Presumably The Umbilical Cord Was Cut With A Chainsaw | Ron Mueck’s A Girl now occupies its own room at the AGA, and we don’t envy the museum employee whose job it is to change its diaper.
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Ron Mueck’s 2006 sculpture A Girl is a spectacle: a hyperrealistically detailed simulacrum of a newborn baby girl, 15 feet tall, splotches of blood on her head and knees, faux saliva glistening in the corner of her mouth, blue veins barely visible through her meticulously creased, folded, and wrinkled skin. But is it art?
The sculpture, which occupies its own room in the Art Gallery of Alberta, is the centrepiece of the AGA’s Real Life exhibit — although you get the feeling that the disorienting photograph of tiny-looking workmen unloading A Girl outside the gallery that appeared on the front page of the Edmonton Journal last week is the show’s real coup.
Seen up close, A Girl is definitely a compelling sight, especially the head, with one eye half-squinting vacantly up at you. Mueck captures that look of nascent intelligence that so many babies possess, and magnifying it to such a degree sends a very creepy chill running down your spine.
Or is that chill merely the “uncanny valley” effect writ large — the same instinctive recoil we feel whenever we see the dead-eyed, smooth-skinned faces of the computer-generated “actors” in Beowulf or The Polar Express? It’s strange that Mueck’s sculptures make us feel so uneasy — but perhaps they feel too laboured-over to produce any feelings of spontaneous delight. Does Mueck take any delight in his creations?
The limitations of Mueck’s work become more apparent in the adjacent room, where Old Woman in Bed is on display — a frail-looking, doll-like octogenarian the size of an infant curled up under her bedsheets. The piece is striking, but without the visual impact of A Girl’s mammoth size (and with most of the old woman’s body hidden), it feels merely like a sentimental tableau.
A Girl reminds me of the cliché about Mt. Rushmore: if you’re in the neighbourhood, you don’t really have any choice but to check it out. And you kind of marvel at the work that went into it more than the meaning of the work itself. —Paul Matwychuk
Comments: 1
Anonymous wrote:
I continued, thinking, "I bet Paul Matwychuk wrote this", since it was lacking the usual art-school pomposity that SEE art writers seemingly cannot avoid, while at the same time, happily lacked the obvious grammatical, punctuation, etc. errors (not to mention sophomoric errors of logic and thought) that are also par or the course with such writers.
Of course, there's Paul's name at the end of the piece.
Well done, Paul! As someone who you say had "wreaked unbelievable havoc" on See's comment boards in the past, let me be the first to point out what I'm sure you're already aware of: This article is WAAAAAAY better than anything AWBlain, Amy Fung, Jill and Mandy Whatstherefaces, have ever wrote for you.
Save your money, and keep up the good work, Paul!
on Jul 2nd, 2009 at 7:48am Report Abuse
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