JUAN MUNOZ by Laura Cumming & Waldemar Januszczak

February 3, 2008

JUAN MUNOZ AT TATE MODERN

In Juan Munoz's dark places, you find the heir to
Spanish greats such as Goya, Dali, Picasso and
Velazquez

Waldemar Januszczak

Spain may have played a huge and heroic role in
the early chapters of modern art, with Picasso,
Miro, Dali and Julio Gonzalez all making critical
contributions, but, around the halfway mark of
the 20th century, this remarkable national effort
began to run out of steam - and, after Picasso's
death in 1973, it seemed to cease altogether. Of
course, the Spaniards the selves would
passionately disagree, as Spaniards do. They
would argue that the sculptor Eduardo Chillida
and the painter Antonio Tapies are important
modern figures. But I, too, am cruel and
demanding, and I beg to differ. Chillida and
Tapies are pequeños amos. The only truly
significant Spanish artist to have emerged since
the death of Picasso is Juan Muñoz. The evidence
has just gone on show at Tate Modern.

Muñoz will be best known to British audiences for
Double Bind, the mysterious grey mega-structure
with ascending lifts and spying figures that he
built inside the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in
2001, in the second of the Unilever series of
unusually large Tate installations. Muñoz
followed Louise Bourgeois into the Tate's grand
canyon and, by a mild coincidence, he is doing so
again now, for, just as Bourgeois's superb and
passionate retrospective closes at Tate Modern,
so Muñoz's retrospective opens. In one sad
respect, however, there is no similarity between
them. Because Bourgeois, amazingly, is still
alive and still making challenging art at the age
of 96. While Muñoz, alarmingly, died in the year
that Double Bind was unveiled. He was 48.

The Turbine Hall has never felt as threatening
and sinister as it did when filled by Double
Bind. I still feel this late-night car park of a
sculpture creeping about my imagination now,
unsettling me for no good reason. But trying to
recall its exact geography is a challenge. Most
of the action seemed to take place in the
shadows, between floors, beyond edges, at the
ends of vistas. Which is how Muñoz's art always
operates. It's an art of corridors and corners,
whispers and glimpses, suggestions and inferences.

Typically, his retrospective opens before you
enter it, with a series of miniature Spanish
balconies arranged high up on the vestibule wall,
flanked by a set of iron signs saying "Hotel".
These tiny additions manage to have a mighty
effect, because they successfully imply that the
Tate's blank and functional interior is actually
a mysterious Spanish exterior: a narrow street
filled with hotels and the naughty rustles of
discreet liaisons between passing strangers that
a hotel sign must always encourage.

That, of course, is my reading of Hotel Declercq,
made in 1986, but I feel no nervousness in
sharing it with you, because Muñoz was clear
about his ambition to involve the spectator fully
and actively in his mysteries. He saw himself as
a story-teller, a presenter of situations through
which you, the audience, are encouraged to wander
and draw your own conclusions. Where other
sculptors sculpt with touchable materials and
carvable stuffs, Muñoz works with unseen things:
the mood of a room, its spatial feel. So much of
his sculpting is done in the psychological
dimension.

He came late to sculpture; he came late to art.
Born in Madrid in 1953, he blundered down various
scholarly alleys, and tried his hand at curating
and writing, before finally emerging, in the
middle of the 1980s, as the first Spanish
sculptor of note of the postFranco era. The
earliest works in this show were made in 1982.
And, as he died in 2001, we have before us the
contents of a strikingly short and concentrated
career. Yet that is not how it feels. An
impressive number of swings and variations were
achieved in his absurdly brief stay, and his work
never appears rushed or speeded up. The
mysterious unveilings in this show always do
their jobs at a notably languid and dreamy pace.

At the far end of this retrospective, you will
find Many Times, the second most ambitious piece
he ever made, after Double Bind. It consists of
100 milling figures arranged in groups around a
room through which you, too, are encouraged to
meander and investigate. The figures are nearly
life-sized, and spooky. All of them are bald. All
wear the same grey and functional work uniforms
that Muñoz came to prefer. And, although they are
all posed differently, and seem to be busily
involved in different moments, you note quickly
that all sport exactly the same grinning Asiatic
face. No clues, no prompts, no agendas. All you
can do is blunder among these mysterious baldies
and suspect what they are up to.

I decided soon enough that their combined effect
was deliberately reminiscent of the Terracotta
Army, and that perhaps something cynical was
being said about the uniformity of Chinese
factory conditions.

But, having now come home and puzzled about it
further, I no longer suspect any of that. Muñoz
is never that literal. And, sitting at my desk, I
am getting weird whispers from my own body,
telling me the sensation of moving between
Muñoz's figures, trying not to brush against them
or knock any of them over, is a more compelling
aspect of the sculpture than the meaning of the
grinning figures. From beyond the grave, Muñoz is
still pulling my strings.

That said, the mad perma-grins on the faces of
the identical Asiatics struck me as a
quintessentially Spanish expression. Something is
being mocked in that particularly bitter and
savage way that the Spanish enjoy. Think of Goya.
Think of Dali. Muñoz's debt to his national
tradition is made even clearer at the start of
the show by a series of early works featuring the
lonely figure of a dwarf. The dwarf was
introduced into art by Velazquez, who famously
questioned the reality of his times by
encouraging a misshapen array of little people to
stare at it extra-fiercely. In Velazquez's day,
the royal dwarf was the only member of court
allowed to question the decisions of the king.
Muñoz's art appears to grant him this same
licence to challenge.

A haunting piece from 1988 shows the dwarf
pressed against a wall behind three large
Solomonic columns that seem to imprison him as
they compare their large, twisting size with his.
A nearby work, called The Prompter, is dominated
by a large stage decorated with geometric
patterns; only some stumpy legs, poking out of
the bottom of the prompt box at the front,
identify it as another dwarf sculpture. The
silence is deafening. No play is being performed.
There is nothing to prompt. It's a fabulously
poignant ensemble.

Although Muñoz is rightly credited with ushering
in a new era of figurative sculpture in the
1980s, his first interest was minimalism; and, no
matter how high the body count grows in his art,
or appears to grow, he never gave up the precise
placement of shapes in space that minimalism
demands. His colour schemes, too, are strikingly
spare. The entire show has been created out of a
narrow range of monochrome greys, browns and
blacks. Even Muñoz's "paintings" - a revelation
to me, as I was only dimly aware that he had
produced any - are made with white chalks on
black fabrics.

I was much taken by these strange black pictures.
A set of haunting interiors of what seems to be
an ordinary apartment into which the light has
seeped in dark, Hitchcockian pools was
particularly fascinating. Although the monochrome
colour schemes are flavoured with minimalism -
Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt were Muñoz's named
favourites - these dark, mysterious paintings
hark back also to the black-and-white moods of
Spanish baroque art - to Velazquez, again, and
Zurbaran. Like so many aspects of this show, the
Spanishness of the colour schemes builds slowly
and spookily, becoming ever more insistent. It
wasn't until I reached the end that I finally
realised how many of Muñoz's key concerns, from
the dwarfs to the mirrors, from the empty
architecture to the constant whispering and
murmuring, are derived directly from Velazquez's
quintessential Spanish masterpiece Las Meninas.
Unless, of course, I am merely imagining it.

Pics <http://tinyurl.com/yq8spj>

<http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/unilever_munoz/unimunoz_pics.htm>

Juan Muñoz: A Retrospective is at Tate Modern, SE1, until April 27

© Copyright 2008 Times Newspapers Ltd.

>>>

SO TELL US THE BIG JOKE, THEN

The enigmatic works of the great Spanish sculptor
and showman Juan Muñoz amuse and unsettle in a
welcome retrospective

Laura Cumming

Sunday January 20, 2008

The Observer

Spanish artist Juan Muñoz died suddenly of a
heart attack on a hot August day in 2001. He was
48 and at the height of his powers. The
obituaries rang with incredulity that such a
vivid spirit could possibly be gone, but the
shock was also unexpectedly real for anyone
visiting Tate Modern that summer.

Muñoz had transformed the Turbine Hall as no
other artist before or since into a parallel
world secreted between two floors. At the bottom
of the building, in a Stygian gloom pierced only
by shadows falling from tenement wells above, a
secret service of grey-suited figures performed
an enigmatic drama in a network of balconies and
corridors: an unforgettable embodiment of
purgatory.

But as you rose higher up Tate Modern, all trace
of what you had seen mysteriously disappeared.
Lifts descended but brought nobody back. Shafts
in the floor turned out to be trompe l'oeil
images, leading nowhere. The experience was
somewhere between Magritte, Piranesi, Dante and
Fritz Lang, except that you moved through it in
three dimensions. Double Bind, as it was called,
was an astonishing experience for the mind and
eye. How impossible that it should be the
sculptor's last work.

Juan Muñoz set out to astonish. His art is more
like showbusiness - silent film, illusion,
vaudeville, mime - than conventional sculpture.
His best-known works involve nearly lifesize
figures in dramatic monologues or groupings,
performers who inspire bewilderment, laughter or,
more usually, disquiet in the audience. For we
seem to constitute something more than mere
viewers for these characters, as he called them,
to co-exist with or even for them.

Take Many Times, one of the signature works in
the posthumous retrospective that begins its
European tour, appropriately, at Tate Modern next
week. In the central gallery, you will encounter
a great throng of figures, a hundred apparently
identical Chinese men, all bald, all grinning, in
hugger-mugger confabs. As soon as you appear
among them, you will simultaneously feel
excluded, left out of the party or the secret or
whatever the private joke may be. Yet with their
unreadable expressions - surely they can't all be
laughing at the same thing? - they seem equally
alien to us.

Part of the grim comedy is precisely that they
all look the same: an optical illusion of
European perceptions. 'For Western people,' Muñoz
said, 'it seemed to me that Chinese people are
like a visual trick. I would make the noses
shorter, the eyes larger, but still they all look
like the same guy.'

He, or his cousin, appears seven times in Towards
the Corner, a much-travelled work you might have
seen in museums elsewhere. Here, the figures are
assembled on wooden bleachers, laughing heartily
at some event in the corner. Entering from behind
them, you are irresistibly drawn to discover
what's so funny, but, in so doing, position
yourself as the butt of the joke. The defensive
thought occurs that if you weren't there, they
would still be laughing, wouldn't they, but
laughing at what - their own collective absurdity?

The Spaniard is one of art's great late-starters.
He only came to sculpture at the end of his
twenties, having run away from Madrid to London
at the age of 17 and experimented with all sorts
of other art forms first. The earliest works from
the 1980s are elegantly absurdist. Architectural
fragments blossoming out of dead walls: banisters
that wiggle as if one were sashaying down
non-existent stairs; hotel signs above
wrought-iron balconies that lead nowhere. They
turn you into an actor, too, as you look up and
inevitably imagine looking down, catching
yourself as a passer-by on some Spanish plaza.

The suspension that is a balcony - neither in nor
out, neither here nor exactly there - is an apt
emblem for what followed. Muñoz began to make
figures imprisoned by their in-between states:
stringless marionettes, ventriloquists' dummies
waiting alertly for a ventriloquist to give them
words, a stage prompt poised in his box before a
bare stage.

In Stuttering Piece, two seated figures are
stymied by the never-ending dialogue repeated on
loop between them:

'What did you say?'

'I didn't say anything.'

'You never say anything.'

'No. But you keep coming back to it.'

Beckett and Borges, TS Eliot and David Mamet:
Muñoz was the most literary of sculptors. The
dummy waiting to come alive is stranded on a
shelf on the other side of an optical illusion of
a floor so convulsive it looks impossible to
cross - a wasteland leading to silence. Another
trademark figure is mired from the waist down in
a sphere like a large, grey Weeble. Helpless,
tragi-comic, a little foolish, he or she must
endure this sticking point forever, like Winnie
buried up to her bosom in Beckett's Happy Days

The greyness of the figures is crucial - they
must be as naturalistic as us, yet unrealistic
enough to be Other. Muñoz hit upon grey after
experimenting with other colours and one sees why
it succeeds by comparison. A white female dwarf
looks too much like a plaster body cast (which,
in fact, she was); a terracotta dwarf looks too
much like traditional sculpture.

This Dwarf With a Box (1988) stands in his suit
upon a desk that brings him roughly to our level.
But his eyes are closed, breaking the connection
and repudiating the supposed advantage of height.
You are thwarted, given the cold shoulder if you
like. It is an inarticulate reproof that leaves
one stuck for words.

Muñoz was never afraid of courting narrative even
as he blocked it. You could make something of the
chess box beneath the dwarf's arm, or the row
blowing up in Conversation Piece, or the man with
his face pressed so hard against the mirror you
sense a horrible revelation dawning like that of
Narcissus in reverse.

But even though his art veers in the direction of
speech, of drama and dialogue, prologue and
climax, at its best it conveys illusions,
sensations or emotions that can't easily be put
into words. Wax Drum is exactly as it sounds - a
mute instrument, lacking the necessary skin. But
plunged into it is a pair of scissors that
somehow represents in one devastating gesture the
whole of its defencelessly deafened state.

And high above the concourse at Tate Modern,
already in place, two grey men are suspended in
mirth. Out of the mouth of one of them trips a
line of tiny iron figures in gesturing poses that
cannot themselves be read. The joke is private;
you're not in on the anecdote and yet the piece
inspires corresponding laughter in the viewer.
And perhaps that is Muñoz's grave point:
laughter, like sorrow, exists beyond words and
long before speech.

Pics <http://tinyurl.com/2pu52j>

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008