One Night Perfomance: Matthew Mullican

Anton Kern Gallery is proud to present a performance by Matt Mullican on November 14 at 7:00 pm. The artist will perform “under hypnosis”. This will be his first performance under hypnosis in New York City since The Kitchen in 1982.

Matt Mullican began working with hypnosis in 1978 and has continued to the present having taken a break between 1982-1992. During this hiatus he began his involvement with virtual reality. Through these experiences he returned to his investigation of the hypnotic trance. Mullican’s interest comes from the insertion of “self” into a media, as in video game culture; the induced state offers the experience of projecting oneself into a conceptual framework.

Subjects of such performances have ranged from reliving early experiences, playing out ideas about what could happen later in his life, setting up conflicts that induce euphoria and repulsion, and exploring the relationship between context and experience in relationship to the hypnotic state. Mullican is attempting to break the patterns of every day life in order to expose underlying structures. Functioning as experiments, the performances are spontaneous and last anywhere from 10 minutes to as long as 1 1/2 hours in length. Mullican will be assisted by hypnotist Marcos Lutyens with whom he has been working for the past few years.