Mrs. is pleased to announce Clark, a presentation of new works by Mark Mulroney. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.
Remember the Phone Booth?
I do. But I only vaguely remember that it had something to do with Superman. For me, the phone booth was a thing that allowed me to get lost, even stranded. Sometimes in trouble—but not too much trouble—because I could call collect and someone would eventually pick me up. I just had to stay put and wait.
Years ago, you could depend on there being one of those little metal boxes with a phone on a cord at the bus depot, mall bathroom, airport, high school parking lot, Carl’s Jr., gas station. I remember you could dial “0” for operator and get a real human being on the other end. She’d say, “City and State please,” and you could say, “Santa Ana, California, I’m looking for Mark Mulroney,” and she would say back, “Sorry no listing under that name.” When I was a teenager, my mom told me to always keep a quarter on me for the phone, in case of an emergency. She said her mom told her the same thing, but it was a dime back then.
For Superman, who lived and worked in a big city called Metropolis, the phone booth was the kind you could step inside. For Superman, it was a dressing room, a chrysalis. He could be walking down the street and just pop into the phone booth’s glass and metal case and transform himself into something beautiful.
Like so much displaced and erased by our current social-techno-infrastructure this apparatus has become obsolete. Lately, I’ve been wondering: what is the difference between obsolescence and failure?
Superman has always been an allegory, but is the meaning of his story changing? Not being a comic book fan, I had to refresh my memory: Superman is a journalist by day (remember writers and newspapers and a reading public?) who went into disguise to protect his privacy (remember when one’s whole life wasn’t for public consumption?) so that he could help people in need (help others?). And the thing that allowed Superman to transform himself from a private citizen into a public servant with a fabulous outfit: it was a little piece of urban infrastructure that also enabled people to find each other, call for directions, leave a message, wait for a call back—without extracting more from them (or about them) than a couple of cents.
Mark Mulroney, the artist, sometimes watches fail videos to make himself laugh amidst the frustration and despair of trying to live a creative and humble life in these times. I’ll hear his laughter from downstairs and I’ll wonder if his entertaining himself with the failure of others is antithetical to these ideals—but it seems Mark has been thinking and feeling deeply about failure lately. It’s not just the wheezing of a woman who has fallen into a bucket of grapes, or the pig with no back legs named Chris P. Bacon, or the injuries suffered by intoxicated middle-aged people on trampolines. Mark seems to have found something else in the shared laugh (or cry). Is it that same pull for connection that created the public phone? The ability to trust if you get into a jam, you can call for help. That mix of risk and hope that enables you to go places without knowing who will be there or how you’ll get back. That opportunity to transform yourself, maybe not as strikingly as Clark Kent, but little adventure by little adventure, into your own self. It might even let you meet someone who will pick you up and fly you to an ice cave in outer space where your hair looks really great and all the problems of the world would be very far away. —Lucy Mulroney