An Australian artist who has received astounding international acclaim for his lifelike fibreglass sculptures is currently exhibiting in his home town, Melbourne.
Ron Mueck is a stunningly successful sculptor who now lives and works in the UK. Using materials such as fibreglass, polyester resin, silicone and polyurethane, he creates sculptures of mostly human, often naked forms that are scarily lifelike, yet either smaller or larger than life. Mueck’s current show at the National Gallery of Victoria in the largest exhibition of his work ever staged in Australia.
Mueck challenges the boundary between art and the real, even as the scale of his works reinforces it, yet the hyperrealism is anything but simplistic. While his work shares similarities with Patricia Piccinini’s playfully dark visions of hybridised life forms, its aims couldn’t be more different.
It struck me as I wandered through this exhibition that I should be focusing on the viewers as much as the works themselves. The large Sunday afternoon crowd were delighted and intrigued, laughing, gazing, waving cameras around and pointing out details to each other. The excited comments I overheard seemed to be mainly about how realistic the sculptures were. Children revelled in the verisimilitude and asked pointed questions.
As the crowd revealed to me, the exhibition can be experienced on many levels. Humans are naturally curious about the people we see in the street, but from an early age we’re told it’s not polite to stare. This exhibition invites us to stare at these apparent examples of our species – to marvel at the various markings on human skin, to study the expression of a figure so lost in its own world it can acknowledge no watcher. Various angles offer different facial expressions and bodily details. But the pieces are always open ended: as viewers, we’re asked to bring our own interpretations to these works.
Mueck’s extreme attention to detail invites us to wonder at the intricacies of the human animal. The skins of his subjects bear all the imperfections and gradations of colour and texture of the real thing: pale pink blotches that indicate underlying capillaries; loose folds; ghostly tracks of blue veins; moles and freckles; pimples; hair follicles, and hairs that have been individually inserted.
Despite the hyperrealism, there seem to be occasional small distortions in the proportions in order to make a point about the subject. While the figures are often naked, the clothes and appendages that some of them wear are rendered with the same loving detail that Mueck brings to the nude.
Before his career as a sculptor Mueck worked in puppetry and model making in film and television, first in Australia and then in London; he was involved in Jim Henson’s film The Labyrinth. In 1997 his sculpture ‘Dead Dad’ appeared in the group exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, held at London’s Royal Academy. The work caught the eyes of critics and shot Mueck to fame; since his stunning debut, visitors have flocked to see his sculptures, which are now included in a number of Australian, US and European collections.
Mueck unashamedly uses size to shock us into viewing his subjects with fresh eyes. ‘A girl’ 2006 is one of the exhibition’s more confronting pieces. A huge newborn baby girl, 5 metres long, lies on her side. Part of the umbilical cord is still attached to her navel, and traces of blood and amniotic fluid are strewn over parts of her skin.
Her face has the squashed ugliness of the newborn, a testament to the ordeal of birth she’s just been through. Her head has been bent back as if she’s been placed in an uncomfortable position or is protesting about her removal from the womb. One eye is partially open but her expression registers little but a kind of blind angst.
Her hugeness suggests the enormity of her neediness, the responsibility that her existence, her advent, imposes on her parents, the undeniable change she will necessitate. But, seen out of the context of a typical loving triad, she looks grotesque and alien, even monstrous, not yet fully humanised. We fear and feel sorry for her simultaneously.
This work contrasts with the first sculpture in the exhibition, ‘Dead Dad’, which depicts the corpse of Mueck’s own father. This sculpture has been placed in its own, dimly lit room. It depicts a man who is about two-thirds smaller than life size, totally naked, laid out on his back with his hands turned upwards. His skin has a grey-greenish pallor. His face still bears the marks of recent suffering but also resignation.
He seems recently dead and therefore close to life, as if death and life co-existed in the sculpture. There’s a sense here that Mueck is demystifying death at the same time as he presents it in all its starkness. The sculpture’s diminutiveness suggests the loss of the human presence in death, but also that the father has lost Oedipal power: not only has been demoted to ‘Dad’, but he is smaller rather than larger than life as an oedipalised parent figure might be. There’s also a sad elegiac beauty inherent in the figure. He’s a kind of hybrid: both medical specimen (laid out too neatly) and loved father.
Most of Mueck’s subjects in this exhibition inhabit inner worlds, lost in their own subjectivity. Four of them directly reference the extreme inwardness of either sleep, being in bed or both.
‘Old woman in bed’ 2002 is a particularly poignant example. An elderly woman lies in a bed, her head nestled into a pillow, her grey hair tousled behind her. A crisp sheet and neatly folded cream blanket cover her, the lack of colour evoking a nursing home or hospital. She lies on her side, suggesting a foetal position. Her eyes are half-closed and her mouth hangs slightly open.
Here is a woman long past caring about the appearance she presents to a hypersexualised world. Instead, one hand loosely fingers the sheet as if craving the security of childhood. She is vulnerable, seemingly utterly exhausted by life, yet there’s also a sense in which she has abandoned herself to the peace that sleep and the bed offer her.
‘In bed’ 2005 (pictured) is also fascinating: a giant-sized woman, somewhere between youth and middle age, lies in bed with her knees drawn up under carefully draped sheets, head propped up by pillows, one oversized hand touching her mouth and cheek. It’s impossible to read her emotional state definitively but the possibilities are endless: she could be facing some health crisis; pondering an intractable problem; or simply watching television. Much as she confronts us with her huge proximity, her inner world is closed to us. The body reveals and hides simultaneously.
‘Wild man’ 2005 is fascinating on many levels, and was attracting a huge amount of attention on the afternoon of my visit. This sculpture, almost 3 metres tall, depicts a naked man sitting terrified on a wooden stool, clutching its sides, his legs drawn together in self-protection. He stares sideways, afraid to meet our gaze. His hair and beard are wild and woolly but his body is pale and conventionally toned. There is a disconcerting contradiction between his huge size and his evident fear, although that fear is emphasised by the vulnerability of his nakedness.
This creature is a focus of curiosity on two levels: as a giant realistic sculpture, and as a supposedly uncivilised man who is perhaps being exposed to nineteenth-century style medical objectification with its implications of the freak show. He seems to quail in our gaze, involuntarily stuck in the cages of his own terror and the discourses that might seek to name and ‘civilise’ him. We’re forced to study him in an objectifying way; but at the same time we’re studying a version of ourselves, and therefore also confronting the primeval fears that may lurk within us.
One disappointment was the exclusion of ‘Pregnant woman’ from the exhibition, which is surprising given that it’s already in Australia, having been purchased by the National Gallery of Australia. This magnificent sculpture of a woman nearing the end of pregnancy is a testament to female strength, agency and endurance. As if to compensate, the show contains four sculptures that have never previously been exhibited.
‘Drift’ 2009 is one of these. It shows a man who continues to revel in the trappings of civilisation even as he disavows the work ethic that such trappings suggest. This middle-aged holidaymaker lies back on his li-lo, arms loosely out to his sides as if his hands are resting in water, seeming to drift along with not a care in the world. His attitude indicates utter vacancy, as if he has temporarily left his life behind. But while he may be carefree, everything about him suggests his context: the expensive-looking designer watch, the surfie-style board shorts, the sunnies, the tanned, well-maintained middle-aged body.
He should be horizontal but he’s vertical so we can easily view him, and the downward angle of his loosely outstretched arms curiously suggests a crucifixion: perhaps Mueck is gently mocking Christian iconography and suggesting that the pursuit of pleasure is now the official religion.
A very different kind of crucifixion is suggested by the only non-human sculptural form in the exhibition. ‘Still life’ 2009 depicts a plucked dead chicken with its neck cut open, trussed and hung upside down, its wings hanging at angles from its sides. The inner flesh from the large cut in the side of the chicken’s neck is clearly delineated. This work, with its discomforting portrayal of human objectification of animals, reminded me of Ivan Durrant’s fibreglass butcher shop window.
Ron Mueck’s works will be on show at the National Gallery of Victoria until April 18. The exhibition will then be shown at the Queensland Art Gallery from 8 May to 1 August, followed by Christchurch Art Gallery from 30 September until 23 January 2011.
0 comments:
Post a Comment