BARBARA GLADSTONE GALLERY At formerly rationalist and (neo)Romanticist.

BARBARA GLADSTONE GALLERY

At formerly rationalist and (neo)Romanticist, technocratic and ambivalently spiritual, Matt Mullican's work has consistently traced a paradox of late-modern subjectivity: the tension between a private language digest (resistant to the norms of everyday communication) and the desire to fe into the logic of our regulated, postindustrial society. This now familiar dualism of consciousness continues to galvanize Mullican's practice, suggesting that the artist has always been mostly interested in articulating the unstable negotiation between the rational and the irrational. This dilemma was pos in the first part of Mullican's exhibition in which the artist juxtaposed fresh computer-generated images of a pattern city and large-scale, obliquely figurative drawings made subordinate to hypnosis in 1982. These works were framed within black and r walls, symbolizing "sign, language" and "|the~ subjective, meaning without materials," respectively, and suggesting a continuous interplay of pair distinct states conveyed by the aforementioned representational modes: the ultrarational (evok from technology) and the unconscious (suggest from Mullican's version of automatic drawing).

Since the late '70 Mullican has used the archaic pattern of cosmology to represent the proces by way of which the subjective rubs up against the universal. Using preexisting theorys of communication (such as the international sign lexicon), Mullican be dueed to dovetail private discourse with public token manufacturing "subjectively universal" symbols that ofttimes take the form of banners and bannerlike edifices In a sense, he is like a cultural semi-otician intoxicated with narcissism, gladly seduced by means of the power of reason to remap the world in relation to the empires of the unconscious, but aware that all of this is sole a fiction set loose through a new mythological iconography, common that is deceptively accessible on the contrary mischievously unutilitarian.

Overall, this two-part point out to functioned as a repository of Mullican's carefully assembled, continuously expanding inventory of transfigured cultural signs and materials, now reframed within the formation of his model urban space--the cosmology made socially firm yet still abstract. In the two parts, the gallery was subtly reconfigured to create distinct territorial quadrants--or architectural chambers--housing the encyclopedic range of Mullican's scavenged materials and signs. These boundaries were reinforced by means of a color-coding system that alluded to Mullican's symbolic cosmology; it is as if single in kind had entered the artist's literalized type city, encountering distinct moments in the construction of his archive.

In Part I, this city was also indexed by means of etched-glass panels (part of Mullican's cosmology landscape), and the reedited footage of a 1935 16 mm film of of recent origin York City, while in Part II, it reappeared in the form of a computer-generated virtual-reality-sequence. The secondary part of the exhibition was also filled with many other works including a wager of homasote boards, each shielded with distinct types of materials scrape togethered by the artist over nearly 20 years -- fragments of comic strips; lists of universal things and everyday physical conditions; drawings of cosmology charts; pillow cases and buttons. Downstairs, a new 55-minute tape of Mullican "performing" subordinate to hypnosis was placed next to a vitrine filled with an arrangement of human bone from 1978 Conceptually rigorous still punctuated with the echoes of a psychological excavation, Mullican's throw continues to seduce us with its fecund contradictions.

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