Part of a new NFT collection, painter Lee Mullican’s 1987 computer work falls on the Digital Art Space Feral file
In the early 1960s, Lee Mullican, the San Franciscan artist best known for his modernist abstractions, traded his brush for the painter’s ink knife. Using its thin edge, he applied paint to his canvases, building color into fine textured lines he called “stripes” that gave his cosmic compositions a rhythmic quality. It’s a technique he would use for the rest of his career – except for a brief period in the spring of 1987, when Mullican would trade his knife for a computer program.
During his thirty-year tenure as a faculty member at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, Mullican participated in the university’s Program for Technology in the Arts, which gave him access to an IBM 5170 loaded with a Truevision Advanced Raster Graphics Adapter and connected to a stylus.
With the machine, the then 67-year-old began experimenting with digital pattern making, generating more than 300 16-bit landscapes of otherworldly stripes in vibrant neon. To document the process, he took pictures of the screen as he worked.
“I found that beyond what was thought, the computer was hardlined, analytical and predictable,” he reflected, “it was really a medium driven by the automatic, made possible by chance and chance, the discovery of new ways of making images.”
Lee Mullican at the computer (1987). Photo: Basil Langton, courtesy of the Estate of Lee Mullican and Feral File.
On March 23rd, a batch of Mullican’s computer artwork reappears via an NFT tour of Feral File. The collection, entitled “LeeMullican.PCX,” includes 12 of the painter’s digital experiments, with each purchase including the original .PCX file (Picture Exchange image format), an enhanced 35mm slide scan and collector’s rights.
Embossed on Tezos, the series will first be sold through 20 sets with an edition of all 12 artworks for $2,400, before the remaining sets are sold as individual editions, priced at $200 each.
Lee Mullican, LM9-2.PCX (1987). Photo courtesy of Estate of Lee Mullican and Feral File.
The release is curated by Anika Meier, the curator and writer who organized Marina Abramović’s NFT debut, and Cole Root, the director of the Estate of Lee Mullican. For both, the artist’s work with computers is in line with his conviction, as one of the pioneers of the heady Dynaton movement of the 1950s, that art should be liberating and liberating.
“Lee’s digital works demonstrate relentless experimentation,” Root told Artnet News. “He did not run away from the new tools and technology of the time. He embraced them and shared what he learned with his students.”
Lee Mullican, LMSP7.PCX (1987). Photo courtesy of Estate of Lee Mullican and Feral File.
“Mullican came from painting,” Meier added. “He used his knowledge of painterly techniques as a guide when he began working with computers and found common ground between his own painting style and the chance made possible by the computer.”
Coincidence and automatism are indeed linked to Mullican’s practice, which incorporated influences as varied as topography, mysticism, ancient philosophies and surrealism. His work in the late 1940s spearheaded the Bay Area’s short-lived Dynaton movement, whose meditative canvases, created by the likes of Gordon Onslow Ford and Wolfgang Paalen, contrasted with the action-driven Abstract Expressionism of the East Coast.
Lee Mullican, Water service (1948). Item from the Marianne Boesky Gallery.
Mullican’s digital pieces are as meditative as all his physical canvases, and their creation is similarly dependent on chance and opportunity. As the artist recalled in the 2008 documentary Find Lee Mullican, “You can wipe something out [on the computer] in one minute and then get it back in another way. It was really a creative experience for me.”
“LeeMullican.PCX” is not the first time Mullican’s computer art has come to the NFT market. In November 2021, the Web3 platform Verisart, in partnership with Marc Selwyn Fine Art and Mullican’s estate, released 15 of his digital works as NFTs in a sale titled “Computer pleasure“, which yielded 35 ETH (about $62,675).
Intentionally, this latest release also features in a number of other NFT projects that similarly characterize early computer artwork, including Herbert W. Franke’s Math Art release Quantum Art in May 2022 (also overseen by Meier), and Sotheby’s “Natively Digital 1.3” sale in 2022 which featured works by Vera Molnár, Charles Csuri and Roman Verostko. The goal is not only to place contemporary digital art within the line of computer art, but to fold these trailblazers into the blockchain age.
Lee Mullican, LMSP6.PCX (1987). Photo courtesy of Estate of Lee Mullican and Feral File.
Furthermore, Meier is quick to shut down any criticism that these ground-breaking works are being “used to legitimize NFTs as art.” In her view, “it’s more the other way around: NFTs bring attention to the beginnings and history of digital art. Many of the pioneers are finally getting the recognition they deserve for their achievements, their fighting spirit and spirit of discovery and their perseverance.”
And all the more so for Mullican’s digital experiments, which the artist, as Root put it, undertook “not for anyone else or a market.” That they now find an appreciative audience is a credit to the art itself, if not to Mullican’s spirit of free-form exploration.
“I think an essential part of this work is that Lee made it for his own satisfaction and enjoyment. That’s why the work holds up, because it comes from a pure place of joy and creativity,” added Root. “He had fun, and it shows.”
Follow Artnet News on Facebook:
Do you want to be at the forefront of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest news, eye-opening interviews and sharp critiques that drive the conversation forward.
