Ron Mueck’s work exhibited at Foundation Carier was far more than a spectacle. While the precision of his craft has a “wow” factor, decision making in his representations spoke deeply of the human condition.
The exhibition was divided between two floors, ground floor and a basement gallery. The ground floor being made entirely of glass walls, offering challenging curatorial obstacles, as well as rare opportunities. Between these floors, Mueck had freedom to make conceptual distinctions between the works present and compose a powerful viewing experience which forced a state if introspection equal to that of the figures present. Mueck’s characters are cooperative, self-sacrificial, and self-aware; it seems we have walked in on private moments of connection (or maybe more appropriately, disconnect) when approaching a sculpture, imposing the role of voyeur on the audience. This intrusion is not purely sexual, but still has the ability to make a viewer uncomfortably engrossed in a moment.
What is a more appropriate material to suggest voyeurism than glass? The sensitive use of glass walls and natural light on the ground floor frames the works as well as a contextual space for the figures to reside. When one first enters the building, the striking image of a larger than life elderly couple sharing a beach umbrella invades the space of the main gallery on the left. This sculpture is visible from outside the building, from nearly every angle, including the street. At a distance, one feels as though they have stumbled upon an uncovered window, and up close, the viewer looks up, in to the sweet moment of a man resting his head on the leg of his wife. The woman looks down at her counterpart, as he looks off in to space. The room is empty, apart from a couple of benches, and the space around the objects extend past the glass walls of the building and continues in to the surrounding garden. The feeling of a beach is represented in more than just a colorful leaning umbrella.
Three objects inhabit the second room on the ground level. Upon entering the space, viewers are startled by an enormous dead chicken, plucked of its feathers, hanging from a hook by the ankles. Upon moving around the object, a large gash along the neck of the chicken is revealed; its closed eyes are damp from a final cry. Across the room are two female figures, one of a nude woman, bent over backwards, carrying an ample bundle of sticks, which greatly surpass the mass of the figure, and another woman with a newborn bundled close to her breast, and hands full of bags of groceries, staring blankly in to the distance.
The figures on the ground floor, while demonstrating a sense of balance and weight, all demonstrate the sacrificial nature of living life for another, from a simple gesture like sharing an umbrella, providing for another’s lean, nearly breaking one’s back to transport bounty, and even sacrificing life itself.
Upon descending the stairs, the viewer enters a space impacted with even more surprises. An enormous, sleeping face greets us. Approaching this object, it is revealed that there is nothing behind it, only empty space, only a mask of what could very well be a self portrait of the artist. In the basement gallery, the viewer is confronted with moments of realization of the body or self, whether it be a bodily wound , or deciphering disconnection with a significant other. Throughout the viewing experience in the lower level, the potential gaze of man, arms spread like Christ, looms. A man in sunglasses, lying on a raft floats across a deep blue far wall. Framed and spatially separated by gallery walls, the man’s gaze is indefinite, unlike the distant gaze’s of Mueck’s other figures. This gaze is present, but concealed. Does this figure take the place as voyeur in the basement level?
It seems that Mueck used the two vastly different levels of Foundation Cartier to present an ever-present human dilemma of sacrifice on the ground floor, and to sink in to introspection and awareness of the body and mind in the lower level. In this way, Mueck presents literal layers of concept, and uses a (highly orchestrated) time-based experience to thrust the same questions upon the viewer.
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