We start arse first: two firm and fulsome buttocks, eye height and each double the size of my head. This will be visitors’ first encounter with the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ summer exhibition, Ron Mueck: Encounter – the largest ever Australian showing of the expat star sculptor’s work, spanning almost three decades.
Rounding the supersized figure, you feel a flash of understanding: she’s extremely pregnant, ready to pop, and her closed eyes and parted lips, as if exhaling, suggest a state of stoic exhaustion at being quite this gravid – in Sydney summer, no less.
Mueck’s Pregnant Woman is a hit wherever she goes: classically beautiful, technically astounding, and a refreshing riposte to the many sacred and classical depictions of female figures. There’s no explanatory wall text for the work (or any other in the show), but it makes a clear statement: pregnant women are inherently worthy of monuments.
And Pregnant Woman is monumental: 2.5m tall. This is classic Mueck: ultra-realistic human figures in various states of fleshy undress, either very big or very small, that embody universal aspects of human experience from womb to tomb. AGNSW’s exhibition includes several of his most popular works in this vein, including a doll-sized couple spooning in bed, two supersized seniors resting under a beach umbrella, and a diminutive old woman in bed (though the latter won’t be found within the exhibition proper; she’s tucked away in a corner in the old AGNSW building next door – a free offshoot).
Mueck’s exhibitions are unfailingly popular, often generating queues around the block and breaking attendance records. But critics are typically less enthused and frequently cutting, comparing Mueck’s sculptures to Madame Tussauds waxworks and criticising their sentimentality and slavish adherence to verisimilitude. The Guardian’s Adrian Searle, appraising Mueck’s 2003 showing at the National Gallery in London, wrote: “It is all so perfect – and perfectly boring … There is something unrelentingly kitsch and sentimental about everything he does.” His colleague Jonathan Jones, bemoaning a show at National Galleries of Scotland a few years later, called his work “brainless. It insists on the gut and provides the head with nothing at all”. “Anyone who admires his work … need[s] to get out more,” he declared (triggering a spray of indignant responses from readers).
In some ways, Mueck is a soft target: born in Melbourne to a family of toy makers, he cut his teeth as a puppet maker and puppeteer in children’s television before decamping to New York and then the UK to work for Jim Henson on productions including Labyrinth (for which he not only created but performed inside the costume of gentle monster Ludo). After a spell making models for advertising, he stumbled into art via his mother-in-law, acclaimed British painter Paula Rego, after she asked him to make a model of Pinocchio for an exhibition in 1996. The puppet was snapped up by controversial ad-man turned gallerist Charles Saatchi, and Mueck was lobbed into the upper echelons of London’s art scene, alongside the likes of Young British Artist stars Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.
All this seems to have fuelled Mueck’s detractors, who view him as less an artist than a technician; less a poet than a purveyor of Hallmark platitudes. Mueck, meanwhile, never talks publicly about his work – neither to defend nor to explain.
Those wishing to make up their own minds this summer will have the benefit of seeing Mueck’s work to best effect. The AGNSW exhibition is thoughtfully curated around the logic of the encounter between viewer and sculpture. The works are presented in clusters that elucidate Mueck’s preoccupations and sensibilities, with enough space for visitors to encounter each figure from various angles; crucially, the exhibition is concise enough to not feel overwhelming – 15 works, out of Mueck’s total output of 49.
The show opens with a cluster of his most humanistic and emotionally plangent works, arranged so that visitors can trace an imaginary narrative thread: from expectant Pregnant Woman to the shellshocked young Woman with Shopping, staring blankly ahead as her baby peers up from under her buttoned-up coat; the teenage Young Couple, whose body language betrays a troubled relationship dynamic; and the diminutive and plainly discontented middle-aged Spooning Couple.
After the initial pop of cognitive dissonance – so big! Or: so small! – and fizz of wonder at their technical execution, you are easily drawn into ruminations about the inner lives and backstories of these characters. Some will have emotional responses. Pause longer, and you start to think about the aesthetics and artifice of the pieces; the tactics deployed to produce these psychological effects. You realise his adherence to realism is less slavish than strategic.
The following rooms tilt towards Mueck’s latent absurd and surreal sensibilities: an oversized mask of a middle-aged man’s face glowers at us from the gloom of a chamber; a baby-sized man curls up in a swaddle of blankets; an old man faces off against a chicken across a kitchen table.
The exhibition’s star piece, presented in a chamber at the centre of its spiralling layout, is a group of supersized and snarling dogs, arranged in opposing packs and poised on the precipice of all-out carnage. Titled Havoc, the work – debuting at AGNSW – irresistibly calls to mind Mark Antony’s portentous line in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “Cry ‘Havoc!’, and let slip the dogs of war.”
Visually, Havoc is the knockout of the show – not only the size or poses of the dogs, but their dark-grey bodies, matte and almost entirely monochromatic, save for red mouths, pink tongues and white teeth. This is Mueck as Australian audiences have never seen him before: realism pared back, politics front of mind, and in the full flight of action.
At first glance, it’s a cartoonish vision of violence – but the longer I spend with the dogs, the worse I feel; noticing the straining muscles of their legs and muzzles, their bared teeth and incipient erections, I slide into unease and then anxiety.
Across the way is a small sculpture of an equally disturbing scene: five men holding down a large hog, their bodies straining in the effort. Up close and crouching down, you can see one has a knife to the animal’s throat. Like Havoc, this work (sardonically titled This Little Piggy) is unlike anything else in the exhibition: rough-hewn, dynamic, mordant.
The final work in the exhibition is a psychological gear-shift: the aforementioned elderly Couple Under an Umbrella, an ostensibly anodyne scene that is also inevitably infected by what has come directly before. Are this couple happy together, or merely resigned? Is he holding her arm affectionately, or propping himself on her opportunistically?
Suddenly, looking back at the exhibition, you may think even Mueck’s early stuff is not so sentimental. Maybe it never was.
Ron Mueck: Encounter runs 6 December-12 April at Art Gallery of New South Wales, Naala Badu building
