Matt Mullican: Conversations

A bricoleur of cosmologies, cities and signs, a hypnosis subject, a collaborator and a collector of art and ethnographic objects, Matt Mullican has embodied and redefined the wilder horizons of conceptual art over the course of his 40-year career. From the start, Mullican has tackled only the big the self, which with some courage he has dismantled under hypnosis, performing and making art as another Matt Mullican named “That Person”; and the universe, which he has imagined as a proliferating cosmology of signs, taking form under his “Five Worlds” concept or as a city. In this bilingual volume of conversations with Koen Brams and Dirk Pültau, Mullican also proves himself an articulate, generous talker. The conversations are themed in five “Collaboration,” “Cosmologies,” “Hypnosis,” “City” and “Collections.” Across these seemingly diverse topics, what emerges as the unifying principle throughout Mullican’s activities is his exemplariness as a true “cosmonaut of inner space.”