M.I.T. Project

Matt Mullican’s complex and multifaceted work can be understood as an ongoing and extensive reflection on the self. While in his earlier works of the 1970s, he pioneered the use of performance under hypnosis, he later developed other mechanisms in his exploration of the subject. If at first he incorporated cryptic dreams, drawings and phrases uttered under hypnosis, and even the figure of Glen, an unconscious alter ego of the artist, in his later works, such as M.I.T. Project (1990–2009), he focused on the subjective construction of an image of the world. Mullican contrasts the arrogance in elaborating a cosmology with the vulnerability of a stranger seeking the meaning of existence. Without renouncing irony, and in an exercise of maintaining distance, both his early works and his more mature projects can be read as a true philosophy of the self.

Exhibited for the first time at the List Art Center of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1990, hence the title, M.I.T. Project was a work in progress until the second presentation of the complete installation at the 28th São Paulo Biennial in 2008. In 2009, it became part of the MACBA Collection as a large rectangular space divided by small partitions into five interconnected compartments through which the public is free to wander. Within this space, in the manner of a game board, a football pitch or basketball court, the artist places two semicircles at either end, and a small square compartment in the centre, all chromatically differentiated.

Mullican uses the five colours he has used since the seventies. The green zone is equivalent to the realm of the material world and contains natural elements such as skeletons, stuffed animals, boxes of insects and minerals, crystals, rocks and fossils. The blue zone represents the everyday world and the immediacy of the city, people and actions. Here the artist places tables and objects, including a radio, a generator, a boiler, a 16 mm projector and a monitor showing the video Five into One. The yellow rectangle in the middle represents the arts and sciences, the realm of knowledge. This contains tables with prints from Mullican’s piece Untitled (2009). The black space represents language. Here we find Mullican’s Bulletin Boards, five large panels with a multitude of objects grouped according to formal criteria: drawings, match boxes, newspaper cuttings with black-and-white photographs, flags, buttons and uniforms, and collages of images of the Second World War, among others. There are also two tables with etchings, aquatints and silk-screen prints, based on the artist’s notebooks over twenty years. Finally, a semicircle with red walls represents the subjective realm, pure meaning and spirituality. Here there are no objects, only the video Untitled (Matt Mullican Under Hypnosis: Zurich) from 2003, a performance in which the artist repudiates his own body. Lying on the floor and moving frantically, he recites a monologue of phrases and words.

As the artist explained in 2008: ‘You could say that the M.I.T. Project is a map, a way of organising information.’ More than a literal representation of reality, this object inventory in the form of a cosmology investigates relationships, classifications, systems and other cultural mechanisms with which we construct our own organisation of the world. Reality, then, becomes a map of signs and signifiers that refer to the subject’s internal structures.