New York based artist, Matt Mullican has used hypnosis since the 1970s to create drawings and give performances. He currently has an exhibition at The Drawing Center in SoHo that will be up through 2/5/09. There is an informative article about Mullican in the New York Times: Mapping an Imagined Order, Page by Page (11/14/08).
I found a transcript from an interview Mullican gave for Tate online. He describes how he works with a hypnotist before a performance:
Today I am meeting with the hypnotist of Assente and will be working this afternoon and this evening and he’ll put me into a…first he’ll relax me which is pretty standard yoga, like where you just go and you concentrate and you’ll just go into a pretty deep relaxation. And then he’ll put me in a trance state, and then in the trance state he might ask me ‘what do you want to do?’, ‘so what’s up?’, ‘what are you interested in?’, ‘what do you want to do today, what’s different from last time?’
And then we’ll have a conversation and he will take notes as to what I want to do and then this evening he will bring those notes back and we’ll have a discussion again and then it will be… like there will be an idea.
And then the audience will arrive….
Here’s a description of the above photo found on Tang, the site of the Francis Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College:
Working under hypnosis, Matt Mullican created this large drawing in the Tang Museum on February 6, 2006. It continues an investigation of what the artist refers to as “that person’s work”—aspects of his own creative psyche and impulses that emerge only under hypnosis. For the Tang session, which lasted approximately an hour and a quarter, Mullican underwent hypnosis with the assistance of a local psychiatrist experienced in hypnotherapy.
Tags: Art and Hypnosis
December 1, 2008 at 11:26 am
Wow, what an interesting article. I wonder if his trance work differs from his work when not under hypnosis. I am a composer, and I have done my best work in the “zone” – a place almost outside of myself. I’ve also composed hypnosis music, and I’ve found that I go very easily into a self-induced trance when I write that kind of music. But the question is: am I in trance because of the nature of the music I’m writing, or does the music have a trance inducing effect because I was in a trance when I wrote it? I do Reiki and Quantum Touch breathing before I start, so who knows!!
December 1, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Thanks for posting a comment, Annie. It’s neat to hear about your experience composing music while in a trance state. I like your question about whether your hypnosis music induces the trance state or whether being in a trance state inspires the hypnotic quality of the music.
Hypnosis and art (painting, writing, composing, acting, etc.) is such an interesting topic. I’d love to hear from more artists.
I visited your Music for Hypnotherapy site and have just linked to it. I enjoyed listening to the samples. Beautiful–and very soothing for hypnotherapy, and other healing arts.
September 28, 2010 at 5:46 pm
I too compose music and have noticed that the process also puts me into a trance. Usually, when I am done it takes me some time to return to my typical non-composing thought process.
I recently saw a video on how there was a type of scan (I think fMRI) done on people with so called A.D.D and how their minds actually worked differently in that there was an on going communication between the front and back of the brain and that the back of the brain is responsible for creativity. They found that people who did not exhibit common A.D.D behavior were lacking in this communication between the front and back of the brain and mostly solely used the front of the brain.
What I’m getting at here and what I am hypothesizing is that if you were to do these same scans on Annie and I during our composition induced trance-like states is that we would either have very active communication between the front and back of the brain or a more singular active back of the brain with a somewhat limited amount of activity in the front of the brain. Keep in mind, I am by no means a neuroscientist and have an extremely rudimentary and possibly fallable understanding of the brain, but it’s worth pondering at the least.
October 1, 2010 at 3:39 pm
Cameron, thanks for this thought-provoking comment. Very interesting!