For nearly three decades, artist Matt Mullican has evolved a visual language that describes an imagined world, a universe of his own creation. Drawing from a rich vocabulary of images that has roots in actual signs and symbols from the public realm—from encyclopedias and other similarly authoritative sources—Mullican composes grids of information that are both literal and evocative.
For the imagery in L'Art d'Écrire Mullican followed his usual practice, adding specific references to the College's library building, the campus, the town of Middlebury, and the state of Vermont. The mural is intended to serve as a map or chart of the viewer's place in the cosmos. If there were a red dot or an arrow to indicate our place in this schematic rendering, it would appear at the lower right-hand corner of the center panel, on the floor plan of the library building itself. Mullican suggests that we determine our place in the world by acquiring knowledge through written sources. L'Art d'Écrireis thus a compendium of information as well as an invitation to study and to learn.
The title of the mural, L'Art d'Écrire (The Art of Writing), as well as a number of the images within the work, have come from the influential 18th-century Encyclopedia compiled by the French academicians Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert. This multi-volume anthology of articles and images on a broad range of topics endeavored to catalogue all of human knowledge, with an unprejudiced respect for the mechanical arts as well as the intellectual, or liberal, arts.
Like his Enlightenment predecessors, Mullican shares an enthusiasm for anthologizing. Woven within L'Art d'Ecrire,one can find references to a range of ideas that encompasses language, geography, history, the natural world, and the built environment. Among the recognizable images in this encyclopedic survey of world knowledge are alphabets of several languages, charts of the heavenly bodies, and some references to Middlebury itself. For example, the library building has been acknowledged in the form of two floor plans found in the mural's center panel. Other images represent aerial views of the town and historic images of College buildings. In general, the right-hand panel represents the physical elements, or materiality, while the images in the left-hand panel of the mural refer to the human brain and the physiology of learning.
Mullican's iconography places an emphasis on the world as perceived through the visual language of commonly accepted signs and symbols that his viewers can read. More broadly, the fundamental concept of the libraryas a locus of knowledge, research, and information resonates throughout the mural's imagery and themes.