“Matt Mullican: The feeling of things”

Matt Mullican is a polymath. A performer, an archivist, and a maker of exquisite objects, he was among the first artists to anticipate early computer technology with an exceptionally varied visual language—before fractured attention was a deficit. After finishing his studies at CalArts in 1974, emerging from feminist art discourses into the circle of the Pictures artists, Mullican worked with hypnosis to create a performance persona—who may or may not be the artist himself, but who has generated an enormous body of drawings over a span of forty years. Such

print Summer 2007

Connie Butler

ONE OF THE SONGS I had in constant rotation for years in my car in Los Angeles was David Stephenson and Richard Bell’s “I Want to Hang Out with Ed Ruscha”: “I want to pack up and fly to LA / I want to hang out with Ed Ruscha / He makes the words and light interplay / He puts cool into LA / That’s Ed Ruscha.” It was on a compilation CD commemorating the late Giovanni Intra, the mercurial New Zealander who was a founder and the pied piper of China Art Objects gallery in Los Angeles for four short years. Like the French-born artist and LA immigrant Guy de Cointet, whose work is the topic at hand,