David Hurlston

I admit that I like Ron Mueck's work. In fact, like many others, I suspect....... I'm quite fascinated by it. The figures look so real, even the hair...each hair individually inserted from what I recall (not from this book). In fact, that's what I found frustratingly missing from this little book: any explanation from Ron about his work and (apart from the giant baby) there is no description of how they were made. I'm interested in the technology behind the sculptures....and Ron is certainly a great technician.....having honed his skills making models for the movie industry.
And when did realistic dummies become art anyway? This book is really a series of essays by art curators (as far as I coud see) who purport to find the meaning in Ron's work. Apart from the essay by Kelly Gellatly, I found most of the essays "hard-going".....overwrought and maybe trying a bit too hard to convince me or to draw allusions to other great artists. I mean, take this for example: "the 'ne plus ultra' of gaunt Catalan melancholy in Picasso's youthful study".....What is Angus Trumble on about? In fairness......Trumble's essay get's better but in most of these essays there seems to be a desire to impress their reader with erudition rather than draw out some significance from the work. To my mind, Mueck's work has a number of aspects to it. The first, obviously, is the shocking realism of it.....is this a real cadaver is that real hair etc? The second is often related to the size ......frequently much larger than life which has an impact all of its own ...making the viewer feel smaller etc. It's the third aspect which seems to capture most of the art critics (and these essayist's) attention. And that is the pose and expression of the subjects.......nearly all of them being human subjects. And, I guess, I agree with most of them that this is especially where Mueck's work becomes art. So Gilbert Ryle (British Philosopher of Language) is quoted as asking the question: "What is the thinker doing?"........Not good enough to answer "thinking"....we need something more....like solving equations in her head, or composing a piece of music. So when we see somebody in bed with hand to mouth and eyes on a point to the far right...we can pretty much make up our own story about what she is thinking. She could be thinking "Did I turn the stove off?"....it looks a bit like that to me. Or she could be thinking "If there is a good god why is there evil in the world?"....or pretty much anything else. Is that the Art in Mueck's work...that he can get people engaged in making up their own stories and interpretations? Maybe.
I liked the book. Nice photos. Some of the essays a bit pretentious ........and it looked like a rather cheap way to produce a book. Get a bunch of pictures together and get a bunch of curators to write an essay about each....top and tail it with a bit of a bibliography...and there you have it: a Book. And, in a way, because of this approach it seemed to lack an overall coherence which you might expect if it was written by the one author.
Did some of the essays make me think? Well yes ..the quote from Jorge Luis Borges, for example: "When I was a young man I was always hunting for metaphors. Then I found that really good metaphors are always the same. I mean you compare time to a road, death to sleeping, life to dreaming, and those are the great metaphors in literature.......If you invent metaphors they are apt to be surprising during the fraction of a second but they strike no deep emotion whatever". And Justin Paton's essay about the man on the LiLo and the passage of time....and was he like a Christ figure on the cross. And the Man in a boat. I'm still thinking about that ......it's where the Borge's quote occurs. It's great....a gaunt, naked pallid figure of a man in a boat. Not doing anything to control or guide the boat......it's like he's being carried over the River Styx. But it wasn't really the essay that made me think; it was the sculpture itself.
Overall some good and some weak points about this book so I've rated it as three stars.… (more)