OTTAWA Is Ron Mueck a good artist or is he a gifted sensationalist?
This has always been the question surrounding his work. There are those who say he simply wows us with his technical mastery, delivering cheap tricks and hackneyed psychology with crowd-pleasing appeal. Others see him as an important new link in the centuries-old chain of figurative sculpture, an artist revamping that tradition in light of new technologies of replication and simulation.
After seeing his current exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, I have to say: I'm in the second camp.
A defector from the special-effects side of the film industry, the Australian-born British artist arrived on the international scene with instant notoriety in 1997 in the touring exhibition Sensation, the show that introduced collector Charles Saatchi's posse of young British art stars to the world.
Mueck's work in that show was Dead Dad, a smaller than life-size portrait of his father's naked corpse.
Crafted from silicone and fibreglass, as are most of his works, the sculpture was a uncannily realistic homage made as his father lay dying half a world away. For this reason, it seems to me, the work was both an act of representation and a kind of ritual act of closure, made as a way of contemplating the physical remains of his parent whose soul had departed. (He even impregnated the shins with hair from his own body, heightening the sculpture's mystical resonance.
) In a way, Dead Dad is a perfect metaphor for the mystery of art, as well as the mystery of life: How is it that the merely physical can house the ineffable, the sublime? And how do artists make inanimate matter vibrate with life and soul -- whether it be Bernini's marble or Rothko's brooding paint stains on canvas?
Dead Dad was Mueck's first art work, and you can see it in the current Ottawa show, where it continues to deliver the same shock it did a decade ago.
But Mueck does more than shock us. As with all of his best work, scale is being used to profound psychological effect. The smallness of Dead Dad underscores the figure's vulnerability.
In death, the father is seen for the humble thing he is -- just a man, a little bag of bones and flesh. Some see the figure as stripped of dignity, but I cannot agree. He is simply reduced to the physical facts of existence or, rather, non-existence, which his sculptural presence somewhat brazenly invites us to consider.
Next to technical skill (he can paint mottled flesh and dirt under the toenails like no man alive), scale is Mueck's most powerful tool, usually used as a means of exposing the drama of family life. A Girl (2006) is a giant, 4.5-metre-long newborn infant smeared with blood, a ferocious clenched muscle of humanity, launching into life.
Scale here makes us feel both her almost uncanny vitality, the shock of witnessing that, and the enormity of her
Couple Spooning (2005) gives us two small figures, a man and woman, lying together. But close inspection reveals that all is not well. Both of them keep their arms to themselves, self-comforting.
They are lost in their own thoughts -- she in her underpants, he in his T-shirt -- and their eyes stare into space. We look down on them and feel their squirming uneasiness, and their diminutive scale (just 25 centimetres long) accentuates the sense of them as exposed psychological specimens. This is the marriage from hell.
In Bed (2005) is a gargantuan 6.5-metre-long sculpture of a middle-aged woman propped up on her pillows. Her careworn eyes are cast slightly upward, beyond our gaze, and her right hand is raised to her cheek in solitary contemplation, the fingertips just grazing her cheek.
Mueck brings us back to the enormity of the mother seen from the vantage point of the child. We stand at the bedside, seeking connection, but her introspection makes her a foreign continent whose shores we can never quite reach. This is where Mueck's project diverges from that of other artists working in a similar realist vein, most notably the Canadian artist Evan Penny, who makes similarly life-like cast sculptures of human subjects: Penny's subject is really the tradition of realism, while Mueck's is the extremities of human relations and experience; grief, joy, solitude, procreation, the inevitability of death.
That which is incarnate will some day not be.
Mueck's best works seem to explore the big transitions in life, most powerfully, perhaps, in Mother and Child (2001), a work Mueck made while he was an artist in residence at the National Gallery in London.
The sculpture was his response to the array of Madonna and child paintings in that esteemed collection, but, in Mueck's work, there are no maidenly glances, no hovering doves and haloed bambini.
Instead, the maternal bond is stripped to its essence and served up raw. A naked, newly delivered mother lies on her back. Her legs are spread in the delivery position, and the umbilical cord is still issuing from inside her, uncut, while the slimy newborn baby crouches like a little roasting chicken on her sagging stomach.
The two figures are both separate and attached: a typical Mueck paradox. He arrives at a small scale for the twosome -- she is just 38-cm long -- enhancing our sense of the profound intimacy of the moment we are witnessing.
Mueck's observation of detail, here, is at its most powerful, and the work delivers the visceral punch of a primal scene stumbled upon in all its unkempt wildness.
The infant's flesh is a rosy purple of uncooked dark meat, and he manages to get just right the waxy translucency of the umbilicus, tinged with arterial blood. We see the sweat behind her knees, and the compact intensity of the newborn's deeply furrowed face, still flushed from its birth trauma, with streaks of wetness running down its mother's sides.
It's the gesture, though, that drives his meaning home.
The woman lifts her head to take her first look at her baby, and her expression is one of shock, recognition, wonder, and some fear. Who is this stranger, this scrawny, uningratiating and almost supernaturally fierce bundle of life force -- both adorable and grotesque -- that has emerged from inside her? Having pinpointed the most pivotal moment of the mother-child bond, this dramatic moment of mutual embarkation, Mueck freezes it, holding it for us to consider forever.
To my knowledge, this is a first in the history of art. It's kind of a big oversight, when you think about it.
Ron Mueck runs at the National Gallery of Canada to May 6.
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