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.