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– MARINA WARNER – him (as in the case of his poems on Narcissus), and he also illuminates the uncanny when he describes the power of make-believe in children. He writes: I know, I know it was necessary for us to have things of this kind, which acquiesced in everything. The simplest love relationships were quite beyond our comprehension, we could not possibly have lived and had dealings with a person who was something; at most, we could only have entered into such a person and have lost ourselves there. With the doll we were forced to assert ourselves, for, had we surrendered ourselves to it, there would then have been no one there at all. . . . it was so abysmally devoid of phantasy, that our imagination became inexaustible in dealing with it.17 In waxworks, similar powers of projection invest the stubborn, inanimate, horrible thing with life, with soul. Through dressing up, adorning, handling, addressing – and destroying – the objects of play are crammed and heaped in visual and tactile specificities, and subjected to a fugue of passions. Among contemporary artists working in this vein, Ron Mueck creates effigies unsurpassed for their meticulous illusionism. His sculptures are composed of plastics and resins, are entirely factitious, yet provoke all the mixed feelings, anxiety, and awe of perfect imitations: the spectacle he offers baffles and puzzles by its exact replication, its enargeia, or vividness of presence. He pricks in eyelashes, body down, pubic hair, strand by strand; glistening gums, the blueish subcutaneous delta of veins, 124
page 149
– On the Threshold – as well as moles, freckles, and smears, add pungent accents of exactitude that deepen the eerie impression of physical reality. These imitations of bodies shiver on the very verge of life, it seems. The son of Australian toymakers, and himself a model-maker for cinema and television, Mueck has adopted the illusions of scale that film commands, and makes spatial shifts away from lifelike proportion; the resulting incongruities disclose with some unnerving subtlety that the figures have been made – made up – not cast or stuffed or embalmed. Dead Dad, the portrait of a naked older man, inspires its particular uncanny shiver because his perfectly rendered corpse is tiny – feet, hands, genitals, all miniaturized, and the more tender and ghostly for this shrinkage. Big Baby, which was displayed in the Millennium Dome, was gargantuan, by contrast. As with Dead Dad, the proportions communicated the psychological space the two subjects take up – death reduces someone to almost nothing, new life balloons the flesh with its huge energies. Another figure, a portrait of a gangly adolescent girl, was elongated beyond human dimensions, and given strangely greying hair, so that she existed not only stretched in space but also correspondingly extended in time. She is called Ghost, and Mueck’s title here announces the contradiction at the core of his astonishing deceptions: there is nobody there, nor any body of anyone who ever was. The artist’s 2003 exhibition at the National ­Gallery, 125

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– MARINA WARNER –

him (as in the case of his poems on Narcissus), and he also illuminates the uncanny when he describes the power of make-believe in children. He writes:

I know, I know it was necessary for us to have things of this kind, which acquiesced in everything. The simplest love relationships were quite beyond our comprehension, we could not possibly have lived and had dealings with a person who was something; at most, we could only have entered into such a person and have lost ourselves there. With the doll we were forced to assert ourselves, for, had we surrendered ourselves to it, there would then have been no one there at all. . . . it was so abysmally devoid of phantasy, that our imagination became inexaustible in dealing with it.17

In waxworks, similar powers of projection invest the stubborn, inanimate, horrible thing with life, with soul. Through dressing up, adorning, handling, addressing – and destroying – the objects of play are crammed and heaped in visual and tactile specificities, and subjected to a fugue of passions. Among contemporary artists working in this vein, Ron Mueck creates effigies unsurpassed for their meticulous illusionism. His sculptures are composed of plastics and resins, are entirely factitious, yet provoke all the mixed feelings, anxiety, and awe of perfect imitations: the spectacle he offers baffles and puzzles by its exact replication, its enargeia, or vividness of presence. He pricks in eyelashes, body down, pubic hair, strand by strand; glistening gums, the blueish subcutaneous delta of veins,

124

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