1- Preliminary research (January – May 2011)

For the last year, during his Work in Residence at Hedah in Maastricht, Matt Mullican has developed new work that consists of a typology of gestures identified in the performances under hypnosis from the late 1970s until now. Repeated patterns of postures, actions and gestures have been singled out; and the performances have been reorganised according to this new classification.

Mullican’s performances under hypnosis produce a crude public exposure of a man’s attempt to look inward, intensely trying to turn his back to a stable form of consciousness in order to enter its inhuman double. Inhumanity could here be understood in different ways. In Mullican’s words, hypnosis creates a ‘super-theatre’ in which the character that he embodies in the time and space of the hypnotic trance has become a model or cartoon character, and an iconic brain. But ‘inhuman’ could also point to the nature of hypnosis itself and its intricate relationship to death in the work of the artist. In this second proposition, ‘inhuman’ would then designate a state of being that is no longer certain or stable. Mullican describes hypnosis as a “floating situation”. In this transient state, he affirms that he has become other to himself, moving toward the inside of his own psyche, which has repeatedly been identified by the artist as ‘That Person’. This impulse to position himself at a distance from the subjective ‘I’ through hypnosis shows his strong-minded will to explore the functioning of a complex association of emotions, ideas, desires and obsessions. Yet the acute estrangement that takes place under hypnosis seems to bring to the surface the question of the irresolvable ambiguity between the conscious and the unconscious, fiction and reality, the body of the corpse and the one of the doll, or of the sleeping body.

I began my research on Mullican’s performances with a hypothesis put forward from the outset. This hypothesis was in a sense contradictory with the common understanding of what hypnosis stages. I proposed to look at how Mullican’s performances under hypnosis reveal the conscious construction of a character. I was from the very start interested in confronting ideas of unconsciousness, of immediacy and of absence of control – notions commonly associated with hypnosis- with ideas of conscious construction, of delay, and of fiction and fabulation – notions associated with art production.

My research has unfolded two main lines of questioning:

1. I was interested in investigating the strategic role of the use of hypnosis as performative dispositif within the context of the body of work of the artist as a whole.

2. I wanted to investigate what I assessed as a gradual blurring of the identities of Matt Mullican and the figure (emerging in the hypnotic trance) of That Person, a blurring made manifest in the last few years in the context of various exhibitions and publications. I thought that it was necessary and urgent to try to conceptualize the increasing overlap between the two personas and their bodies of work, which had previously been kept somehow apart.

2- New perspectives for research (June – November 2011)

With the development of this new typology of gestures, singled out from the performances under hypnosis, and based on Mullican’s desire to explore a new process of work with actors, Mullican’s performative language decisively moves into the field of theatre.

The movement between the hypnotic mimesis and the more conscious act of imitation, which was already at work in Mullican’s constant exploration of the character of That Person in retrospect – through the use of his own memory, the video documentation of the performance and public re-enactment of excerpts of the performance based on their textual transcriptions – here becomes emphasized through the emergence of the figure of the actor.

My ongoing research in the next six months will continue to investigate hypnosis as a privileged performative mode. In this context, I continue to find the necessity to explore the potential of hypnosis further as a strategic process of undoing the frame of representation by initiating a state of differentiation through a somnambulic mode of knowing. Hypnosis indeed uncovers the enigma of the emotional tie between self and other without intending to resolve it. Through hypnosis the gaze turns inward, yet faces the impossibility to rationalize what can be seen or heard from this inside. Hypnosis appears as dissolving the boundaries between self and other, embodying a highly plastic notion of the human subject that radically calls into question the unity and identity of self.

Yet in Mullican’s approach and use of hypnosis it seems key to emphasize the importance of the continuity between hypnosis and a subsequent conscious investigation of what happened in hypnotic trance. The plasticity of the self that emerges under hypnosis is reflected in the continuous exploration of That Person outside of the trance, through the deployment of other artistic strategies. If through hypnosis, the subject is constantly born again, the memory of the trance is constituted nevertheless because it is captured through the means of writing and documenting. Rather than re-enacting a pre-given script, we could say that each new performance might replay a memory that is inscribed in the body, in a manner that might not be dissimilar to how one describes the body-memory of a trained dancer, or the way an actor has been trained to get into a character.

The character that emerges from the hypnotic trance is not a traditional fictional figure. He is characterised by an anarchic emotional state and an undifferentiated state of existence. Yet, I am interested is positioning the character of That Person within a theatre history, and more particularly, at least as starting points, in relation to the writing and theatre productions of Antonin Artaud, Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett.

Looking at authors such as Artaud, Stein and Beckett through the lens of Mullican’s concerns aims not only at placing Mullican’s work within a genealogy, but also to understand how theatre and performance have produced new ways of thinking of the notion of embodied subjectivity, and of the relationships between the realm of the social and of subjective perception, outside of purely academic and philosophical discourses.

Within this context, the performer or actor occupies an essential position. Each of these artists, Mullican included, offers a different model to think through these questions, models from which it is impossible to distinguish the immaterial nature of thought from the material nature of the theatrical event.

By moving into the more traditional framework of theatre, Mullican will have the opportunity to use the stage as new situation and a new language. The theatrical stage might reinstitute a constraining structure and a specific framework of representation. How Mullican might invest this new situation and engage with actors as a tools remains to be seen and thought through.

Vanessa Desclaux, May 2011