Notating the Cosmology, 1973-2008 reproduces and organises pages torn from Matt Mullican’s own notebooks, accumulated over more than thirty years. The form imitates retrospective and biographic models, and integrates work notes used in Mullican’s performances under hypnosis that evoke his imaginary studio. Filled with notations, observations, sketches and reflections on cosmology, Mullican’s notebooks display modes of perception and formalism characteristic in his work: accumulating, collecting, adapting forms and thought patterns that are “already there”. Thus, pictograms and concepts are reworked, classified and adapted into new modalities. Borrowing from many moments of discourse and different forms of language (mathematics, visual, literary, etc.), Matt Mullican elicits a singular cosmology that invites us to reconsider our ways of constructing the world. Articulated around a semi-fictional/ semi-real Ego, Mullican creates a kind of parallel world to our own in which he organizes disciplines according to his own rules: nature and its evolution, the world of objects, symbolic values, signs and concepts.
Published by Captures éditions, France • Sewn cloth bound notebooks • 258 pages • Four colour offset printing • 25 x 17 cm • English • ISBN : 978-2-9533912-0-6