But can we help it if his exhibition at the James Cohan Gallery in Manhattan (through June 16) is such a killer that only, say, a member of a grumpy mayor’s decency commission wouldn’t want to find out all there is to know about the artist, the best thing to happen to figurative sculpture in a couple of artistic generations?
Actually, Mueck may be one of the best things to happen to realism-as a whole-in a long time. About 30 years ago, the big thing in contemporary painting was a style called “photorealism.” It succeeded wildly because art critics concocted some highfalutin theory (about photographs being mere “maps” containing bits of “information” that were copied to the canvas as a new, cold-blooded kind of inverse abstraction) that enabled serious collectors to hang highly realistic pictures by Chuck Close or Richard Estes on their walls without feeling unhip. Sculpture got in on the act, too-or tried to. In the days before a gigabyte was pocket change for a personal computer and sophisticated programs for plotting three-dimensional forms from two-dimensional images were available, sculptors who wanted to make a completely realistic human figure had to cast it from a mold made directly from a live model and dress it in real clothes. But as stunning as some pieces were (more than one gallerygoer asked Duane Hanson’s “Security Guard” for directions to the men’s room), the ultrarealistic sculpture of a couple of artistic generations ago was always a little esthetically unsatisfying. Why? Because it was exactly life-size. It couldn’t scale up or down the way painting could; it couldn’t add enough of the crucial element of fiction that separates art from the real world. And even now, when fancy machines can digitize almost any imagined form into concrete existence, it seems like no sculptor out there has sheer talent enough to get the verisimilitude, the variation of scale and some kind of psychological insight into a realistic sculpture.
PLAYING WITH DOLLS
Or so it seemed, until Mueck came along. And he didn’t come down the same path (trendy London art school, succes du scandale with in-your-face installation art, bad-boy lifestyle, etc.) as his compatriots in “Sensation” did. Born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1958 to parents who were toymakers, he labored on children’s television shows for 15 years before working in special effects for such films as “Labyrinth,” a 1986 fantasy epic starring David Bowie. Mueck then started his own company in London, making models to be photographed for advertisements. He has lots of the dolls he made during his advertising years stored in his home. Although some still have, he feels, “a presence on their own,” many were made just to be photographed from a particular angle-“one strip of a face,” for example, with a lot of loose material lurking an inch outside the camera’s frame.
Eventually Mueck concluded that photography pretty much destroys the physical “presence” of the original object, and so he turned to fine art and sculpture. In the early 1990s, still in his advertising days, Mueck was commissioned to make something highly realistic, and was wondering what material would do the trick. Latex was the usual, but he wanted something harder, more precise. Luckily, he saw a little architectural decor on the wall of a boutique and inquired as to the nice, pink stuff’s nature. Fiberglass resin was the answer, and Mueck has made it his bronze and marble ever since.
“Dead Dad” was Mueck’s debut (in the initial, 1997 version of “Sensation” at the Royal Academy of Arts). A year later, his first gallery exhibition (also in London) confirmed the promise of that electrifying work of art. The show included a giant mask of his own face (with every stubbled whisker an individual segment of plastic fishing line); a small, nude male angel (with elegantly feathered wings, sitting on a stool, head in hands, obviously having failed to elevate some soul to heaven), and “Ghost,” a seven-foot adolescent girl in a bathing suit, whose excessive height was the perfect metaphor for her poignant discomfort with her own body. But Mueck understandably works very slowly, and his first U.S. exhibition was delayed again and again.
HANDMADE HAIRS
Even with just two pieces in it, the current show is worth the wait. “Mask II” finds Mueck’s face on its side, sleeping. His mouth is squished and slack. Peek inside and you can see teeth, gums and even a little faux saliva; stand beside it for a moment, and you’ll swear you can hear him snore. Once again, every hair (which is to say monofilament standing in for five-o’-clock shadow, eyebrows, eyelashes, etc.) is anchored in a specifically drilled hole. All the hairs are sanded and painted. The lashes are hand-tapered to a point with a scalpel. Mueck cooks up a resin with a never-seen-the-sun Caucasian flesh color, but he delicately paints every faint blue vein afterward. The only overt concession to engineering is a clear Lucite pole in the back of the mask, to keep it from collapsing. Mueck says the piece is structurally sound on its own, but people-who can blame them?-keep wanting to touch the thing. It looks so lifelike that they almost believe there’s a real person inhabiting this outsize face. But Mueck’s painstakingly detailed “Mask” intends to make exactly the opposite point. “We can never really know who someone is, can we?” Mueck asks in subdued earnestness.
At the opposite end of the gallery, atop a plain white platform, lie “Mother and Child”-a supine, naked, barely postpartum female figure and her newborn, umbilical cord still attached. It’s the most unflinchingly affectionate portrait of childbirth you’ll probably ever see, and, in a way, an emotional pendant to “Dead Dad.” Mueck says what he likes about “Mother and Child” is the tension: the woman’s head is straining up, her toes are curled. It’s partly a response, he says, to all the Madonna-and-Child paintings in Britain’s National Gallery of Art (where Mueck is now completing an artist-in-residence stint) in which “happy and serene women put their spotless kids on display.” It’s also a little paean to his wife’s experience: she and Mueck have two daughters, ages 11 and 14.
The sculpted mother is not, however, his wife. “Mother and Child” wasn’t made using a model at all. Mueck had a few come to the studio, but he couldn’t get the physical type he wanted so he ended up looking through a stack of birthing manuals and deriving the piece from a mental composite of images. Which makes the work (only partly fiberglass, with the head cast in silicon this time) all the more astonishing as a piece of portraiture: mom is emphatically very English, very tired, very proud, and very glad to have it all over with. And there’s one detail that’s surpassingly nifty, even for Mueck: mom has a single strand of her long brown hair caught in the corner of her mouth.
NOTHING AND EVERYTHING
Most all of us are awed by an artist who can make painting or sculpture as realistic as Mueck’s. Even determinedly modern or postmodern critics will give him points for industriousness and manual dexterity. But a lot of stubborn people in the art world are likely to ask: What does all this old-masterish skill have to do with being contemporary? Answer: nothing and everything. Staying alone in a room making stuff is still the core of being an artist-a century ago, 30 years ago, or now. Getting right a human detail like that new mother’s errant strand of hair is always its peak. And being a soft-spoken fellow who doesn’t like self-promotion, well, that’s just a bonus.
