Mueck Ron (1958- ) Ron Mueck is a London-based photo-realist artist. Born in Melbourne,
Australia, to parents who were toy makers, he laboured on children’s television shows
for 15 years before working in special effects for such films as “Labyrinth,” a 1986
fantasy epic starring David Bowie. Muek then started his own company in London, making
models to be photographed for advertisements. He has lots of the dolls he made during
his advertising years stored in his home. Although some still have, he feels, “a
presence on their own,” many were made just to be photographed from a particular
angle—”one strip of a face,” for example, with a lot of loose material lurking an
inch outside the camera’s frame. Eventually Mueck concluded that photography pretty
much destroys the physical “presence” of the original object, and so he turned to
fine art and sculpture. In the early 1990's, still in his advertising days, Mueck
was commissioned to make something highly realistic, and was wondering what material
would do the trick. Latex was the usual, but he wanted something harder, more precise.
Luckily, he saw a little architectural decor on the wall of a boutique and inquired
as to the nice, pink stuff’s nature. Fiberglass resin was the answer, and Mueck has
made it his bronze and marble ever since.
The story so far. In 1997, at the Royal Academy, the sensation of Sensation: Young
British Artists from the Saatchi Collection is neither Damien Hirst's increasingly
dowdy, dilapidated, dog-eared shark, nor the homeopathically talented Tracey Emin,
whose empty appliquéd tent is an exact objective correlative of her camp conceptualism.
Nor is it yet Marcus Harvey's cool, ironic but cynically hyped portrait of Myra Hindley,
whose compositional method is denounced by the tabloids - because the face is an
agglomeration of childish handprints. Nor is the sensation of Sensation the Jake
and Dinos Chapman 1995 fibreglass frieze of girls - naked, prepubescent, wearing
only trainers, but sporting several penile noses and open, anal mouths. Among this
clamorous, attention-seeking art there is good work - by Jenny Saville, Rachel Whiteread,
and the photographer Richard Billingham. And there, on the floor, 3ft long, is one
indisputable, obvious masterpiece - a single work, the understated Dead Dad by Ron
Mueck, the Australian son-in-law of Paula Rego - a calmly brilliant sculpture which
is the contemporary equivalent of, say, Holbein's subtle portrait of Erasmus, with
its engaged intelligence and wryly amused thin mouth. The greatness of Dead Dad is
oxymoronic: its very completeness also tells us something is missing. The sculpture
dispassionately records every delicate and indelicate bodily detail - detail that
is alive with accuracy. Nothing is missing. Tendons, toenails, the direction of dark
hair on the calves, the hazy pubes a little stationary mirage, the tidy greying hair,
the polished, modest, uncircumcised cosh of the penis at four o'clock, which echoes
the thumbs across the open, upturned palms. And yet this body is unmistakably dead.
It is laid out - the opposite of foetal. We are not in the presence of sleep. The
eyes have it - significantly pink, fatally, infinitesimally sunken. And the helpless
hands have irretrievably lost it. Everything is there still, but stilled, and something
central has gone. The reduction in scale somehow suggests this loss. The body is
lesser than life - for some, lighter by 21 grams, the weight of the soul: the alleged
difference in body weight before and after death.
I didn't really get on with my father but, as I made the piece, I found myself thinking
about him, caring." The carefulness of his creation is cognate with care in the broader
sense. In fact, sentimentality is nowhere in sight. Though there is sentiment - a
completely other thing - it is inextricably fused with another perfectly proper,
strong human emotion: curiosity.
Mueck also said that in creating Dead Dad he had worked from memory and imagination.
Imagination.
Mueck's Spooning Couple are definitely not forking. They seem not to be spooning
either, in the erotic sense - they resemble kitchen utensils in close proximity,
more than they resemble human beings about to make love. Mueck has given us the habit
of affection, the pose of cuddling. In Dead Dad, he gave us the mystery of death
- of to be and not to be. In Spooning Couple, he has given us another mystery - the
precise moment of sexual evaporation. The emotion here is as miniaturised as the
figures - mild worry, "How did we get here, if this is where we are?"
Ghost, an early piece on show at Edinburgh, is a wonderful, unexaggerated sculpture
depicting an emotion rarely noted by artists - self-consciousness. A gigantified
girl in an unflattering swimming costume arranges herself awkwardly - as if she were
a tripod rather than a biped - caught between two states, at once pathologically
ordinary and a freakish refugee from Diane Arbus's lurid, unforgiving, prying lens.
Her size, the scale, is how she feels about her body. Technically, this cognitive
dissonance is called anosognosia - which means not being aware of your condition.
She thinks she is the Incredible Hulk. She is only sick with shyness.
Naturally, this is part of Mueck's sculptural stock-in-trade. He spends, he told
me, a lot of time staring at his clay models - trying to see them. "If you've been
looking at a piece of clay for hours you can't see it." He has invented strategies
to counter this blasé blindness: he takes photographs; he looks at the piece in a
mirror; he glances over his shoulder. In one case, Big Man (2000), he lost his rag,
bashed it on the head, and created a frown from which the sculpture really began.
Look for long enough and parallels - natural parallels - will mob the real artist.
Pregnant Woman (2002), demonstrates lucidly how the face and the body can be mirror
images of each other. All portrait painters know - if they are any good - that the
face is echoic, a rhyming dictionary. The eyes and the nostrils and the eyebrows
are examples of almost competitive mimicry. Raise an eyebrow, arch a nostril - snap.
In Matisse's 1914 drawing of Elsa Glaser, the mouth is another eye. In Mueck's Pregnant
Woman, this network of parallels is extended to an invisible omnipresence.
First things first. You are overwhelmed by the size of the piece. She is larger than
life - 8ft tall. But pregnant women at this stage are larger than life. There is,
too, something unbelievable, impossible even, about their anatomy. Mueck reminds
us of more familiar truths as well. The woman has monumental legs and feet. We think
of women as feminine, delicate, waisted. And they are. But they are also female,
sturdy and monumental. Pregnancy reveals the practicality of the pelvis, like the
frame of a rucksack.
Then you are overwhelmed by the detail. Amazingly. The danger of scaling things up,
of bigging it, is that there isn't enough detail to go round the acres of extra space,
of dead space. Her calves and shins are shaved. There are two very inconspicuous
spots on her bum - in exactly the right place. The spot on her left buttock is just
to the left of her bum crack. The moles are perfect, especially the larger one just
above her left armpit.
Then the parallels kick in: the closed rounded eyelids are mini-breasts, the nose
a pregnant belly (with a mole placed to echo the bud of the navel). The lips and
vagina are an obvious implicit parallel, of course. Her hair parallels her pubic
hair - both wonderfully accurate, differentiated textures. Her arms mirror her legs,
her hands mirror her feet. Pregnant woman is a contemporary portrayal of motherhood,
making reference to universal themes such as fertility, birth, the goddess, the iconography
of the Madonna and Child, and to life itself. Mueck's ability to portray the monumentality
and strength of a pregnant woman, as well as her vulnerability and emotional intensity,
creates a powerful connection between the work and the viewer. Mueck's process and
techniques are a source of fascination, particularly in relation to his meticulous
observation of the skin's surface: its pores, the follicles of hair, the softness
of a mole, the hardness of a nail and the shadows of veins just beneath the skin.
These are the things that draw viewers to Pregnant woman and make the sculpture seem
so real.
How to get rid of cellulite -forever!
Do you want to get rid of cellulite? Follow this program and no longer worry about
unsightly, lumpy cellulite.
You’ve seen those ads—
‘This disgustingly smelly cream guaranteed to rid you of unsightly cellulite!’
Wear this hot, tight, uncomfortable garment for an interminably long time each day
and your cellulite will disappear like magic!’
(Well, that’s what those ads should say.)
Now, fitness researchers have jumped on this bandwagon. They’ve come up with a fairly
simple exercise program that they say will get rid of cellulite. But there’s one
difference between their cure and the ones you’ll see in magazine ads: The fitness
experts aren’t trying to sell you anything.
What is cellulite, anyway?
It’s nothing but regular, old fat. In areas of your body where you have a high proportion
of fat to muscle (like women’s thighs, hips, and buttocks), a lot of the fat is trapped
between the muscle and the skin and begins to look lumpy. The fibrous or connective
tissue that holds your muscles, fat, and skin together is what you are seeing when
you see the lumpy, pocked look of cellulite. Some women have more fibrous or connective
tissue than others, making the ‘cottage cheese’ look of cellulite more pronounced.
Cellulite can worsen with age, too, because you tend to lose muscle as you get older,
causing your body to have a higher proportion of fat to muscle.
So what’s the cure for cellulite?
Well, it’s not a pill, or a cream, or a rubber garment that you squeeze on over your
body. It’s a simple, easy exercise program.
A group of 23 women that were enrolled in a two-month exercise program saw significant
decreases in cellulite at the end of the study. The women ranged in age from 23 to
66 and were all in varying levels of fitness. They were all fairly sedentary at the
outset of the program, however, and they all had cellulite on their hips, thighs,
or buttocks that they expressed an interest in decreasing or getting rid of altogether.
The women in the study exercised for thirty minutes, three times a week, for the
two months required. At the end of the program, all of the women in the study had
lost cellulite and expressed satisfaction with the exercise program. In fact, 73%
of the women experienced ‘a lot less cellulite’ on their hips, thighs, and buttocks.
The age and fitness levels of the women experiencing ‘a lot less cellulite’ again
varied greatly.
The study was conducted three more times, each time following the same program and
length of study, and each time there was a significant loss of cellulite in each
of the women in the study.
Here’s the program that they followed:
1. 15 minutes of aerobic exercise should be done: i.e, walking on the treadmill,
riding a bicycle or using a stepper. Always do a 2-minute warm-up before and a 2-minute
cool-down after the aerobic exercise. This reduces the risk of injury to your muscles
while exercising.
2. Do 15 minutes of strength exercises or weight training at a weight that fatigues
the muscle within ten repetitions. Start out with light weights, then as the program
goes on, raise the weight to a higher level.
Do ten repetitions of each exercise for the targeted muscle. If, for example, your
thighs are the part of your body that is lumpy with cellulite, you should use an
exercise specifically designed for thighs, such as leg lifts or side-lying leg lifts.
Or use an exerciser specifically designed for thighs such as a thighmaster.
If you want to rid your buttocks of cellulite, do lunges, or squats. Adding one to
five pound weights to your ankles, holding light weights at your side, or working
out on a weight machine is suggested, though you can start the program by doing the
exercises without added weights. The people in the study, however, all had much better
results when they used hand or ankle weights or exercised on weight machines, as
opposed to doing the exercises without the added weights.
3. Stretch out the muscle for 20 seconds after each set of 10 repetitions of the
exercise. This is a very important part of the exercise program. Stretching out the
muscle after the exercises helps to increase the length and flexibility of the muscle,
and this will help to increase your strength. The more strength that you have, the
easier the exercises become, and the more muscle you build. The more muscle you build,
the less cellulite you will have.
And that’s it. It’s not a miracle cure for cellulite, but it is a cure nonetheless.
It requires a little work and dedication, but the results will be worth it. The women
who participated in the studies all expressed satisfaction with the amount of cellulite
that they lost during the two months of the program. Fitness experts believe that
you will also be pleased with the smoother thighs, hips and buttocks that you will
have if you follow this program. And if you continue this program three times a week,
your cellulite may not ever come back.
