MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART
Public Programs: Boiler Room Series
Matt mulLican
Monday 2o APRIL 2015 6.00-7.30pm
FREE Entry
The Wheeler Centre,
State Library of Victoria
176 Little Lonsdale St,
Melbourne
Bookings required:
[email protected] or
ph. 03 9905 4217
For further details and
additional public programs see:
www.monash.edu.au/muma/
events
MUMA, in association with
Monash Art, Design and
Architecture [MADA], present
a keynote lecture by renowned
artist Matt Mullican.
The lecture will be introduced by
Charlotte Day, Director MUMA,
and followed by a discussion
and Q&A with Lars Bang
Larsen, an independent curator,
art historian and writer based in
Barcelona and Copenhagen.
Believe not every spirit,
but try the spirits
Guest curaters: Lars Bang
Larsen and Marco Pasi
21 April – 27 June 2015
Wednesday 22 April, 6-8pm:
Opening celebration with
performance by Matt Mullican
For the last 30 years Matt Mullican has experimented with hypnosis to create work that both
examines his subconscious, and functions as a strategy to break from the patterns of everyday
life. Mullican’s practice interrogates systems of knowledge, meaning and language through
drawing, collage, video, sculpture, performance, and installation. His interest in modified states
of awareness led him to work under hypnotically induced psychoses, and it was during his first
performance in 1978 at The Kitchen, New York, where the recurring character and alter ego
“That Person” emerged—an ageless, genderless being that inhabits Mullican’s physical body.
From the early ’80s Mullican’s preoccupation with cataloguing That Person’s reality and
compulsion to order his own world has culminated in a comprehensive and private cosmology
of hand-painted banners and signs, computer-generated virtual renderings and enormous
outdoor sculptures in marble and stone. For this keynote lecture Mullican will introduce his
multidisciplinary practice and discuss recurrent themes in his work including repetition, renewal,
and the unconscious as a tool to interrogate reality.
Matt Mullican was born in Santa Monica, US in 1951 and currently lives and works in Berlin and
New York. He received his BFA from CalArts in 1974 where he was taught by John Baldessari.
His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe in group and solo
exhibitions at galleries including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Haus Der Kunst,
Munich, the National Galerie, Berlin, the Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam, Netherlands, Museum
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mullican has
taught and lectured at Columbia University, The Rijksakademie, The London Institute, Chelsea
College of Art and Design, and amongst others, The School of Visual Arts, New York. Mullican
is represented by Brooke Alexander Gallery and Tracy Williams, New York, Galerie Micheline
Szwajcer, Brussels, Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich, Peter Freeman Inc, Paris and New York, and
PROJECTESD, Barcelona.
Ground Floor, Building F
Monash University, Caulfield Campus
900 Dandenong Road
Caulfield East, VIC 3145 Australia
www.monash.edu.au/muma
Telephone +61 3 9905 4217
[email protected]
Image: Matt Mullican, Self-induced
hypnosis 2007
performance at TATE, London
courtesy of the artist