For And Yet It Moves, the tenth issue of Triple Canopy, artist Matt Mullican collaborated with computer programmer Patrick Smith to create “Planetarium,” a navigable scale model of the solar system. Mullican, who has worked in performance, installation, sculpture, and hypnosis, first experimented with digital environments in 1991 to create Five into One, a virtual city constructed in accordance with his personal visual vocabulary and cosmological order. Exploring that city, Mullican was transfixed by his ability to leave the earth’s surface and travel into the sky, toward the stratosphere, into nothingness. (This experience of unbounded space became a leitmotif in later works.) From Me (in Space), an edition published by Triple Canopy as the companion to “Planetarium,” is Mullican’s schematic diagram of his relationship to space, positioning him both within and outside the solar system. The left panel of the diptych shows the planets, horizontally aligned and rendered as colored pixels in a black field, in the bright, solid palette characteristic of the artist’s sculpture and cartography. On the right, Mullican charts his distance from those planets. Near the bottom of this panel, Mullican has provided a time stamp, halting the movements of these celestial bodies at the moment of his completion of the work.
Matt Mullican was born in 1951, in Santa Monica, California, and currently lives in Berlin. His work has been exhibited extensively in the US and internationally. Recently, his work was included in “The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2009) and the 2008 Whitney Biennial; it has also been exhibited at the Drawing Center, New York (2008); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2005); Ludwig Museum, Cologne (2005); and Museu Serralves, Porto (2001). Mullican’s work is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at the STUK Kunstencentrum in Leuven, Belgium, which will be traveling to de Appel, Amsterdam, and Haus der Kunst, Munich.