THE PECULIAR ALCHEMY OF THE CATHODE RAY

“The first thing that struck me was, the light was black. My eyes took a little time to grow accustomed to this absolute darkness for, though the felicate apparatus of cornea and aqueous humor and crystalline lens and vitreous body and optic nerve and retina had all been reversed when I gave birth to my mirror self through the mediation of the looking glass, yet my sensibility remained as it had been…. but when the inside of my head could process the information my topsy-turvy senses retrieved for me, then my other, or anti-eyes apprehended a world of phosphorescent colour etched as with needles of variegated fire on a dimensionless opacity. The world was the same; yet absolutely altered.”

Angela Carter’s solarised universe extends beyond the silvered meniscus of a hermaphrodite’s mirror in her short story, “Reflections”. The condensed atmosphere is characterized by a leaden gravity that distorts perceptual awareness, compressing distance, warping sound and it is as if Craig Mulholland’s aesthetic has seeped through the punctured skin of such a mirror-portal.
Carter is often identified as a magical realist, and through this epithet we find a side road, a back alley, to Mulholland’s practice. Magic(al) realism, usually denotes a stylistic literary connection to a group of Latin American writers – Asturias, Allende, Borges, Garcia Marquez – whose work combines the fantastical and the mundane to illustrate the psychological and cultural truths of the “Other”. However, this use has evolved through translation, adoption and attribution from a term – magic realism – introduced in 1920s Germany by the critic Franz Roh to describe the paintings of a group of artists (Georg Schrimpf, Alexander Kanholdt amongst them) who manifested stylistic concerns differing from the mainstream Expressionist mode. Part of the taxonomical proliferation which accompanied the late 19th century breakdown in the hegemony of the Academy and the birth of Modernism, “magic realism” was a subset of the Neue Sachlichkeit which, defined in opposition to Expressionism was “cool and cold” rather than warm; “engrossing” rather than “arousing”; thinly coloured, civilized, obvious and enigmatic, positing the “explanatory” rather than “stifled” object; like “polished metal” rather than “uncut stone”.

In Mulholland’s scheme, this “miracle of existence” – the object in magic realism – sits at Thomas Carlyle’s “Conflux of Eternities, (the eternal refreshment of the present by streams from past and future) at the “Centre of Immensities”, (the instantaneous apprehension of the universe in its entirety). Mulholland’s fascination with the arcane – his burnished surfaces, the counter-balanced apparatus that comprise his spindly orchestra – and the propositional quality of his arrangements belie affection for the Scholar, for whom the Machine is animate, revelatory and mechanistically beautiful. The Scholar, in this instance, is less the Renaissance man whose typology has, by way of Dr Frankenstein, dictated the habit of the Mad Professor, and more the Pataphysician concerned with “the science of imaginary solutions”, who, like Carlyle, can “see all possible worlds when (looking) at only one of them.”
Poetically at least, the Pataphysician’s physics presaged the development of chaos theory, the science of irregularity and unpredictability. The final few years of the 19th century and early years of the 20th, represent a period that saw the ossification of Empirical ideas and the reversal of the tradition of order and permanence over chaos and change. It is this period – with its far-reaching repercussions – that Mulholland’s fractal understanding is rooted. His practice configures an imagined sense of the prehistory of computer technology, of information science nascent at this time. As Walter Benjamin used the architecture of the Parisian Arcades to provide an organizational metaphor for his convoluted, cross-referenced system of subjective enquiry, so Mulholland employs the technics of data-processing to examine the compromises it entails for the individual. The notion of the Panopticon is a trope to which Mulholland repeatedly appeals, not just in the service of his comments on surveillance, on the interchangeability of Operator and Camera, but also as way to invest his enterprise with liminal architectural and archaeological references and focus it hermetically, solipsitically.
Psychoanalytically, the screen – which appears in Mulholland’s work as a series of shuttering trapdoors, or angled metal music scores – may have its genesis in the hemespheric sense and separation of a thick, bubble-glassed visor on a diver’s helmet and is thus implied in figuring Solipsism: we are inside looking out -“Poltergeist” maybe the ultimate paranoid fantasy in this respect, projecting the divided self beyond the beveled glass of a television. With the advent of plasma technology, our material connection to the screen is changing. Differences in experiencing the television and the computer collapse, and the repository of poetic resonances and references changes with it. Mulholland’s work exhibits a nostalgia for the mechanics of image making which are everywhere miniaturised, occluded, denied: he challenges us to question what we take for granted, to uncover the politically inflected structures which govern our lives unnoticed, universally accepted.