- Venue
- Tate Modern
- Location
- London
Playing with scale, using the minute and the immensely big to experiment with the possibility of perceiving the world in a different way. "You have to come, to look, to smile and despair." The words of Juan Muñoz, to whom Tate Modern have dedicate a wide Retrospective…
Interest in architectural space and relations in which the work and the viewer are immersed represented, at the end of the sixties, a crucial issue for many artists. From Minimalism and Land Art up until the early research of the 80’s and 90’s, where the conceptualization of relational aesthetics foregrounded Place in the relationship between work, viewer and environment, the investigations of Juan Muñoz (1953-2001), have centered around the relationship between spectator and architectural space through the use of dimensions and perspectives that allow the beholder to "meet" and immerse themselves in the work of the artist.
By creating a tension between reality and play, and the act of seeing and being seen, the Spanish artist investigates the spatial dimensions that define our relationship with the world, creating anonymous figures, or "muñecos" as they were defined by the artist himself. Real and at the same time far-fetched, these characters chat, mirror and take up the space of art as if it was a miniature of the space of life. Like all the investigations of Juan Muñoz, these dummies remain suspended in a continuous game between reality and fiction, a space "in between".
The exhibition proceeds chronologically, presenting the first work Balconies dating from the mid-eighties. Bridging intimacy and the public environment, balconies, as elements of the urban landscape, represent the privileged point from which to see the world and to be seen by the world. These elements in miniature size are an invitation by the artist to observe the space of everyday life, or more banally, to take part in this space.
Next, a series of installations that pose the viewer as a starting point for his utterances. In The Wasteland (1987), the artist’s first large-scale installation that invites the public to be involved in the space, this perception is at the same time destabilized by the use of an optical illusion which ‘lengthens’ the distance between the viewer and the bronze figure sitting on a shelf.
An entire room is dedicated to the Raincoat Drawings, paintings made with chalk on black canvas showing interiors of apartments where, as the artists explains, "It seems that something is about to happen, but nothing does happen because either we came to soon, or at the wrong time.” In Many Things (1999), one of Juan Muñoz most famous and probably well known works, one hundred figures with Eastern Somatic traits, all the same and dressed in the same way, seem to talk in the space of the gallery.
Whilst this retrospective of Juan Muñoz presents us with some of the key works by the Spanish artist, it does so from an overtly ‘textbook’ perspective. Without calling into question the thoroughness of the exhibition, it does seem devoid of interpretive momentum, the work of an art historian rather than a curatorial innovator seeking to propose a new contextual perspective from which to view Muñoz’s significant output.
