Ron Mueck Nov 3 2006 - Feb 4 2007

This week I was lucky enough to see Ron Mueck's mid-career retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. I say lucky because the Museum was closed to the public and so the eeriness of his sculptures was heightened considerably by the fact that I was the only person walking through the two rooms devoted to his work. Mueck is an Australian artist who worked in animation and puppetry (for Jim Henson Studios of Muppet Show fame) before turning to sculpture. He was picked up by Saatchi, and displayed 'Dead Dad' in 1997 garnering him instant praise.

The notable feature of his work is the contrast between on the one hand a skillfully precise rendering of his subjects, which has seen his work categorised as realism, and on the other hand the scale of his work, alternating between minaturist and gargantuam. Indeed, the catalogue for this retrospective is at pains to emphasize his position with a tradition of realism. While there are merits to such an interpretation of his work, it does however force Mueck's sculptures to function simply as representations. Because of his almost exclusive concern with human subjects (I believe he has sculpted dogs, which were not alas on view here), this has meant that his work is generally understood as depictions of what can be broadly categorized as the human condition. Thus a scupture like Big Man or Spooning Couple become merely representations of alienation and ennui - existential themes writ large. Important themes sure enough, but haven't we been here already? Art has been expressing man's alienation for a good century now if not longer. Surely there is more at stake here.

And indeed there is. For walking through the deserted gallery one's attention is drawn again and again to the sense of vulnerabilty of the cast of characters Mueck provides. Wild Man looks not so much wild as frightened; despite his immense size, Big Man squats in a corner in a position that is defensive and suspicious. Both look like nothing so much as detainees who have just been stripped and are awaiting their future with an infinite dread. Conversely Spooning Couple also achieves this look of vulnerability, only this time it is by virtue of their diminutive scale.

It is this vulnerability that is I think the key to Mueck's work from Dead Dad right through to his newest pieces here. And the crucial issue, what raises his work above simple realism is the implication that such vulnerability is not merely a reflection of the human condition but is directly linked to the act of observation. These characters by their positioning within the space of a gallery become objects for the spectators gaze. They are naked and exposed to our God's eye view and we in return, experience nothing but impotence. Why? Because beheld in the gaze of another we too are powerless. As in Hegel's master slave dialectic, through our position as autonomous viewers, we are in fact paradoxically revealed as powerful and powerless.

It is no accident that the two least successful works on display at the show are both works which empower their subjects. In Man In A Boat, the subject seems to be in fact on his way out the door of the gallery. His positioning in a boat lends itself to superficial metaphorics of isolation and the journey of life but in fact it points to an attempt to escape the gaze of the viewer. In In Bed the fact that the subject is covered and not naked lends her a dignity and privacy, which while admirable, leaves little to wonder at except Muecks' technical ability.

Nonetheless it is significant (and this is certainly one of the few strength of the curators' approach) that she is being observed by the malicious eyes of Two Women. In fact the show's central motif is the omnipresence of eyes. Almost every sculpture either observes or is being observed by another. In this manner Mueck provides the clues to his work and it demands that we place it in a tradition, not of realism, but of spectatorship, surveillance, and the politics of objectivization. Is Wild Man the true modern man or is he the cast in a circus show touring bourgeois museums and art fairs? Is Boy and Mirror our inner child, frightened and alone, or is he the exotic feral boy held up to be studied for our edification? It is a touch of ironic cruelty that his attempt to hid from our gaze is thwarted by the mirror.

The museum has long been the traditional home of the vitrine display case and the diorama. Donna Haraway has eloquently argued in Primate Visions that the work of the museum has always, despite its best intentions, been to objectivize its subjects according to dominant narratives which dissimulate and obscure other equally valid narratives. It is this taut relationship that Mueck's work serves to indicate. We see here how despite our hopes and modernist desires for art to bring us face to face with the new, it is our own viewing power that corrodes this newness.

As such art faces the impossible task of offering itself to our gaze and resisting its power - a power to dominate and demean. The radicality of such a position may be better appreciated if we remember that one of the most dominant aesthetic theories is Kant's notion of disinterestedness. With this in mind we should ask ourselves whether such disinterestedness can ever be possible. For Mueck shows use that the gaze is always powerful and powerless, always effectual and ineffectual, always political but for ever isolating. We are as vulnerable as others are to us.

Clive Murphy: Making Space

“They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said.
He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of the shutter release buttons, the rustling of crank of levers that advanced the film.
“What was the barn like before it was photographed?” he said. “What did it look like, how was it different from other barns, how was it similar to other barns? We can’t answer these questions because we’ve read the signs, seen the people snapping the pictures. We can’t get outside the aura. We’re part of the aura. We’re here, we’re now”
He seemed immensely pleased by this.


In Don DeLillo’s 1984 novel White Noise two professors consider the spectacle of THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. It is the index of a world in which meanings proliferate and take on a life of their own but yet nonetheless implicate the invisible community of people required for such a world to be possible. So too does it point to the irreducibly social dimension of the Event, its creation and activation through the interaction of people ‘here’ and ‘now’. But DeLillo’s words may also serve as an index to the work of Irish sculptor and visual artist Clive Murphy. For Murphy’s work has consistently engaged with questions concerning the individual’s position within the sheer mass of information facing us, the gravitational pull of these signifiers and sites of meaning, and the way in which the relationship between individual and environment is colored, if not wholly determined by the social and cultural forces with which we may negotiate but rarely control. And yet despite these sources of alienation Murphy, like DeLillo’s character who is “immensely pleased by this”, displays no resignation. His work precisely embodies a negotiation with these cultural forces, a negotiation that, despite the seriousness of Murphy’s intent, is shot through with a playfulness that creates a space for reconfigured modes of interaction and new possibilities of artistic experience.


Ferdinand de Saussure has argued that language consists of both a signifier and a signified, whose relationship is arbitrary and ultimately conditioned by location within a system or a cultural context. As such there is no essential connection between words or images and their meanings. Murphy’s early work in the Inflatable Cardboard Box series displays an acute awareness of this and investigates the role and position of the viewer, the point where signifier and signified coalesce. His alteration of printed information on a number of these inflated boxes is a sly subversion of the forces of marketing and consumer demands, opening up a space where the viewer/consumer is freed from the binding relationship with the object promised to be held within, while also bringing the viewer face to face with the nature of these forces. The inflated space within the box holds promise, the object of our desires, while also promising literally nothing. To open is to deflate.


While such an attention to surface and the conscious embrace of low culture displays a debt to Pop Art, Murphy eschews quick productivity and mass productive techniques in favor of what he himself calls draughtsmanship . Like Tom Friedman, much of Murphy’s work is painstakingly constructed from the most unlikely materials, cardboard boxes, cassette tapes patiently rewound, black bin liners joined into sculptures. Furthermore his apparent concern with surface and superficiality is underpinned by an acute sense of spatiality. His series of street signs, utilizing American mid-west sermon titles extend the manipulation of physical space in Inflatable Cardboard Box to the manipulation of social and cultural space. The appropriation of space for ideological ends by religious billboards is defused by Murphy’s acts of de-contextualization. Language itself is rescued from ideology, or at the very least is offered as fair game to all competing ideologies. The significance of these actions becomes more pronounced in the context of Belfast where Murphy lived and worked for many years. The sectarian murals, banners and slogans there are a testament of how language and space is politicized - where one’s geographic and symbolic location can only be accurately gauged by ‘the writing on the wall’.

The symbolic life of landscape and the environment is further investigated in Murphy’s Untitled piece, from 2005, constructed from found audiocassette tapes, amplified and spooled along the gallery walls to delineate a primitive landscape. The personal history of the cassette tape, the legacy of mix-tapes, sharing, and their evocation of a specific period in the history of sound at once indicates the life of the individual and a shared past. The public and the private are brought together in the strands of tape collected and reworked, implicating collective memory and, like Ennio Morricone’s soundtracks of the West, pointing to the evocation of real and imagined social milieu through sound.


While Murphy has understood his more recent work on bouncy sculptures and castles as “a revisit to the world of the inflatable”, there is a very real sense in which it a natural development from and a deepening of his earlier work. All his work has a subversive edge, and both his bouncy sculptures, such as 2005’s I want to be you, and his bouncy castle unveiled this year at Mercer Union Gallery in Toronto, with their defined lines and austere black appearance, mimic the pretensions of modernist architecture and the self-conscious severity of artists like Malevich. Yet this mimicry is extended and transformed into critique by Murphy’s development of his work toward an aesthetics of the Event. The invitational aspect of I want to be you – not only its title, but its rising and falling armature, beckoning and luring the viewer into its midst – becomes central in his 2006 bouncy castle. The bouncy castle is there to be literally bounced on and as such becomes an interactive social event and an opportunity for new configurations of human relations. As such it distances itself from the aloofness of modernist and late modernist/minimalist aesthetics by reconsidering the art gallery as a site for unselfconscious social interaction and by questioning accepted distinctions between high and low culture.

Furthermore, the black plastic and rubber surfaces of these works have an unmistakably fetishistic feel, a theme that can even be extended back to Murphy’s untitled piece, in which the shiny black strands of cassette tape are stretched along the walls of the gallery, in a manner not too dissimilar to the walls of a dungeon. Both Marx and Freud have emphasized fetishism’s capacity to create distance, in that the object of the fetish comes to insinuate itself between two terms of a relationship by symbolically replacing one of those terms. In this light, it is apparent that much of Murphy’s work can be understood as an effort to engage with this distancing. From his early inflatable boxes, in their concern with mass production right through to the bouncy castle and its emphasis on human relations in the ‘here’ and ‘now’, a strength of Murphy’s work is its power to indicate sites and strategies whereby this distance can be indicated, subverted or altered.

Yet it is for this very reason that, despite such serious considerations, Murphy’s work is not overbearingly earnest or ideologically driven. Through the subversion and parody of social and aesthetic ideologies, he himself refuses to accept any ideology. Like his street signs that were appropriated in Brussels in 2003 “as the battle cry for a group of immigrant residents living in an area allowed to sink into dereliction by property developers” his work refuses single meaning by being open to all. His work is characterized by this openness and an immediacy that gives the work its particularly inclusive nature. We, like DeLillo’s speaker, should be immensely pleased by this.

Callum Innes November 9 - December 9, 2006

This show at the Sean Kelley gallery is over but, as I did not have a blog then...

Callum Innes is a Scottish artist born in 1962 and shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1995. Although at first glance he appears to fall into that already overcrowded category of abstract minimalism, on closer examination he is quite removed, even critical of the complacency apparent in both the tyranny of formal abstraction where intention, absolute control and artistic will dominates (despite any claims that might be made for the role of the unconsious) and geometrical minimalism, which often sacrifices three dimensionality in favour of exploring more lateral relationships between objects, shapes and colors. On entering the gallery one first encounters his early works on paper. These oils, dating from 1990 and 1996 are exceptional for the way in which they draw attention to what is behind the paint. Its uniform application makes for impressive surfaces and allows for a more random pattern development when, in Innes' signature technique, the paint is treated with thinning solution, as it is less lightly to follow the vagaries of the artist. 'Untitled from 1990', (see first image) predicting his later works is executed in a dark grey/black to achieve a stripped, shuttering effect reminiscent of a Francis Bacon background that draws attention away from the paint as much as towards it. Like Merleau-Ponty's ideas of the visible and the invisible, the work suggests that the canvas (or in this case the page) functions in a corporeal manner like flesh, as a chiasm between presence, absence and becoming. As such we see the work in a paradoxical manner as both complete and incomplete, moving away from the blank page, yet frozen in that move.


This relationship between presence and absence becomes more overt in the new works from 2006, perhaps even pointing to a certain figurative dimension. More precisely perhaps, it is the ghost of figuration as forms are revealed through the application of paint remover to the canvas. Monochromatic applications of greys and dark violets are stripped away to reveal the onion layers of the paint, a history or genealogy of the canvas itself. Out of this appears the ghosts of the artist's movements, reminiscent of sharp unforgiving landscapes or gaunt Giacometti style figures approaching in the dark distance.


Of all the works on show, I felt at the time that the geometrical paintings were the least successful. However, it is interesting that Innes also applies his stripping technique here too, though in a highly determined and significant manner. In 'Exposed Painting Cobalt Green' for example (see the last image above ), it is apparent that each monochromatic square is composed of layer of different colors, much in the same manner as Sean Scully's heavily layered stripes. But while Scully's work reveals the history and process of an artist in search of balance, in Innes' work it is these early layers which are allowed to bleed down over the bottom right of the canvas, exposing the apparent self-contained identity of the cobalt green above as a ruse. Uniform colors are thereby split into multiplicities. The names of the geometrical paintings are telling in this light (Cobalt Green, Cadmium Red etc) indicating as they do a history and life to color. They are not simple elements but are complex forms in their own right. In this Innes I feel is questioning the valorization of color and relationship that we see in so much minimalism, suggesting that these fundamental units of the spectrum are not to be taken for granted.