general public in the first place. Matt would grunt, throw up food, or run around the structure smelling corners like his childhood dog. It was difficult for an outsider to watch, and I could only imagine how traumatic it might be for his family to witness this process. However, once we put aside judgment, what we really saw was a full-grown man attempting to grasp onto some part of his past, remembered or invented.

Going through our correspondence, we seem to identify our role in this performance as that of witnesses rather than as audience. Different than a rehearsed play or “conscious” act, hypnotism as vernacular performance is often associated with certain form of spectatorship, successful only when the audience confirmed the performer was genuinely under hypnosis. The more we have been distant from normality -- Matt acting out regular actions under an altered transgressive state -- the more we seem to desire certain proof of authenticity, some identification of control and intentional limits, to connect ourselves to the performer, and justify “this happened.” Is it at all possible for the context of art to provide another set of ethics for us (the audience) and Matt (the performer) to engage with each other?

Suddenly, I think about the circularity of his Whitney performance: Matt performing a day of the artist in front of an audience, many of whom are artists, in a biennial putting focus to art that employs populist vernacular to intervene with reality. Each of us, Annie, Klara, Nina and Zach, has our own personal version of what a day of an artist might look like. This is not unlike performing childhood in front of old friends and family members. What’s the point of watching something we all can closely identify at the first place? We can consider hypnosis as simply the medium, a kind of theater that allows an altered representation of experiences we all believe we know so intimately.

AC:
Again, we are back to the mirror. I think at this point it is useful to consider the brief statement about Mullican's performance found in the event listings for the Whitney Biennial:

"Since the late 1970s, Mullican has used hypnosis to explore the experience of the subjective. For this rare performance, Mullican acts under hypnosis as “that person,” treating his psyche as a found object and distancing the ego from the creative self.”

If the ego, or the self-aware part of one's mind is disengaged, as is stated to be part of the intention of this performance, we would expect a certain freedom from social constraint as the performer, theoretically, is no longer in touch with external reality - the place from which many social constraints are imposed. Certainly such release from constraint was visible in Mullican's outbursts of emotion, externalization of what sounded like internal dialogue, and on-going noise-making. Certainly all of these actions could be influenced by Mullican's own natural personality quirks, but we have no means of gauging this within the context of the performance because he has not allowed us to know the conditions under which he was hypnotized, nor were we allowed to view his transformation into the character we see in the performance space. As I understand from a former assistant of Mullican's, at least in one early performance, this transformation was visible, with Mullican changing into the personality of a child as he crossed a taped-off line demarcating the performance space. His choice not to reveal any clues as to the degree of the change he has undergone for this performance obscures the degree to which he is in control, returning us to the question of editing.

I do not intend to say that there is no editing, and no self-control within Mullican's performance. Even within the performance, a certain self-awareness is still present: the hypnotically-induced distancing of ego from creative self did not translate into freedom from self-doubt, as one of the more dramatic conflicts arose from the gap between expectation and reality, both with the missing Wall Street Journal from his stack of newspapers to the results of his composition on the back wall of the performance space. However, the exact degree to which he can exert any form of conscious control is impossible for the audience to even guess at, short of drawing on any previous knowledge of the man or his artwork. While this question of control in and of itself is not so important, it seems to me that recognizing its ambiguity is a key to understanding how we relate to the performance. As Annie pointed out, we have a desire to ascertain the authenticity of the experience (and I would add the exact degree of the authenticity), but the structure of the performance is such that it becomes an impossibility to come to any definitive conclusions on this question, forcing us to place it aside. We either accept that the performance is totally hypnotically induced, or disregard it as a farce.

If we accept the performance as authentic, this puts the decisions of how to perform this day-in-the-life-of-an-artist on a pre-conscious level, excising the involvement of the ego (as in self-image/pride). Although the experiences he draws upon, unconsciously, to perform this day are still uniquely his, because of the apparent lack of involvement of any self-important element, we can accept the veracity of his portrayal more readily. We identify the elements we are familiar with, and are less prone to questioning the elements that are foreign to us. After all, he did not choose them in order to portray himself as the stereotypical creative individual, but rather simply because it was something he unconsciously recognized as a common experience from his life.

All of this may seem a bit of a stretch in purely logical terms as, for the sake of illustrating the underlying mechanism, I have perhaps overstated the degree to which we are influenced by the structure of the performance. However, the main point I am trying to reach is that by placing the decision-making process on this pre-conscious level, he is able to establish a connection to the audience that would be more difficult and tenuous were he to make the same decisions from a conscious level. At this point I would draw a connection to one of the other main lines of inquiry in Mullican's general practice. Much as his pictographs are able to address people in a pre-verbal format, communicating in terms that may be difficult or simply different on the level of speech, his performances address and connect to us on a pre-conscious level. The parallel is not perfect, as we are in a different state of consciousness than he is and thus will necessarily comprehend the performance on a different level of consciousness, but I think it is an important aspect of the work that helps, for me, to illuminate a possible motive for Mullican presenting, as Annie put it, "something we all can closely identify at the first place."