22 October 2000 – 7 January 2001
Matt Mullican: How would you define “quantifiable”?
Michael Tarantino: Something that can be measured.
Matt Mullican: You can measure maps that are fictional.
Comprised of photographs, posters, videos, comic strips, maps and signs, Mullican’s exhibition More Details from an Imaginary Universe dealt with the signs and symbols that people experience in everyday life.
Posited as glimpses from an imaginary universe, the exhibition was concerned with the fictions we absorb into the narrative of daily existence; Mullican located the imaginary in the ordinary, a phenomenon best described in his own words: ‘every time you read something, [you read it] symbolically, primarily symbolically, that can be any sign whatsoever. Writing, talking, film, TV… you are dealing with another world, an imaginary world.’
The sheer quantity of the media in which Mullican worked demonstrates the scope of his subject matter, one that includes all the potential variety of ‘another world’.
At the time, the exhibition was only one part of the full picture, with another selection of Mullican’s work simultaneously exhibited at the Tapies Foundation in Barcelona. Seeing More Details from an Imaginary Universe subsequently demanded the imaginative capacity of those who saw it – to guess and envision the other half of the work, in a gallery hundreds of miles away.