This
could be anywhere. Trying to locate Julian Mullan’s motives is thoroughly
precluded by his accurate cropping of the image, the proximate step after
deciding on the motive in the process of a geminated selection routine. The
immanent calm evokes notions of emigration and deserted sites, the numerous
towns left for better economic opportunities. Present fears due to the
ever-growing industrial automation, including our means of transport, i.e.
cars, and its impact on human work force emerge.
In
the face of the upcoming changes technological progress enables, Mullan’s
sculpturalisation of the everyday object can’t be read as merely aesthetic or
as sheer capitalisation of shape and color for artistic purposes. Nor can it be
considered as the means to force the audience to a more acute perception and
focus (for instance, a reflecting puddle on concrete – simple but a fortiori
radiant). It is rather a massively accelerated crescendo leading to the eve of
the crisis, a documentary of the soon-to-be-discarded, a stroll through the
still-there, which, in a not so far fetched future, can be viewed in museums
only.
Mullan
took some of the images years ago, as if intuiting the preciousness and
fleeting of what we call commonplace now. The frequently occurring
interruptions via diagonal lines are echoed in the selection of works for the
exhibition, the “haunted” images are contrasted by images of somewhat untouched
nature, resembling a different sort of human absence.
Simultaneously,
he seems to present a possible pastime, for a future humanity: within the time
won due to automatisation lurks the possibility of a return to delight in the
given, the pristine.
His
works might as well be diagnostic of a strange nostalgia, already somewhat
palpable but yet to come, about the wistful enjoyment of apparently unaffected
spots in growing awareness of the Anthropocene, the age in which one species
has induced profound consequences by its various interventions on this planet.
I
also have to think of the filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, who, like Mullan,
valued color and contrast as an important element of his work. Both are
incorporating architecture. Either are fond of ambiguity too. Like a string,
from one to the other, one is confronted with the rise of classic
industrialisation, while the other works in times of the fall thereof. The
buildings depicted, respectively sections of, are in either case constructed
for maximum utilisation, featuring nothing ornamental or too inviting, bleak
and mistakable: a photograph is a copy after all, and the photographed
buildings are, due to the schematic and simply viable repetition regarding
structure, too.
But
not only the death of a major portion of the work force and general conditions
of a first world existence as we know it is surfacing as a theme, there are
increasing rumors about the demise of photography. Well-known is the threat
that photography at its advent posed to painting, and the following reinvention
of the latter medium. Now the tables have turned and the time has come for
photography to find ways to re-establish itself and secure its place in the
wake of an egalitarian, more instant and less conscious practice of it.
Unflinching,
Mullan is continuing to embrace the slowness of the trade. The indeterminable,
cropped-away surroundings of the image he presents conjure intrigue. The gaze
that his minute precision encourages could be the very essential characteristic
that might translate into a new appreciation and survival of the medium in the
end.
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