Hypno Journal

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.