LILLI MULLER: DISCORPORATION
The fragmentation of the body – which would in most contexts seem rather grim or grisly – takes on a surprisingly playful, joyful, even hopeful tone in Lilli Muller’s encapsulation and reformulation of limbs and extremities, torsi and heads. To be sure, Muller’s corporeal concoctions suggest a thorough reformulation of the human condition, and they can seem entombed in their boxes, custom-made as such boxes may be. But, cast from live human bodies (and thus, importantly, life-size), these anatomical excerpts seem more vital (if parodic) than they do morbid or alienating.
George Segal discovered this ghost-in-the-machine effect a half-century ago when he began animating his tableaux with plastered people. Muller takes Segal’s revelation a step further by regarding human casts not as ciphers for real or imagined individuals, but as the seeds they grew from, the skins they sloughed, the potent presences they left behind. Does Muller proffer her parts as prosthetic enhancements, extensions of the body the way wigs and plugs are extension of the hair? Or are they less functional adornments, a new kind of jewelry or even clothing that celebrates anatomy by reifying it? Are these curious bits casual suggestions of a Pompeii in the making (not so much a disaster waiting to happen as a “re-cocooning” of the human spirit)? Are they messages in a bottle from our civilization to some other galaxies or millennia away? Are Muller’s heads elaborately painted and enmeshed but also branded with data in braille so that, for all their visual glory, they speak to the unsighted as well?
Notably, Muller’s drawings seem far distant in language and symbol from her sculptural work. One would expect her on-paper activity to concentrate on figure study. Instead, she conjures fanciful flora and flora-adjacent forms conceived with the same wit as she invests in her objects, and rendered with the same care and sensuality, but referring not to the human animal but to vaguely – or not-so-vaguely – human plants. Some of these notations (not least the elaborated polyhedrons) seem more cartographic than biological, and others bear strong resemblance to known vegetal forms .But, just as the casts of character reclaim their own integrity and offer themselves as amplification, not just replication, of their sources, Lilli Muller’s works on paper show us reconsiderations, and aesthetic transmogrifications, of phenomena in the real and living world.
Peter Frank, Los Angeles, January 2015