- Bob Dylan
Galleries and museums come with a dilemma attached: do you go alone so that you can linger on some things and skip past others as you like, or do you take someone with you in case you want to talk about the exhibits? Overall, I’m glad I went to see a recent Ron Mueck exhibition alone, because that way it was easier to appreciate his solitary subjects.
Mueck’s sculptures are all models of people, and he makes them as realistic as he can. They have that Madame Tussauds quality to them – you do a double-take when you realise it isn’t a real person standing next to you after all. What makes this double-take more surprising than in Madame Tussauds is the fact that each one is either larger or smaller than life. I suppose he does this to make it obvious he’s building the figures from scratch rather than just making waxworks from casts. But it also makes for some interesting effects: things you don’t get by looking at the photos in the catalogue. The initial surprise at being confronted by something massive is the most obvious of these, which I suppose is the reason Wild Man came first in the exhibition – a huge, naked man with unkempt beard, clutching his chair in fear. But the scale trick does more subtle things to you too. My favourite sculpture was Ghost, a slightly-too-big teenager in a swimsuit, looking distinctly uncomfortable at being made to lean against the wall in a gallery where people could criticise her.
And criticise her they did. Maybe if I hadn’t been alone I would have done the same thing. It’s one of the three things people seem to do when they’re confronted with Mueck’s models. Because the things are so lifelike, it feels like the artist needs putting in his place, and you’re compelled to look for flaws. The people around me were muttering sceptically about the realism of Ghost’s skin tone and the unwanted arm hair that they failed to remember from their own adolescence.
The second reaction people have is to try to imagine what the characters are thinking. Mueck and the curators who work with him are careful to leave this game open, making sure they give you nothing more than hints to get it going. This was what made Ghost so good for me. I felt a combination of sympathy for her crippling shyness (her face was pulled into a gawkily unusual expression that – well, you’d have to see it up close) and hope on her behalf, because it’s clear that she’ll be good-looking in a couple of years’ time.
The third thing you can do with these sculptures also treats them as real people – instead of putting yourself in their shoes, you sometimes find yourself imagining you’re someone else in the room. In Bed has a middle-aged woman propped up on the pillows, staring into the middle distance. I think she’s watching TV, personally. Anyway, the plaque suggested that her large scale put the viewer in the position of being one of her children. It seemed to me that I was more like a husband. The only time I see flesh in that much detail is when I’m very close to it, and even though it was a pretty unsexy portrait I couldn’t shake a sense of intimacy.
7 comments:
Interesting. Are his models all made from wax? Where did you see the exhibition?
Very promising blog by the way, but not quite as intellectual as LoonyBin. ;-)
He makes a clay model from which he produces a cast. Taking the cast off destroys the model, and he annoyingly throws the bits away instead of selling them to people like me. Then he paints layers of resin onto the inside of the cast to build up the sculpture. When there are lots of fiddly hairs, he uses silicone instead of resin. The eyes are glass and the hair is real for small models and artificial for big ones.
Kind words - thank you. LoonyBin is in a league of its own.
I went to see this when I was up for the festival, and I think my favourite was the woman in bed. She may be watching TV, as you said, but if so it waas very absent mindedly - she looks incredibly troubled about something or other, more so than she would be watching a nasty news story.
Didn't really get what the chap in the rowing boat was about though...
The most interesting thing about the chap in the rowing boat is that his mouth looks like Jarvis Cocker's.
I went with two people to the exhibition but I found that we spent a lot of our time alone.
With the exception of the wild man, whose incredibly striking pose of terror and discomfort which fantastically in a Gulliver sort of way, I was most keen on the small exhibits. Unlike yourself, I did not like the adolescent girl. Her face did not convince me enough to illicit empathy, despite my proximity to her in age and situation.
My personal favourite piece was the spooning couple. The urge to pick them up, particularly the woman, was almost unbearable. While the enormous new born baby was simply too large for me to comprehend, their smallness allowed the viewer to take in a huge amount of information in one viewing, in a way that you would never get in real life; information about them as individuals and their relationship. I found people lingered much longer by them than they did by the large baby.
I look forward to reading these every fortnight. I may, in fact, enter it in my diary at this very moment.
Yep, smallness is good too, no doubt about it. It can allow you to see more of a picture at once, as you say; it can exaggerate the pathetic, as with Mueck's first piece, Dead Dad; and it can make something comical, as with the pair of gossipping old women.
I liked the spooning couple because I found them ambiguous. It could be that they've lost that loving feeling, or it could be that they're caught just at the moment of rolling back over and going to sleep. I can do the same thing with In Bed, whatever Boston Boy says. Also Mask III, the black woman's face that's either "beatific" (curator) or slightly disapproving. This is what makes playing the guess-what-they're-thinking game such fun, and I think it reminds you that neutral expressions on solitary people aren't necessarily negative - it's just that we're used to seeing people when they know they're being watched.
Yes: diarise me! Listen to this person, everyone, she talks sense.
Review the grass outside the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art! My favourite artwork in Edinburgh.
Keep it up, Herbert...
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