<---- Actual human size
--Ashley Linden
Ron Mueck
You won’t believe your eyes.
There is no Spoon
"I feel like they're so real they're breathing" - Andrew Lynch
Is this an image of real people, or not? That is often the immediate question that flashes through the mind of a first time viewer of Ron Mueck’s work. Mueck was born in Germany and had no formal training, but continues to create his stunning clay sculptures from his small studio in London. Nothing would be more fitting than if Mueck were to take on illusionist and showman Henry Roltair’s slogan, “you won’t believe your eyes!” Roltair enjoyed creating optical illusions that seemed to be impossibly real, such as his living decapitated heads. Mueck’s art seems to have taken up the concept of illusionism into his work as well. Illusionism captures the senses with beauty or astonishment and holds the viewer in a state of disbelief, curiosity and unfulfilled desire. Mueck uses unusual sizes and realistic emotions in a way that is not only captivating as an illusion of reality to the eyes, but the emotions as well.
The “Spooning Couple” is the first of Mueck’s sculptures I saw, and my eyes were completely taken in. There is nothing in the clothing, position, anatomy, or expressions that tips the eye off to the clay-and-paint nature of the pair. I assumed the couple were two real-life people perhaps posed by a photographer. But as you can see, unless they are a newly discovered breed of pixy, the couple is much too small to be living. The illusion is in the details. The strands of hair, the folds in the clothing and work of gravity on the skin, and even emotional expression (as we will see later) is all undistinguishably true to a life-size human.
Too Big to be True
On the other hand, many of his sculptures are massive, a feature that adds to the awe in reaction to the sustained realism. It is somehow easier to imagine the boy entitled "Crouching Boy" standing up and revealing himself to be a living giant than to imagine Mueck plastering the boys great back, painting and polishing his eyes, and sculpting emotion into the creases on his forehead and toes. The detailed care that has gone into forming his ears, laying his hair, fitting his pants, and indenting the huge individual marks of the vertebrae on his back is a staggering reality.
Mueck's exhibits have been well received by the public, and this is, I believe, partially due to the extremely relatable nature of his work. His sculptures demand more than technical observation, there is something emotionally charged about each piece that screams for attention. Each piece asks the viewer to look for story, for human contact, to feel out where the character is in their life and what circumstances brought them there. Each one has an untold story which Mueck hints at with body language and expressions. Talking about "Wild Man" (left) one reviewer put it well: "'Wild Man' shows signs of extreme anxiety, even terror; he grips the stool and his toes press down onto the floor. The artist has made him look doubly vulnerable. Despite dwarfing us mere mortals who look at him – he is nearly three metres high – his state of ongoing fear elicits a sympathetic response from us. Instead of our feeling intimidated by him, he seems intimidated by us." In addition to these things, Mueck has also given the Wild Man goosebumps, which can be interpreted as stemming from cold from being naked in a presumably air-conditioned room, or as a another sign of the intensity of his anxiety.
I Feel You
Photographer Gautier Deblonde said of Mueck's work, "Everyone can find a moment of his life where his experience matches Ron's sculpture. It's like you're being watched. Sometimes it feels like you're looking at yourself by observing his sculptures. This is what is fascinating." Sadness, surprise, and anxiety are just a few of the illusional emotions Mueck conveys best, and all of these relate to the viewer in one way or another.
The "Cut Boy" is caught in the moment of discovering he has acquired a pretty nasty wound. His raised eyebrows, open mouth, and gentle handling all convey that this is something very new for this young man. His surprise is instantly relatable, and like Deblonde said, it’s almost impossible not to see yourself in his face, and mirror his surprise and concern.
Similarly, in a close-up view of the spooning couple the viewer is exposed to almost certainly familiar emotional affect: perhaps a lingering anguish that won't pass away, the prospect of one more day without money coming in, an erring child that refuses to listen to reason... a thousand other reasons would resonate with the couples blanks stares. With an outside view (like we saw before) the couple appears to be sleeping cozily together, but a closer look reveals their worn emotional state. Though there is a small amount of intimacy, they withhold any affection with their upper bodies and both curl their arms protectively. Though this gesture seems to denote distance, the expressions coloring their faces appear to be closely mirroring one another. They both share a worn and sleepless gaze, both curling their arms in as if to comfort themselves. But why should they comfort themselves when the one they love is right beside them? There's is a paradoxically shared and separate pain.
The sculpture 'Couple Under an Umbrella" conveys a similarly complex array of emotions. First, they are at the beach, a normally calming and pleasant experience. But the two are sitting silently, deep in thought; both seem weighed down by some unspoken trouble. But unlike the spooning couple, the pair reach out to one another. The expression is poignantly subtle: the husband has reached up and is holding his wife’s arm tenderly, if a bit absently as he gazes off, deep in his own mind; the wife's watches his face unseen, almost as if she wishes she could heal his pain with a compassionate gaze, but knows it wouldn't be enough. But this is only one interpretation in an endless stream of possibilities. As artist Andrew Lynch said of Mueck's work, "It's sometimes dangerous to talk about things, because words make it too specific... Every viewer has his own feelings and interpretations and its this kind of freedom of coming up with your own thing that's very important."
This same kind of connection can be found in all of Mueck's sculptures. The illusion is complete, the sculptures draw us in with the flawless illusion of physical and emotional life. But how?
A Golden Silence
Mueck is an extremely private artist. He does not answer any prompts for interviews and has only let one photographer into his studio with the stipulation that there would be no talking or explanation, only film and photograph.
In the illusion business, Mueck's silence is a great tool to produce curiosity, and keep desires unfulfilled. There are some questions that will never be fully answered. The biggest one being "How does he do it?" The details we do know are sparse and simply add to the mystery of the illusion: Some of his most used tools are wire frames, plaster and molds, and hair from humans and horses (and who knows what other creatures!). However, though the mystique of Roltair’s floating heads was dashed when viewers found out that mirrors were concealing the individual’s body, with Mueck’s sculptures, it is plain that there is no great trickery. What you see is actually completely accurate to what is there, it’s simply not alive as the eye would have us believe.
Perhaps for a man as introverted with his personal life, sharing the details of his work (however mundain) would be like sharing the secrets of his heart. His emotions are already laid out for us in his work and he seems to say, "If you want to know me, leave the details alone and come see my art for yourself." And here we are.
In an era where the skeptical eye has become part of every-day living, the fact that Mueck’s work can create such a reaction is quite an accomplishment. It is his attention to physical and emotional detail that brings his art into the realm of illusion, tricking the eye into believing what it sees to be real not only in a physical sense, but an emotional one as well.
“You see him working on a piece of clay and suddenly this person appears. Somehow, out of his hands, he manages to create an object – alive." Gautier Deblonde