Date: 13-08-2006
Owning Institution: Royal Scottish Academy, courtesy Ron Mueck
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph Features        
Subject: 20th Century          

 As Oscar Wilde famously remarked, “Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.” It would be interesting to know where Ron Mueck was, on the Wildean scale of filial emotions, when he made his best known sculpture, Dead Dad. Mueck himself seems a little unsure but he remembers that the work – a silicone and acrylic simulacrum of the naked body of his recently deceased father –  took him several months and great pains.

Getting the colour of a day-old corpse exactly right was hard enough, but it was the more minute detail that really took the time. Each individual hair had to be punched in by hand. Then, one day, it was done. There he lay, the father figure suddenly drained of life, as if on the mortician’s slab. There it was, the memory of a parent, fused with the fact of his death – all encapsulated in a disconcertingly realistic image, flesh but not flesh, like a higher form of waxwork. No detail had been overlooked. The body stiff with rigor mortis. The face, drawn and grey, a little pink seepage around the eyes. The stubbled chin. The swollen stomach, stretched over a barely visible network of veins. The flaccid penis (“roseate cock with its prepuce folded close like a link of cold sausage”, as the poet Craig Raine later put it, in a remarkable hymn of admiration for Mueck’s work published in the magazine Modern Painters). The helpless outstretched palms. The skinny, slightly wasted legs. The calloused yellow soles. Dead Dad, as dead as dead could be.

Why would anyone want to create such a thing? “It was just a way of thinking about my dad, really, a way of saying goodbye, I suppose,” Mueck now recalls. “He died in Australia, suddenly. He had had a bad heart. I didn’t see him after his death and then he was cremated – gone. I wanted to have this last little image of him. I never got on with my dad very well. He was a miserable bastard. But I felt closer to him by the time I had made it, because I’d thought about him in such detail. It didn’t change entirely the way I feel about him, but I was surprised that there was so much tenderness in what was essentially a quite graphic, straightforward thing.”  No one could accuse such an unflinchingly matter-of-fact and bluntly titled sculpture as Dead Dad of sentimentality; but it does seem to hint at the reversal of roles that can take place when people get older and frailler, when sons sometimes have to learn to be fathers to their fathers. Mueck’s one departure from realism was the scale of his sculpture, which he made half life-size.  “It’s a body you could cradle”, he says.

The sculpture was intended by Mueck as a way of marking the end of a chapter in his life but it also precipitated a fresh start. When he finished making it, in 1997, he had spent almost his entire adult life as a commercial model-maker working in the film, television and advertising businesses. By the end of that year, Dead Dad had launched him on a new career as a fine artist. This was not a matter of strategic planning, more a case of luck and good timing. At first, Mueck did not know quite what to do with the disconcertying object he had made. “It spent quite a lot of time at home on our kitchen table,” he recalls, where it became – as might be expected – something of a talking point in the Mueck household. “It used to draw some pretty curious observations and remarks and reactions from neighbours and friends who dropped by…” Mueck’s life changed when Charles Saatchi got wind of it and bought it for his art collection (“that’s the really perverse bit, not so much making it as selling it off,” Mueck says). Dead Dad  was subsequently shown in the much-publicised exhibition “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection” – a show which, by more or less universal consent, Mueck stole – and before long Mueck was agreeing terms with one of the most influential contemporary art dealers in the world, Anthony d’Offay. Currently artist-in-residence at the National Gallery, the artist will be showing new work in the Saatchi Gallery in Boundary Road, North London later this month, while his first solo exhibition in New York is planned for later in the year – all of which adds up to a fairly remarkable transformation in the life of a man who, three years ago, was devoting his best energies to the creation of a life-size model of a waterskiing sheepdog for a Kit-Kat commercial.

A tall, reserved and faintly lugubrious figure, Mueck is for all sorts of reasons a rather unusual member of the Young British Artist set. He is not exactly young, being in his early forties. Nor is he conspicuously British, being an Australian who was born and brought up in Melbourne. He never went to art school, let alone Goldsmiths, he does not go to parties and he has no reputation for outrageous behaviour. “I don’t know any of the other artists who were in ‘Sensation’. I don’t tend to socialise with anybody at all. I don’t go to dos or any of that stuff.”  Like father, like son. Being a miserable bastard, he observes, seems to run in the family.

Much of the work which Mueck has done since Dead Dad has itself a certain quality of introversion and alienation. Having abandoned death as a subject, it seems that various manifestations of anxiety are what interest him now. He has applied his trademark, painstaking realism to the creation of figures who seem imprisoned by their own depression or vulnerability. An old man wrapped up in a sheet sits, doubled over, with his face bent towards the ground. His fellow in misery scowls nervously while cowering beneath a cardigan which he has draped over his head like a shield against the world. “A lot of my things tend to be rather gloomy,” he says. “But then that’s the kind of guy I am. Ron Mueck’s Happy Period is a long way off.” The most impressive of Mueck’s post-Dead Dad works is probably a sculpture called Ghost, a larger-than-life-size sculpture of an unbearably tense adolescent girl in a slightly ill-fitting, school-issue bathing suit. With her blotchy skin, her nervous, chewed lips and her haunted uncertain gaze, she is the epitome of gangly self-consciousness.

Sculpture, for Mueck, seems to be a way of trying to catch and embody certain common human feelings. Thanks to the near-fanatical verisimilitude of his technique, he has been categorised as a hyper-realist, but there is an element of caricature about some of his works too. He shows us what a person might look like if possessed by a single emotion, to the exclusion of all else, so there is always an element of exaggeration involved. “They’re all kind of self-portraits really,” Mueck says, by which he presumably means that each of them is a projection of a part of himself. Mask is the most obvious example of this, being a six-foot-high model of Mueck’s own frowning face. He made it, he says, partly because he wanted to have a sense of what his children must feel when he looms over them in a filthy mood and bosses them about. “It makes me pity them.”

Sitting in his studio at the National Gallery, Mueck is the spitting image of Mask, his brow furrowed with anxiety at the thought of his impending New York exhibition. He says he is going to have to cancel it, because the work will not be ready in time. “The sculptures are taking longer and longer to make,” he says, “I think because I’m spending more time clutching my head. I’m still learning to please myself, instead of meeting someone else’s deadline. I’m making something I can bear to look at, instead of something that will be good enough for the advertising photo-shoot next Tuesday.” There is a work-in-progress on the floor, a large figure roughly carved from a block of polystyrene which, in a later stage of Mueck’s working method, will be cast in silicone. The figure is curled up in a foetal position, which suggests that Mueck’s Happy Period is still as remote as ever. On a table nearby there are several pieces of what looks like fishing wire. This, he explains, is destined to become hair. He buys it in varying thicknesses and with different tensile properties so that he can do everything “from facial to pubic”.

Mueck seems happier talking about how he makes things than why. This may reflect his background as someone who, until fairly recently, regarded himself as a craftsman rather than an artist. He says he has “always enjoyed making” and feels that this is something he got from his parents. The late Hans Mueck “was a painter-decorator by trade, but he did woodcarving and modelling and made stuff just for the fun of it, while my mum got into making soft toys to supplement the family income. So my background was always quite arty-crafty.” Ron never thought of going to art school, because “it was nothing anyone in my family thought of”, leaving formal education as soon as he could to start work as a window-dresser in a Melbourne department store. “Whenever anything needed to be made, props or whatever, it ended up that I’d be the one to make it.” After that, inspired by seeing Star Wars – “I thought it was extraordinary, this world that they had created from nothing” – Mueck found work in children’s television and in film special effects before coming to specialise in creating models for advertising. He enjoyed the work, although he also became increasingly frustrated by its ephemeral nature. “Quite often I felt I’d ended up with a thing that I felt had a certain value in its own right. Yet it was only ever destined to come to any sort of public awareness as a two-dimensional reproduction of itself on a billboard.” It was that frustration which first led Mueck to make some works for himself, an activity in which he was encouraged by his mother-in-law, the painter Paula Rego. It was she who first called his work to the attention to Charles Saatchi – the advertising man who, with satisfying symmetry, rescued Mueck from advertising.

Mueck seems to see his work, in some ways, as a form of anti-advertising, a counter to its weightlessness and insubstantiality and ephemerality. But he also acknowledges a debt to mass media imagery when he says that “I am often struck, when I’m out and about in town, by all these photographs of enormous people on hoardings or on the sides of buses. I like to imagine what it would be like if they were really there, in 3D”. Some of his recent work, like the Brobdingnagian boy designed for the Millennium Dome, seems like an attempt to satisfy that particular idle daydream.

Working at the National Gallery has not unnaturally made Mueck think more about the fine art traditions, and has sharpened his sense that “it’s the art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that really grabs me.” He reaches for a book about the Symbolists and leafs through until he gets to some angular kneeling figures by Rodin’s follower George Minne – introverted, miserablist works which it is not entirely surprising that he should like – and then grabs a paperback full of illustrations of Kathe Kollwitz’s dark Expressionist drawings. He stops at a drawing of a bereaved mother, her mouth twisted in an agonised wail. “This is going to seem like more doom and gloom, but I love her stuff, Kathe Kollwitz. Some of them are very melodramatic – but I love anything where you get the sense of people, I like it when a personality or a feeling leaps out at you…”

In the end the suspicion remains that Mueck’s greatest struggle will be to live up to his own past, rather than the past masters. Part of the fascination of looking at Dead Dad was the way in which the sculpture seemed to open up a whole realm of speculation about that fine, fine line that separates animate and inanimate matter. What is it, exactly, that happens when a man gives up the ghost? (As Craig Raine expressed it, it is a work which explains, with exemplary clarity, why people have found it necessary to invent the concept of the soul.) Another part of the fascination of that sculpture came from the eerie sense that the figure might, even as we watch, wake up.

At its strongest, Mueck’s work plays very effectively on ancient human superstitions about art and representation. It reminds us, with its disturbing, almost life-like presence, why graven images and idols should always have both excited and troubled human beings. The trouble may be that Dead Dad, Mueck’s very first work of note, should have fathomed so deeply so many of the most interesting possibilities implicit in the nature of his art. Will he be able, in Francis Bacon’s words, to “deepen the game”? Time will tell.