Ron Mueck in the Artist's Room

Ron Mueck (b 1958) is a hyperrealist sculptor, who your mum has probably heard of. The painstakingly exquisite sculptures of naked humans in awkward poses are some of the most striking and symbolic pieces of contemporary art to emerge from Saatchi’s influential Sensation show. His piece Dead Dad (1996) made him a household name, and he went on to have his monumental piece Boy featured as part of the Millennium Dome.


Mueck’s work is striking partly due to the scale, and his work is ostentatiously all about size. You find yourself using fractions and scale to describe things in ways you never would normally. And this is exacerbated to great effect by the other striking feature of his work, the realism. The fleshy hues and individual hairs on his ½, 2x and even 10x human bodies are honest and masterly representations of physical and social forms.


Wild Man (2005), is easily the most impressive of the three pieces on display. A bearded and scraggly haired man is blown up to 3x times normal size and is perched, uneasily on a stool, his body tensed and a worried expression on his face. His eyes fixed on something, if you stand in the right place, just behind you. The tension in his body, his nakedness and the title of the piece creates an air of apprehension. His oversized and ungainly body makes the embarrassment and sense of being scrutinized he must be feeling evident in quite a comic way. The comparisons to Gulliver’s Travels are easy and lazy, so I’m going to make them. It also makes our role in assigning judgement to his situation transparent. By diminishing us physically this serves to diminish us morally too.


As Mueck’s work is about the body, about our unconscious movements and intimate moments, it is very easy for almost anyone to relate to. This a strength of the work, and allows for the scale to instantly transport the viewer to exactly where he wants them to be. There is no confusion, when you stand in front of Mask III (2005), you’re instantly thrown back into childhood, to looking up at the warm and kindly face of this black matriarch. Even if, like me, you never knew a kindly black woman as a child and never had this happen to you “for real”, Mueck can still put you back into that moment, whether it’s one from his past of one from your own. Except this moment is frozen, and you’ve got forever to ponder the enigmatic quirks of the soft expression on her giant face. The title suggests that this is one of many personas the artist as a person must take on, so while this may or may not relate to an actual event, Mueck acknowledges that at times he must be the embodiment of motherly warmth. Either way, we experience what he wants us to.


The smallest, and my favourite, is Spooning Couple (2005). In this piece, a miniature couple lie together, but apart. Their bodies “spooning” as if in bed together. You approach them in the same way you marvel at the detail in a newborn baby; their tiny toes and fingers, their hair, their eyebrows, all perfect. Yet their pose suggests something not quite right. They are comfortable enough to lie together semi-naked, but they do not face each other, their tired expressions show them lost in their own thoughts, and makes it clear that we a looking at a delicate and intimate moment. We become unwilling voyeurs, forced to evaluate our own relationships in light of this new perspective on the couple. We have to look down on them, making our emotions and feelings for one another feel childish and inconsequential. In the same way we know a baby will grow up to learn to control it’s impulses and relate to those around it, we feel that of our foetal couple. I felt a pang of guilt about the relationships in my own life, yet was hopeful for them and myself afterward.


These tiny, yet intimate moments which are easily forgotten, puts me in mind of the hit American sitcom Seinfeld. Ostentatiously a show about nothing, it drew attention to the small, everyday moments that made up our lives. This made it, conversely, a show about everything. In the very same way Mueck’s work does this, changing our relationship to a particular moment through his use of scale.


The three pieces in this show are all excellent examples of his work, and the video on show in the room next door gives an insight into the work that makes one of these sculptures (and shows you how each hair is individually sewn into the latex). Mueck is obviously a master of his craft, and a brilliant and exciting one at that.
This is an excellent, though small, exhibition, which I’d recommend going to see at least twice. Go on your own and with your friends (if you have any).


At Manchester Art gallery until Sunday 11th April 2010

Urbis to become National Museum of Footy

The National Football Museum is to move from the “spiritual” home of Football, Preston, to the Urbis in central Manchester. The move has been not been popular with Preston City Council who are threatening legal action, which may delay the move, although it looks inevitable. The move is supposed to begin in April 2010, with the museum opening about a year later in 2011. The main reason is lack of funds; the museum just costs too much to run for relatively few visitors, about 100,000 a year. Manchester City council claims they will attract 400,000. No contest, it would seem.

This isn’t wholly unsurprising. Like the National Centre for Popular Music, based in Sheffield for just under a year, before closing, it’s visitors numbers were wildly optimistic, and it was charging about £21 a ticket for a family of four, for something which you can experience by turning on the radio. The striking building it inhabited later became a live music venue, and then Hallam University’s Students Union. Provincial museums always struggle, especially when they are so off the established tourist trail. Going to Preston for a day out is about as appealing as it sounds.

This is a bit of a coup for Urbis, which has always seemed a little unpopular. When the museum of urban life opened in 2002, it failed to draw in the crowds, it charged for entry, and wasn’t about anything. A museum of urban life in Manchester, a small provincial city? What exactly is city life? A video about life in Denton? At some point it changed to wholly showing changing exhibitions, and hosted Channel M, Manchester’s very own TV station. This marked a bit of turning point in Urbis’s fortunes and visitor numbers slowly increased. Despite this, the place still seems to lack focus. I’d have difficultly describing to a tourist what it is. It sometimes shows art, sometimes design, sometimes historical exhibits. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. It has a television studio, and an upmarket restaurant. Occasionally, a gig will be on. It’s neither one thing nor the other. It’s the cultural equivalent of a village hall, a space where stuff happens.

I think the biggest problem with Urbis as a museum, or platform for art or music, is the Urbis itself. Nothing it has shown has been anywhere near as exciting as the building itself, which is a brilliant piece of contemporary architecture. It competes for attention with the exhibits, and wins most of the time.
Where will these exhibitions currently held at Urbis be housed in the future? I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone does at the moment. With tougher economic times looming and arts funding on the chopping block, there sadly probably won’t be any exhibitions to house. There’s always Islington Mill.
That it’s going to become the N.F.M. isn’t the outcome I’d have picked for it, personally. I’d rather it had become a dedicated space for contemporary art in Manchester, but that was never likely. Manchester is already synonymous with Football, and this seems like a populist subject to match the mass appeal of the building itself.

The beautiful urbis, as seen on Google Streetview.

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Review; The American Scene, From Hopper to Pollock

Hi there, today I'm going to be talking about an exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, called The American Scene, Prints from Hopper to Pollock. What the exhibition features is almost a dead giveaway, but I’ll explain it anyway. The exhibition covers (gasp) American Printmaking, from the early 20^th century, to the1960’s, and is the most comprehensive exhibition of American printmaking of this period one could hope to see. The prints are the highlights from the venerable British Museum’s collection, and this is the last leg of a tour that has already had an airing in Nottingham and Brighton. It also feels a little like the Whitworth is trying to tempt back the more MOR type gallery goer, with an entirely 2D exhibition about modern prints, after the madness that was Marina Abromovich, but maybe I’m being too cynical. All very well, but is it worth going to see?

the exhibition is straight to the point, and even goes as far as having it’s “Stars” in it’s title, and they are undoubtedly  two of America’s most famous artists, but artists who are primarily painters, who are not renowned for their printmaking. Indeed, it is slightly misleading; if you’re going in expecting lashings of Hopper and Pollock, you’ll be disappointed. There are only two Hopper prints, and not a huge amount of Pollock’s work. That said though, the rest of the work more than makes up for this.

These two stars chronologically bookend the exhibition, which is split up into 12 “chapters” showing the progress of American printmaking over this period. These chapters divide the work up either stylistically, thematically, but always chronologically, so you always have a sense of where you are within the framework the exhibition sets out. This does make the exhibition feel like you’re wandering around a life size coffee table book, and is Unfortunately about as thrilling as this.

The work itself is good, if a little unexciting. Starting out in 1900, we have the work of the Ashcan school, known for its gritty social realism, which is art world slang for stuff that isn’t dead posh. This mainly illustrative work is sentimental in it’s unsentimentally, showing a daily life which is now long gone. This work is interesting insofar as it was the work that informed the next generation or American Artists, the Hopper’s and Pollock’s of the exhibition’s title.

Fast forward a few chapters to American modernism, and the work begins to portray the skyscrapers and industry we associate with American art, and the new type of society American money was creating. Modernism had made its way across the Atlantic with the Armory show of 1913, and the effect here is visible. Hopper’s, Night on the El Train (1918), uses the new psychological space of the city, as a backdrop for his human drama’s to unfold, as well as showing the influence the new technologies of film and photography were having on traditional art. Louis Lozowick’s New York, (1925) uses the straight lines of the city to produce a striking and almost abstract rendering of the metropolis. Charles Sheeler’s Delmonico Building (1926) is a highlight, showing through a bold use of tonality the effect the new architecture was having on the traditional city.

During the next phase we are shown that American art appears to take a step back towards figurative art with the bizarre Satirical Realism (surrealism?) and Regionalism. The Regionalists turned their back on abstraction, and concentrated on homespun portrayals of rural America. Interestingly, that master of abstraction, Pollock turns up here with a bucolic haymaking scene.

It isn’t really until the Depression kicks in, and Roosevelt’s Federal Art Project provides the means for artists to start producing more socially aware printmaking that there is progression. Free from the constraints of the market (much of this work was destined for schools and hospitals), the themes of poverty, the plight of the African American and the harsh working conditions of miners are prominent, and abstraction comes back into play, undoubtedly influenced by artists fleeing fascist persecution in Europe. A new technique, called screen-printing, is developed and is used to great effect by Robert Gwathmay, in The Hitchhiker (1937), which shows the struggle of finding work in the depression against a backdrop of consumerism. The bold use of colour here contrasts the poor world of reality, with the rich world of advertising. American politics is touched upon for the first time and continues into the next chapter, showing the effects the Second World War had on American printmaking, and the patriotic guff that resulted.

Hidden away, on the opposite wall is a short chapter on American geometric abstraction, which includes work by Josef Albers, whose clean, experimental style influenced a new generation of Artists. Albers was opposed to the socially conscious art produced at the time and this influenced the artists to follow.

Then we get to the post war area, which is, to say the least, quite different from that which has gone before. This area is separated from the previous chapter, and one is confronted the two largest prints in the gallery before being allowed through. The grotesque and misshapen forms of Leonard Baskin’s Hydrogen Man, and Man of Peace, two life-size pieces that stare out of their frames, and signify an America grappling with the power and responsibility of the atomic age. These are two of the most interesting pieces in the exhibition, and having them in such an unavoidable and inescapable position reinforces the manifestly necessary issue they confront. Their figurative nature does mark them apart from the rest of the work in this chapter, where Abstract Expressionism’s effect on printmaking is explored.

The work of Atelier 17, a collaborative workshop for printmaking, is the subject of chapter 10, and shows a much more experimental approach. This conceptual approach to printmaking is exemplified by the work of Louise Bourgeoise, and the last series of prints she made before she turned to sculpture shown here is a definitely one of the highlights of this exhibition. The prints themselves show spindly constructions, which echo the modernist treatment of the American cityscape earlier on. These are accompanied by a short statement, which resonates strangely with the image, to produce something, if you’ll pardon the expression, otherworldly.

Pollock’s work rounds off the exhibition in Chapter 12, but, as the guide explains to us “[the abstract expressionists] also resisted printmaking because of it’s associations with the socially conscious WPA” so what is shown are some prints that look quite like Pollock’s paintings. Although it’s nice to see the work around such show stopping and monumental pieces Pollock’s “Action paintings”, it seems a bit of damp squib to have this as the zenith of the period being discussed. Absract Expressionism is the first major art movement to emerge from the USA, so it’s fitting to end the Exhibition with a genesis and a revelation, at the same time.

Curiously absent from an Exhibition of American printmakers, is the most famous American printmaker, Andy Warhol. Although his large scale screen-prints probably would have drowned out any of the other pieces on display. Still, I feel it’s an opportunity missed, as Hopper and Warhol arguably have more in common than Hopper and Pollock.

The exhibition is a good one and well worth a few hours of your time, especially as so many of the artists shown are barely known outside of the US. Although it does show how lacking Amercian art was until the it was lit by the influx  of European ideas. The work American Artists were producing appears downright regressive compared to the work that the Bauhaus or Russian Avant garde was producing at around the same time. In fact, there’s almost a correlation between how experimental American Art is, and when Socialist realism becomes the official standard of the U.S.S.R. But perhaps I’m reading too much into things.

The exhibit does suffer a little from feeling like it should be in a museum rather than an art gallery, but this might just be a downside to how comprehensive it is, rather than it feeling lifeless. Which is a good thing.

The American Scene; prints from Hopper to Pollock is at the Whitworth Art Gallery until the 13^th December 2009

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