Professional Documents
Culture Documents
FRANCES SCOTT
MA Fine Art
Wimbledon College of Art
REWARDS 28-33
ENDNOTES 38-40
ILLUSTRATIONS 41-53
BIBLIOGRAPHY 55-64
PRE-VOICE
Come again?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
1 Lippard, Lucy R. 'Double Spread', Fusco, M., & Hunt, I. (eds.) Put About: A
Critical Anthology on Independent Publishing, Bookworks, London 2004. p.83.
THAT PERSONS/S (MULTIPLY, TO THE POWER OF...)
INCIDENT 1
It is as though one were watching one's own life from someone else's perspective,
like an autobiography written and read by someone else. 1
In January 2007, in the turbine hall at Tate Modern, a seated audience witness the
artist Matt Mullican perform within a state of hypnosis. 2 Over ninety minutes he
carries out a series of repeated actions; working in ink on large paper banners at the
back of the space - text, images writ large - marking out bands on the floor with
masking tape, and talking (to himself). As the performance unfolds, Mullican
appears agitated, and at some point lies down on the floor, shouting obscenities.
asks the hypnotist to 'stop now'. He is guided from the hall and the performance
ends.
Fast forward to January 2010, to the lecture theatre at the ICA, London. To a seated
presented at the Whitney Biennial in 2008. Actions in the recorded performance are
similar to those from the Tate, this time with dialogue between a falsetto 'start the
day, start the day!' and from a much lower register, 'I can't wait to start my day'.
Talking through this particular section, Mullican faces the video documentation on
screen, not his audience. He seems weirdly energised by the play of escalating voices,
'different' Mullicans played out. Recall the Tate: Watching again the documentation,
there is some discrepancy between the composure of the artist shown in interview
pre-performance, to the activated figure then witnessed in the live event. Recall now
the lecture at the ICA earlier this year: The strangeness here comes with Mullican's
transcription of the footage of himself; 'oh, yeah, he often does this'. It would appear
that the 'he' in question is a familiar, if eccentric, friend, known to embarrass himself
This state, for Mullican, is closely aligned with a certain kind of virtual reality, an
example within his practice being his stick figure 'Glen'. 'Glen' lives on the page, in a
room that denotes Mullican's studio and workspace - another plane for being and
experiencing. 'Glen' can do anything, his first action to pinch himself, he works on
In a way he is like Glen, but I don't want to call him Glen. He's beyond
time and environments; a before/after, and during, person - different versions of the
same (still whole) 'self'. In some respects, what Mullican does here is to initiate a
the ventriloquist and their dummy, he proposes to the audience a tension between
two discrete entities - one docile, inert, the other agent and active, whose voice
source is apparently undetermined. Mullican also suggests his need to keep this
self(ves) separate to the collective, the audience body. He speaks of a palpable 'heat'
brought by the audience on their arrival to the space, and the demarcation of the
performance 'zone', creating masking tape boundaries between where he and they
reside. 7 In doing so, and in his description of this affect (on his body), he conjures
up images of the ritual. His desire to access the 'other' in some way, implies an
activity that draws on the vocabulary of mystic practice, aligned with a tendency
keep the 'other' (whatever that 'other' turns out to be) at a distance.
Come again?
Action.
deeper still'). 'Now just imagine you are walking down a long
corridor. And with every step you take you drift deeper,
deeper into trance. Relaxing deeper, deeper, and deeper.'
minutes, the camera slips very slowly through the gap between
curtain behind, and it stays there for what feels like a long
Some time later, the camera pans back to present the scene
mention too, that the audience for the work in Porto would
It turns out later that this first room was the one in which
The body considered in one funnel here, is the intact, organised organism, The
but is not channelled. It can act as a terrain onto which another voice - external or
internal - might speak, but even so will continue to preserve itself. Its identity is
formed by itself and through the systems in which it operates. It carries (I carry) all
and porous, it overflows into the world and the world into it.
interior or 'deeper' layer that seeps constantly through into the flesh of the
conscious. Repressed and submerged by the individual, it acts upon the psyche,
welling up into the conscious to either be articulated and given formal expression, or
returned. The 'self' remains intact throughout this process of being acted upon.
Funnel two: The incorporeal body introduces a trouble for the
body/machine/s.
Gamma (1999) or Stasi City (1997), when the camera pans down
relations with other things, the world, and draw them close.
What does this introduce for work whose approach is one leaning towards models of
distinction articulated early on between artist and viewer, or spectator. In order for
the work to be fulfilled, we are needed to recognise and validate, to make real, the
person/s enacted in trance before us. Recall: in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, the
private eye - Blue - is hired by a client - White - to investigate and follow a man -
Black. It soon appears that Black is in fact White (no Black and White then, but Grey.
I've needed you from the beginning...To remind me of what I was supposed
to be doing. Every time I looked up, you were there, watching me, following me,
always in sight, boring into me with your eyes. You were the whole world to me,
Blue, and I turned you into my death.17
This validation can only happen if the state is presented to the viewer, if 'that' person
inducted into hypnosis. Thought and body are posited as autonomous images, and
affect is controlled and accounted for. It does not spill further than the 'Mullican'
perimeter.
The unconscious can therefore present only what is supplied to it by the conscious. 18
Representation assumes a certain position vis a vis the world, in that the human
throws light onto something in darkness, and brings it to the fore with their scanning
realism', where;
digging goes right through and out of the other side to show
something as it is.
THE HAND IS A NEEDLE
Fade in.
BODY-MACHINE
If the body is a mediating body, a medium through which other voices may speak
(including those voices present already within that body) - filtering and framing -
documentation of the trance state. It exists outside of the event as discrete and
autonomous. This notion of the body as machine and its 'print-outs' is corroborated
Mullican also describes the act of channelling and (re)projecting noise. Under
hypnosis he becomes:
...a radio, an AM radio, and I'm moving it around the room. I'm receiving
different kinds of information...If I have an AM radio and I'm on the dial going
from one channel to the next, it's chaos, there's no information. 23
No information. It is not so much 'what's out there' and more the action of
receiving, translating. The thing that emerges might be white noise and nothing
more. In the context of spiritualist practice and history of the seance, Marina Warner
also describes Tony Oursler's The Influence Machine and its animated bodies in this
suggest that the mechanical is aligned with the unconscious, in which there is an
interesting tension between what is seen as inert or docile 'reception', and a more
proposing the divide: 'on the one hand, living beings (or
machine.
It is a process of accumulation;
Rewind.
The notion of the mediating body or active, mechanical filter, suggests a certain
consider this strand first and submit to the role of medium, what reward or access to
(a version of) a truth is permitted? To make the leap to the site(sight) of Disneyland,
What Eco seems to be saying is that there is a complicity or form of contract; our
Robot body equals trance?! We are duly rewarded with the infinite, with unlimited
knowledge. In her essay, 'Truth's Shadows', Jean Fisher proposes that this surrender
brings forth a dilemma for the individual dreamer, who becomes unable to claim for
themselves their own altered state/s, and plays out instead 'someone else's
phantasy'.31 She suggests that the domain of the (repressed) unconscious, the dream,
the imagination, is colonised and conditioned by society, systems (of our own
making) to the extent where it no longer belongs to the individual. In both instances,
the notion of a surrender or giving-in, assumes still that the body mediates and is
conscious in its selection to behave this way. It is implicated, and, as Deleuze and
then how can the unconscious be repressed? The body and these
himself, over and over; Every time you see yourself, well,
Access and escape are held in stasis within the same body. No
bleed.
not through its image, but embedded within the buildings and
itself.
But wait, the blind spot.
inexistent.
no image. The blind spot then i s the body without its image,
3 Mullican, M., Moura de, V. & Wilmes, U. Matt Mullican: that person's
workbook, MER, Gent, Belgium & Ridinghouse, London 2007.
6 Goldblatt, D. Art and Ventriloquism, Routledge, London and New York 2006.
p.42.
10 Dogville, directed by Lars von Trier, Icon Home Entertainment, UK, 2004.
[DVD]
16 Benjamin, W. 'One Way Street', One Way Street and other writings (trans.
Jephcott, E. & Shorter, K.), Verso, London 1997. p.45.
17 Auster, P. New York Trilogy, Penguin, London and New York, 2006. p190.
22 Michaux, H. 'To Draw the Flow of Time' (1957), Morley, S. (ed.) The Sublime,
Whitechapel Gallery, London and MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts 2010.
p.24.
23 Wilmes, U. 'Who do we think?', Mullican, M., Moura de, V. & Wilmes, U. Matt
Mullican: that person's workbook, MER, Gent Belgium & Ridinghouse, London,
2007. p.724.
26 Hansen, M. Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media, Routledge, New York
and London 2006. p.20.
27 Hansen, M. New Philosophy for New Media, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts
2006. p.6.
37 Millar, J. 'the story so far', Doherty, C. & Millar, J. (eds.) Jane and
Louise Wilson, Ellipsis, London 2000. p. 40.
Mannoni, L., Nekes, W., & Warner, M. (eds.) Eyes, Lies and
Illusions, Hayward Gallery, London 2004.
Sacks, O. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Picador,
London 1986.
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