"Ron Mueck, the good client" by Eric Mircher

[This is a continuation of my translations of Eric Mircher's original articles.  Please read this introduction for the background behind this project.]

     The Fondation Cartier here in Paris recently opened an exhibition of the London-based Australian artist for only the second time.  Since the opening, the lines in front of the museum have not ceased to grow, with parents, children, art lovers, art critics, and nearly every body.  Ron Mueck unites all, and for a museum, he is “a good client.”

     There are a few lessons to be drawn from this ability to unite a public that is so diverse and often in opposition to each other.  Even Artpress has published a special edition in which Jean Clair admits to having “failed” to notice the artist at the start of his first spectacular public successes, notably at the Venice Biennale of 2001.  One remarks that, from the pen of someone who usually holds so much bile against contemporary art, there is a certain healthy frankness when Jean Clair celebrates, in the pages of an art journal edited by Catherine Millet , a work that is “between Gulliver and Gargantua” while defining its historical repercussions.

     As in all exhibitions by a “good client,” the thought that comes to mind immediately as one goes through the show is that “it works.”  Obviously, the central pivot point of his work, the enlargement or reduction in scale, is a fascinating device that has always worked in all public presentations since the beginnings of time, from medieval carnivals to local country fairs of yesteryear and the Lilliputian villages, much appreciated by the Germans in the 1980s, where school children like myself were sent on class field trips by the Education National (the French Ministry of Education) to visit on the other side of the Rhine.  This distortion of scale of the sculpted hyper-realistic protagonists  provokes in the viewer the sensation of being in a “human zoo.”  In this troubling space, the spectator is integrated into the environment and at times, one begins to think that another visitor, quiet and still in contemplation, is also a sculpture of Ron Mueck.  On the flip side, after long and sustained observation, both the sculpted miniatures and the sculpted silicone giants appear to move.  It is as if one has had an extended face to face visit with someone who has passed on and all of a sudden, just for a brief second,  the deceased seems to have taken a breath.  One chuckles for having been fooled; one stays fascinated by the possibility of looking at a human being as a strange but yet familiar creature.

     In the show, this frontier of “troubling realism” is not successfully reached by all the work.  The piece where a male bather is floating against a blue azure wall stays completely inert.  The young black man with an open pearly wound like a painting by Caravaggio looks dollish.  The young lovers, where the play of hand gestures is supposed to suggest the emotions of their hearts,  do not elicit empathy from the viewer.  The plastic form of these pieces become their main billing and the looming artefacts do not successfully cause any sense of disequilibrium, which is precisely what separates them from the successful pieces.  

     This disequilibrium is fascinating in the sculpture of the young woman with a newborn harnessed to her chest, her body tired and weighed down by the bags of groceries she is holding.  The sculpture brings to mind the image of a young chick straining its neck and beak towards the parent on whom its life depends.  The elderly couple, in giant dimensions,  with all their wrinkles and aging folds of skin, are touchingly and without any omission detailed and presented by the artist.  This elderly couple on the beach presents an incongruous situation where bodies ravaged by time as well as the life they have spent together are exposed in all simplicity.  The delicacy of the elderly gentleman's gaze allows one to elevate their mortal bodies to the realm of what one can call, in all humility, “humanity.”  The same sense of fragility and doubt, in all its senses, is seen in the nude rower, gazing worriedly at the horizon, with the immense rowboat as his only protection.

     The film that accompanies the exhibition is excellent and the viewer that pays attention will not be disappointed.  Gautier Deblonde, the filmmaker, followed closely the day to day work of the sculptor.  His close relationship with Ron Mueck and his studio, whom he has known since the early 1990s, has allowed him to create a silent but enthralling film that follows all the steps taken in the creation of the sculptures.  The camera viewpoints are precise and done with fine workmanship.  The close-ups, where one sees sculpted clay feet next to those of the artist at work,  or again the living hands of the artist sculpting the hands made in resin, are powerful.  It is a film with certain surrealistic accents where one discovers that each face, giant or lilliputian, is only a deviation of the artist's own self- portrait.  One also sees that the artist's studio is a place of fastidious and slow work, as in all arenas of creation.  Ron Mueck reveals himself as a craftsman.  Far from the art managers who program serial productions of their work, he spends his time, in all modesty, in the making of his work.  This Ron Mueck is definitely a “good client.”

• Article written by Eric Mircher
• (Translated from French by Roy Forget)