Skip to main content
Read page text
page 150
– MARINA WARNER – London, the result of a year’s residency, included new works, three of them inspired by the theme of the Madonna, but carrying the icon into new zones of representation. Mueck’s pregnant woman, a Madonna del Parto for our times, stood 12 feet high, stark naked; his smaller than life-size Mother and Child showed the naked baby crouched in foetal curl on the naked mother’s tummy, before the delivery of the placenta, so the umbilical cord still attached them to each other. Mueck’s figures often give the impression of startling themselves: they hang back from their own enfleshment in art, loiter uneasily or stand amazed, or lie stunned at their own paradoxical coming-into-being as image, as fabricated auto-icons. The sculptures packed all Mueck’s earlier powers of uncanny imitation, but with a deeper tenderness and awe for the difference between life and image: the stillness of these last descendants of the fine art wax sculpture tradition draw attention to the utter elusiveness of whatever it is, that thing called spirit, the spark of life.18 A new generation of figures at Madame Tussaud’s move and speak, sing and dance: in Kylie Minogue’s case, her voice seems to issue from her famous derrière. These automata are so much hugged and kissed by visitors, especially for souvenir snapshots, that they have to be regularly replaced: both the to-the-life exactness of the simulacra and the wear-and-tear they suffer feature prominently on the attraction’s posters – they proclaim the success of the deception. 126
page 151
– On the Threshold – The waxworks’ state of suspended animation stirs all kinds of thoughts about that inner life that has fled them. Imitating sleep, such waxworks, like dolls, invite the beholder to speculate about that person’s interior life, to supply inner processes: the more scrupulous the simulacrum of their exterior, the more the observer is persuaded that it might be possible to penetrate beyond it. Like ‘The Sleeping Beauty’, these likenesses invite us to enter into their minds and think about their dreams. . . . NOTES 1. Aristotle, Nicomachaean Ethics, 1139a1, quoted in ‘Commentary on Aristotle’s ‘De Anima’ ’, in M. C. D’Arcy (ed.), Aquinas: Selected Writings (London, 1939), 60. 2. So the label in Madame Tussaud’s said, in 1995, when I began this research. 3. This elaborate tableau was devised by the stage designer Julia Trev- elyan Oman. 4. Marie-Thérèse Louise de Savoie-Carignan (b. Turin 1749, d. ­Paris 1792). The Princesse de Lamballe was one of the ghost figures seen walking at Versailles by the visitors from England. See Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York and Oxford, 1995), 112–16, 127–30, 133–4, 263 n. 94; Chantal Thomas, in her novel Les Adieux à la reine (Paris, 2002), dramatizes vividly the intensity of their relationship. 5. Hector Fleischmann, La Guillotine en 1793 d’après des documents inédits des Archives Nationales (Paris, 1908), 290. 127

Page Text

View plaintext

– MARINA WARNER –

London, the result of a year’s residency, included new works, three of them inspired by the theme of the Madonna, but carrying the icon into new zones of representation. Mueck’s pregnant woman, a Madonna del Parto for our times, stood 12 feet high, stark naked; his smaller than life-size Mother and Child showed the naked baby crouched in foetal curl on the naked mother’s tummy, before the delivery of the placenta, so the umbilical cord still attached them to each other. Mueck’s figures often give the impression of startling themselves: they hang back from their own enfleshment in art, loiter uneasily or stand amazed, or lie stunned at their own paradoxical coming-into-being as image, as fabricated auto-icons. The sculptures packed all Mueck’s earlier powers of uncanny imitation, but with a deeper tenderness and awe for the difference between life and image: the stillness of these last descendants of the fine art wax sculpture tradition draw attention to the utter elusiveness of whatever it is, that thing called spirit, the spark of life.18

A new generation of figures at Madame Tussaud’s move and speak, sing and dance: in Kylie Minogue’s case, her voice seems to issue from her famous derrière. These automata are so much hugged and kissed by visitors, especially for souvenir snapshots, that they have to be regularly replaced: both the to-the-life exactness of the simulacra and the wear-and-tear they suffer feature prominently on the attraction’s posters – they proclaim the success of the deception.

126

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content