High, Wild And Handsome: Mueck's Outsider Is A Force Of Nature
The Age
Wednesday September 10, 2008
RON MUECK AT McCLELLAND
McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Park, McClelland Drive, Langwarrin, until November 2 mcclellandgallery.com WILD Man (pictured) is the latest Ron Mueck sculpture to be acquired by an Australian institution. For its debut at the McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Park, this formidable work from 2005 is joined by two other sculptures by Mueck: Pregnant Woman from the NGA and Two Women from the NGV.Wild Man has the iconic force of Pregnant Woman and the narrative intensity of Two Women. A giant naked man sits on a colossal stool, clutching its sides with straight arms and raised shoulders. His whole body stiffens, his spine raking backwards, his toes crushing upon their grip of the ground, to the point of bloodlessness. He looks to his right as his body recoils to the left, as if evading the attention of a scrutineer.The man and the sculpture as a whole are actually very beautiful. The work is confronting because Mueck hides nothing; and to add to the shock of full exposure, the nudity is amplified by scale. If the man stood up, his legs alone would be taller than we are. For all his size, however, the man enjoys no comfort. Taut with anxiety, he flinches and retreats from our gaze. What makes him so fearful? He seems the archetype of the outsider, never fitting in and somewhat haunted. He's naked in company but apparently ashamed of it.Wild Man has been likened to the Teutonic primitive man of the woods, evoked in excellent cultural histories by Ted Gott and Robert Lindsay, director of McClelland. Their points are well made, that in projecting the natural as individual, Wild Man resists the globalised aesthetic of advertising. But this doesn't make him a symbol of ancestral Germanic forest-consciousness any more than he reincarnates Polyphemus or Saturn.With his luminous skin and good proportions, he certainly has nothing to be ashamed of. He is hirsute but hardly an ape. If he's wild, it's in vestigial ways. His hair and beard are somewhat unkempt, but no worse than the coiffure of any mathematics professor. He is neither a beast nor hunter but a gentle, sensitive fellow; and his terrors have nothing to do with the axe or tooth and claw.He sits on a stool, a perfectly crafted piece of carpentry, not some pile of logs. He's a natural guy lodged uncomfortably in a conformist culture, and he eyes us with suspicion and dread. His apprehensiveness is justified because the spectacle of a naked hairy man is not sanctioned by society. His body is encased in taboos that alienate nature.Wild Man isn't wild because he's savage, but because he doesn't match a branded fantasy. His natural body doesn't qualify as a fetish: it isn't a stereotype, suitable for advertising or popular culture. He is the total "ingenu", unequipped with the sly marketing language to transact his nudity with the social gaze.Mueck is drawn to such moments of ill-fit, where a highly codified artificial language doesn't take care of a person's predicament in life. Take a look at Two Women: they are out of step with modernity, overtaken by email and online shopping. The figures have their own society of murmurs and parsimony, their boiled beef and darning, their sense of fate - remembering their heroism in the war years - but are now misunderstood and disrespected in the age of marketing.So, without the language to confront our superficiality, Two Women projects a grumbling stew of suspicion and resentment. Even Pregnant Woman exists in an unsocialised divorce from her spectators. Her private groans, anticipating the stress of labour, insulate her from our curiosity, in spite of her nakedness: she has her own supply of inner emotional contact - her "cosmic placenta" to adapt the phrase of Joseph Beuys - that shrouds her in solitude and makes language redundant.Wild Man explores the same psychological remoteness, as the anti-hero will never trust us. If he connects with some archetype from antiquity, it's Prometheus, the giver of fire who is banished for his benevolence by the Olympian gods, condemned to sit for eternity with an eagle perpetually pecking his liver. Wild Man is such a giant, with the powerful order of branded aesthetics persecuting his innocence and the unseen eagle of social convention gutting his confidence.robert.nelson@artdes.monash.edu.au
© 2008 The Age