Exhibition Guide: Speech Acts

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Speech Acts


Speech Acts Although its title might evoke postmodern debates about linguistics, this exhibition was conceived with a more basic ambition: to consider the ways in which the British artist Richard Grayson and the American artist Matt Mullican grant a certain equivalence between speech and action in their work. Connecting language to bodies, psyches and socio-political frameworks, both artists share an interest in the ways that text and speech can be used to construct hypothetical worlds, dramatising the hidden mechanisms of internal and external realities. In a seemingly timeless 1980 essay entitled “Matt Mullican’s World,” fellow American artist Allan McCollum writes of Mullican’s “near-obsessive introspection” which recreates “for the outer senses a multidimensional picture of those normally unconscious, interior processes which are present in all of us”.1 Mullican plays with maps, creates his own quasicorporate logos and embodies fictional constructs to address how people create meaningful representations of the world. Fascinated with how real sensations are transformed into symbols, his encyclopaedic practice addresses the confluence of ideologies, impressions, feelings, memories and symbols that inform archetypal self-conceptions. Mullican projects an identity that is at once structured and nebulous – heartfelt, uncertain, artificial and psychologically complex. Grayson, who is also an art critic and curator, shares Mullican’s worldly concerns. He has made text works that

predict how the world will end, curated exhibitions examining how artists create fantastical worlds, and pursued installation-based projects exploring how art can provide viewers with firsthand experiences of complex systems of belief. In his video work Nothing Can Stop Us Now, performers sing Willie Johnson’s 1943 song Stalin Wasn’t Stallin’ (written at the time of Hitler’s invasion of Stalin’s Soviet Union), which was covered by the English musician Robert Wyatt on a 1982 album, from which the work takes its name. Here Grayson reflects on the machinations of power, which he sets in contrast to more humble or vernacular forms of expression. Prompting thoughts about public surveillance and flash mob performances, the work gives us images of London that seem iconic of its place after the July 2005 bombings, examining public solidarity in the digital age, alongside allusions to global capitalism and outmoded twentieth-century political ideals. Mullican and Grayson might be representative of ‘critical’ or ‘investigative’ modes of art practice; however, it is often very difficult to pin down exactly what kind of knowledge is presented in their works, or which kinds of messages they are attempting to convey to viewers. While recalling Jacques Rancière’s point about aesthetic art as marked by dis-identification and indeterminacy (finding implicit political agency in art’s re-ordering of cultural codes), we can also consider both artists in terms of an attempt to uphold the temporal and gestural qualities of their works. In short, Grayson and Mullican are less concerned with revealing something than they are with performing something. If the exhibition could be related at all


to J.L. Austin’s accounts of speech act theory, which went on to spark debates about continental (Jacques Derrida) versus analytical (John Searle) philosophy in the 1970s, it is in how both artists approach art as a process of re-staging, re-performing and reinscribing – prioritising enunciation over clarification. For Derrida, Austin’s account of contextual factors in speech that impede the conveyance of intentionality revealed how miscommunication is not an ‘outside’ to – or deviance from – effective communication but is its “internal and positive condition of possibility”.2 Derrida focussed on the relation between speech and writing (in which the interpretive context is out of the author’s control) to argue that every sign “can be cited, put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context”.3 Becoming paradigmatic of a poststructuralist idea of language, Derrida went on to claim that, when it comes to communication, “there are only contexts without any centre or absolute anchoring”.4 Where Grayson and Mullican part from one another is in their prioritisation of conscious and unconscious reality. Mullican has been performing under hypnosis since the 1970s, evolving out of his drawing practice – specifically, his early 1970s drawings of stick figures, which he started treating as if they were thinking and feeling human beings. Mullican personifies every stick figure he has ever drawn by referring to them as the same person: ‘Glen.’ From this fascination – which could perhaps be understood as a fascination for the unavoidability of anthropomorphism – he began to use hypnotism. He has described this as,

“the most extreme kind of theatre I could come up with, where the people who were onstage believed that they were the characters they were portraying; where somehow they were not acting even while they were acting. Their psyches would portray a fiction, but the actors wouldn’t have the normal relationship to that fiction.”5 Mullican strove to go deep into the nature of psychological projection, utilising hypnosis as an impossible attempt to understand and psychologically map realities beyond his own experiences. Mullican’s performances can be seen as extending his desire to enter the ‘realities’ of an inanimate object’s material, social and emotional resonances, investigating pictures as if they were psychological subjects. In contrast, Grayson appears less interested in the internal psychologies of his subjects than in the relation between utopian belief and factual, socio-political power. While both artists reflect upon utopian ideals, Grayson is more invested in external realities, whereas Mullican maps the circuitry of internality and symbolic representation. At the heart of Grayson’s practice is an interest in the many parts that constitute understanding; knowledge as a narration that both shapes and obscures the world. As Dereck Kreckler wrote of Grayson’s Various Things Explained (1998), “Whilst we remember the experience of some of our past moments, we rediscover them, articulate them through language. As the felt experience sheds, disappears, our experience turns to language, creating staging points from where we further narrate our stories. This is the constant


struggle between experience and language and begs the question: How do we represent ourselves?”6 If we accept that Grayson’s work is primarily concerned with the historical meanings and mythologies embedded in language, we might go further to say that he focuses specifically on subject matter in which individual identity is overshadowed by the forces of history – as testified by his consistent references to omnipresent phenomena such as God and global capitalism. Grayson does not so much attempt to explain socio-political power than to show how universalist ideas can overshadow questions of the self. Because Mullican and Grayson value art’s capacity to explicate as well as obfuscate, the exhibition plays on the relatively openended nature of both artists’ practices to generate random associations between works. To this end, the type of speech the exhibition seeks to represent is more a cacophony than an oration or a conversation.

List of works Richard Grayson, Cosmic Joke (2015) Richard Grayson, Nothing Can Stop Us Now (2014) Richard Grayson, Various Things Explained (1998) Matt Mullican, Untitled (Animated Fictional Details: Dying Stick Figure) (2002) Matt Mullican, Untitled (Mullican Shooting-Close) from “Psycho Architecture: Experiments in the Studio, November 5-7, 2001,” (2001/2004) Matt Mullican, Untitled (Matt Mullican Under Hypnosis: Geneva), (2004) Matt Mullican, Breakfast (2005) and Drain (2005) from the installation “Learning from That Person’s Work,” Ludwig Museum, Cologne (2005).

Wes Hill

Notes: 1 Allan McCollum, “Matt Mullican’s World,” Real Life Magazine (Winter, 1980), 4-13. 2 Jacques Derrida, Signature, Event, Context, trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 17. 3 Ibid., 12. 4 Ibid. 5 Mullican quoted in Tim Griffin, “What is that person Thinking?” Artforum 47, no.5 (January, 2009), 179. 6 Dereck Kreckler, “Art is Slow,” Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, exhibition catalogue (1998) http://ensemble.va.com.au/Grayson/texts/ Derek.html (accessed 15/7/2015).

Right: Richard Grayson, Cosmic Joke (2015) (detail)



Richard Grayson, Nothing Can Stop Us Now, video still, [2014]

Richard Grayson Richard Grayson is an artist, writer and curator. Recent exhibitions include His Master’s Voice (on voice and language), HMKV Dortmund (2013); Triumph (with Steve Wigg), Anne and Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide (2012); The Magpie Index, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle upon Tyne (2010); and a retrospective in 2010 at De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill. Grayson was curator of the 2014 Adelaide Festival international exhibition Worlds in Collision, Artistic Director of the 2002 Biennale of Sydney, and between 1992 and 1998 was Director of the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide. Grayson is represented by Matt’s Gallery, London and Yuill|Crowley, Sydney.


Matt Mullican, Untitled (Mullican Shooting-Close) from: Psycho Architecture: Experiments in the Studio, November 5-7, 2001, (2001/2004)

Matt Mullican Matt Mullican is an artist whose work encompasses drawing, installation, video and performance. His work has been exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, at galleries including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Galerie, Berlin; the Stedelijk Museum, Netherlands; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, an received a major retrospective in 2011 at Haus Der Kunst, Munich, Organising the World. Mullican is represented by Brooke Alexander Gallery and Tracy Williams, New York, Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Brussels, Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich, Peter Freeman Inc, Paris and New York, and PROJECTESD, Barcelona.


Speech Acts Richard Grayson | Matt Mullican curated by Wes Hill 8 September – 9 October 2015 Associated Programs: Performance: Matt Mullican Under Hypnosis Friday 18 September, 6:30pm Cell Block Theatre, National Art School Forbes St, Darlinghurst Guest Lecture: Matt Mullican Saturday 26 September, 3:00pm Artspace, 43 - 51 Cowper Wharf Rd, Woolloomooloo Acknowledgements: The curator would like to thank the artists, UTS ART staff, Artspace and the National Art School for helping to make

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Cover: Matt Mullican, Untitled (Matt Mullican Under Hypnosis: Geneva), (2004)

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