trompe l'oeil

Fact and fable: Juan Munoz: employing conceptualist strategies and the illusionistic devices of theater, the late Spanish artist Juan Munoz left behind an extraordinarily rich and varied oeuvre. His idiosyncratic sculptures, drawings and installations are currently on view in a major touring retrospective, his first in the U.S

David Ebony

By the time of his death in Ibiza on Aug. 28, 2001, Juan Munoz, at age 48, had achieved a level of respect and recognition in the international art community that is afforded few contemporary artists. A fatal aneurysm abruptly ended a nearly 20-year career, during which the Spanish artist was recognized for his ability to expand the possibilities of figurative sculpture and installation art. He had more than 50 solo shows to his credit, and his work had been included in numerous international exhibitions such as Documenta (1992) and the Venice Biennale (1993). He won Spain's prestigious art prize, the Premio Nacional de Artes Plasticas, in 2000.

In early June 2001, less than three months before his death, he completed his most ambitious work, Double Bind, a vast installation for London's Tate Modern. While on vacation in Ibiza, he was anticipating the fall opening of the first major museum survey devoted to his art, to debut at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden before embarking on a U.S. tour. What was intended as a midcareer retrospective opened in Washington as a memorial exhibition on Oct. 18, 2001. It is now on view at the Art Institute of Chicago [to Dec. 8].

Featuring some 60 sculptures, installations and drawings created from the mid-1980s to early 2001, the show was organized by Neal Benezra when he was deputy director and curator of modern and contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago (he was recently appointed director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). Working in collaboration with the show's coordinating curator, Olga M. Viso of the Hirshhorn, Benezra chose many of Munoz's best-known works as well as a group of rarely exhibited early pieces.

In Washington, two major works were displayed outdoors. One was an upside-down, nearly life-size human figure suspended by a cable fastened around one ankle; that cable was attached to another wire bisecting the circular courtyard. Dangling high above a fountain, the eerie, gray-patinated bronze, Figure Hanging from One Foot (2001), is Munoz's final sculpture. In many ways, the work exemplifies his approach to art-making as well as the sense of intrigue that permeates much of his oeuvre. Indicating perhaps a prisoner who fell from a ledge, a bungee jumper, an acrobat, an escape artist or a man being tortured, the finely wrought figure, wearing loose-fitting pants and jacket, suggests a tense drama. The piece is ambiguous in every way except in its ability to convey a feeling of helplessness. Inside the building or on the ground beneath this figure, removed and distant from it, the viewer feels powerless and frustrated in determining the cause and outcome of the figure's bizarre predicament. Metaphorically, if not literally, the work is suspended somewhere between reality and fiction.

Situated on a lawn in front of the building and part of the museum's permanent collection, Munoz's bronze figure grouping, Last Conversation Piece (1994-95), suggests a state of exclusion. Here, five figures made of light gray bronze have bald heads and slender arms and torsos. Instead of legs, the bodies end in bulbous, sacklike forms, like oversized beanbags. Despite their awkward appearances, the figures seem highly animated. In a fixed arrangement, three of them appear to be engaged in an intense discourse, whispering and gesticulating. Two elements placed some distance apart seem to be ostracized by the main group. They correspond to the viewer's sense of being outside the scene, forever in the dark as to the information being passed among the figures.

This installation is part of a series of works featuring schematic, androgynous-looking, pear-shaped figures. Related bronzes, "Conversation Pieces I-V" (1991), filled one room inside the museum; at approximately 4 1/2 feet tall, the sculptures have generalized facial features; like bottom-weighted, uncapsizable toys, they might easily rock from side to side with just a slight push. At one end of the gallery, a figure pressed its ear against the wall as if eavesdropping on a conversation in an adjacent room. In these pieces, Munoz's interest in theatricality and the figure corresponds to contemporaneous experiments by a generation of artists who emerged in the mid-1980s, including Robert Gober, Charles Ray, Kiki Smith, Stephan Balkenhol and Thomas Schutte.

Born in Madrid in 1953, Munoz grew up in a middle-class family during the last decades of the repressive Franco regime. Studying privately with Santiago Amon, a leftist critic and editor for the newspaper El Pais, Munoz was introduced to international vanguard works of literature and art. He briefly studied architecture at the University of Madrid before moving to London with his brother Vicente in 1970. After traveling extensively in Europe for some years, he returned to London in 1976 to enroll at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, where he earned a degree in printmaking. While attending New York's Pratt Graphic Center in 1981, he received a Fulbright Fellowship and subsequently served as an artist-in-residence at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City. In 1982, he returned to Spain, settling in Torrelodones, a Madrid suburb, with his wife, the Basque sculptor Cristina Iglesias, whom he had met several years earlier in London.

In the same year he conducted an interview with his favorite sculptor, Richard Serra, which he hoped to publish. While it never made its way into print, the interview nevertheless led to Munoz's brief career as a curator. Serra referred him to a friend, the Spanish curator Carmen Gimenez, who was working at the time for the Ministry of Culture in Madrid. Under Gimenez's guidance, Munoz organized two influential traveling museum exhibitions, introducing the work of a number of key contemporary artists and architects to post-Franco Spain. (1)

The first show paired architects with artists, and the second compared contemporary art with prehistoric paintings and artifacts. Munoz contributed an essay for the catalogue of each show, establishing his reputation as an astute critic. Subsequently, he wrote numerous essays for various publications, exploring a broad range of topics from Borges and Borromini to Aztec art and British modernist sculpture.

While Munoz found his curatorial work rewarding in some ways, the small fees he earned left him constantly broke. He supplemented his income with odd jobs, including briefly working as an assistant to Mario Merz, who was in Madrid at the time. Eventually, Munoz abandoned curating and returned to art-making. He produced a series of smallish welded-steel wall reliefs and freestanding sculptures depicting highly stylized balconies and staircases, some incorporating wooden doll-like figures. Munoz's career as a sculptor was launched when these works were presented in 1984 in a well-received solo show at Galeria Fernando Vijande, a Madrid venue that showed artists such as Jannis Kounellis, Jaume Plensa, Antonio Muntadas, Chema Cobo, Jose Maria Sicilia and Susana Solano. A number of pieces from that show are included in the current retrospective. One example, If She Only Knew (1984), is an approximately 13-square-inch construction of sheet metal and wood that resembles a simple hut. The structure is raised above the floor by means Of four 5-foot-high metal legs. Gathered beneath the structure's pointed roof is a cluster of small wooden dolls with crudely carved facial features. The work encompasses a curious blend of conceptualist and post-Minimalist elements, as if a bunch of Dennis Oppenheim's puppets had taken shelter in one of Joel Shapiro's houses.

Metal wall reliefs from 1984, such as Spiral Staircase and Used Balcony (Small Balcony with Figure), are among Munoz's first studies of the balcony, a motif that preoccupied him throughout his career. In the latter work, a shallow, boxlike structure contains a crude figure made of burnt wood, which is attached to the posts of a stylized railing. The artist was interested in the balcony as an ambiguous form and a contradictory space. Neither exterior nor interior, the balcony imparts a kind of tension arising from its status as an observatory, a stage and a private place of confinement, removed from the public space of the street. He used the balcony as a means to explore in visual terms the concepts of the gaze as proposed in texts by Michel Foucault, Norman Bryson and other theorists, whose works Munoz read in depth. In a mid-'80s series of oil-stick drawings, stark balconies scrawled on colored paper suggest prisons or cages; at times they convey almost sinister or morbid implications. One of these, Untitled (Balcony with Death Notice), 1984, contains a fragment of an actual death certificate affixed to the paper.

In spite of Munoz's protests that he had no particular allegiance to Spanish culture and that his sculpture addresses almost exclusively the concerns of international art, (2) his entire output, beginning with the balconies, bears numerous unmistakably Spanish attributes. The dwarves that populate many of Munoz's works seem to have been inspired by images by Velazquez. Goya's influence is evident in the balconies, which are featured in a number of the painter's most famous works. Munoz's figures often recall the schematically rendered faces and bodies of the anxious populace in Goya's "Black Paintings" from 1820-23.

The elemental properties of Munoz's work--their muted colors and gritty textures--also closely relate to characteristics of much modern Spanish art. Certain of his pieces seem to correspond to the experiments of the El Paso group, a collective of vanguard Spanish artists active in the 1950s, '60s and '70s that included Manuel Millares, Antonio Saura, Luis Fieto, Martin Chirino and Raphael Canogar. Several of these artists co-founded an art community and an important museum of abstract art in Cuenca, a Castilian town noted for its casas colgadas or hanging houses, which feature elaborate balconies overlooking a steep ravine. In his work, Munoz shares with these artists a sense of urgency and a kind of visceral approach that conveys a feeling of existential angst.

The title of one of Munoz's most compelling early works, Minaret for Otto Kurz (1985), refers to the late Viennese art historian known for his writings on Islamic art. Here, placed on one corner of an antique Muslim prayer rug, is a nearly 4-foot-high welded iron tripod, topped by a small round platform complete with a rough-hewn railing. Suggesting a tower in old Granada that was used to watch over a Moorish realm, the piece evokes medieval Spain's rich Islamic culture and heritage.

Minaret for Otto Kurz is a prelude to the artist's large-scale 1986 installations, "Hotel Declercq I-IV" and The Wasteland. The former works are part of a series of small iron balconies, shallow wall-mounted reliefs hung in irregular groupings about 8 feet from the floor. Interspersed among the balconies are tall, narrow signs reading "hotel," the letters in vertical rows. Visitors come upon these sculptures as if strolling along a city sidewalk. The Wasteland contains two elements, one being a geometric, trompe l'oeil-patterned linoleum tile floor, which, in its rigorous and modular simplicity, seems to refer to certain Carl Andre sculptures. A large bronze doll seated alone on a low shelf at the far end of the room resembles a ventriloquist's puppet. At once a hallucinogenic vision and a comic farce, this piece marks the beginning of the kind of absurdist theater found in many of Munoz's subsequent and increasingly ambitious works.

Dwarves are the protagonists in two major installations from 1988, The Prompter and Dwarf with Three Columns, which are among the highlights of the retrospective. Nearly filling one gallery at the Hirshhorn, the former work involves a construction like a small stage. Raised several feet off the floor by metal supports, the empty platform is covered with geometric-patterned linoleum tiles. Visitors face the stage like audience members. One can see the backs of the legs of a resin dwarf whose upper torso and head are encased in a small gray booth at the front of the stage; there, presumably, he could help performers remember their lines. A large bronze drum leaning against the wall at the rear of the stage symbolizes perhaps a performance that has just ended, or one set to begin.

Although he was an avid reader of Beckett and Pirandello and often referred to their works, particularly the Italian playwright's Six Characters in Search of an Author, Munoz was not a devoted theatergoer. While he achieved theatrical effects and a sense of a narrative in many pieces, he eschewed notions of character or plot. Movement, sound and dialogue are integral to a number of his pieces, including a group of kinetic and audio works from the mid-'90s. The simplest, Elevator (1996), is a mechanized metal box, open at one end, that moves up and down on a tall and narrow metal framework. Perhaps a pun on Minimalist sculpture, this piece is a precursor to the large-scale elevators he installed at the Tate Modern last year.

Living in a Shoe Box (for Konrad Fischer), 1993-95, consists of a motorized shoe box that runs back and forth along tracks raised about 9 feet off the ground and hugging three sides of the gallery. Inside the box one can see the upper torsos and heads of two small, beige, puppetlike figures. Stuttering Piece (1993) features two crudely rendered beige dolls seated in chairs leaning against a wall. They wear stiff uniforms like miniature versions of Joseph Beuys's gray felt suits. An audio track repeats a bickering dialogue: "What did you say?/I didn't say anything./You never say anything./No./But you keep coming back to it." It recalls the absurdist banter of a Beckett play. Although this work is the only one in the survey with prerecorded sounds, it hints at the more elaborate audio pieces that Munoz produced throughout his career. He achieved considerable success with radio programs broadcast in the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe, working in collaboration with writer John Berger and musicians Gavin Bryars and Alberto Iglesias.

Munoz's bronze and resin figures are never individualistic; instead, they are schematic and impersonal, like those in certain Giacometti groupings. Right from the start, Munoz said that his figures were conceptual and not based on reality. (3) He chose facial and body types removed from his own realm of experience to avoid any hint of autobiographical reference. A large number of pieces, for instance, have Asian features; their physiognomies were based on a Belgian Art Nouveau bust that he found in a flea market. Munoz often referred to his figures as Chinese statues. For him, the term "statue" connotes an inherent theatricality, while a "sculpture" implies a more personal and individualistic expression. (4)

Dwarf with Three Columns seems to be an homage to the Baroque period. Here, a dwarf stands beside three twisted Bernini-esque columns nearly 8 feet tall. Lacking the political and religious rhetoric of Baroque art, however, Munoz's vision is more akin to existentialism; his work is immersed in a mood of melancholy and doubt. Nowhere is this feeling more evident than in the series of 18 large, black-and-white chalk images known as the "raincoat drawings," since the supports are made of black vinyl raincoat fabric. Devoid of figures, these cheerless scenes of empty living rooms, bedrooms and stairwells could be set designs for a film noir production that was never realized.

Another stark and enigmatic group of works is the wall-hung "banisters," minimalist wood pieces from the late 1980s that resemble oddly shaped hand railings. Some of these highly polished pieces, such as De Sol a Sol (From Sun to Sun), 1990, and Banister (1991), run along the wall in sensuous curves; others have sharp angles, such as I Saw It in Marseilles (1987), spanning the corner of one room. Like the "raincoat drawings," they imply but do not depict a human presence.

In 1996, Munoz was invited by three museums to create separate, large-scale installations for Madrid, New York and Santa Fe. The success of these works, appearing over a two-year period, secured the artist's reputation. The first, Square (Madrid), 1996, installed in the Palacio de Velazquez near the Prado, consists of a group of 31 near-life-size Chinese figures, made of khaki-painted resin. Arranged in a loose circle, wearing identical Mao-era uniforms, with shaved heads and sardonic smiles on their faces, the figures seem to be part of either a benign congress or a sinister conspiracy. Recalling the famous third-century warriors excavated from a tomb near Xi'an, China, these figure types appear in a number of Munoz's works of the 1990s.

For New York's Dia Center for the Arts, he produced A Place Called Abroad (1996), a vast environment in wood, with figures and architectural details in resin and metal. Organized by Dia curator Lynne Cooke, the exhibition, which remained on view for more than nine months, might be described as a kind of miniature town within the museum, through which visitors could wander. Corridors, like darkened city streets, opened rain places to reveal miniature plazas, mazelike alleys or other phobic enclosures. Individuals or groups of waist-high figures some of these dimly lit spaces. The hushed and eerie atmosphere out the installation recalled that of de Chirico's Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914), a painting that Munoz greatly admired.

One of the most haunting and best-known parts of the Dia installation, Five Seated Figures, is included in the retrospective. In this work, a central figure seated in an armchair is flanked by two other identical figures. The center figure turns his head to gaze into a large mirror hanging on the wall behind him. Coming upon this smaller-than-life-size grouping, one seems to be viewing the scene from above, as if from a balcony. A hint of conspiracy and intrigue permeates the piece. Does it signify a group of conspirators, terrorists, military strategists or corporate trustees? One can never know.

Munoz reworked and elaborated upon the Dia Center installation for "Streetwise," a 1998 exhibition at SITE Santa Fe, organized by SITE's director Louis Grachos. He added new works for the show, several of which are included in the current survey. Toward the Corner (1998), for instance, shows a group of nearly life-size, smiling and laughing Chinese figures seated on bleachers facing a corner of the gallery. Moving toward the corner, the viewer suddenly has the unsettling feeling that he or she is the butt of the joke. Another sculpture, Loaded Car (1998), is quieter in tone. This work features a 24-by-60-by-20-inch welded-steel passenger vehicle turned on its side. Instead of seats and a dashboard, the car's interior is outfitted with miniature architectonic structures featuring an intricate and delicately wrought spiraling staircase and labyrinthine corridors.

Displayed alone in the last room of the retrospective, Loaded Car is the show's perfect denouement. However, with its dark recesses filled with incongruous and complex tableaux, the work in some ways constitutes a preamble to Double Bind, the enormous installation that was on view at the Tate Modern from June 12, 2001 to Mar. 1, 2002. Occupying two floors--the lobby and the lower lobby--of the museum's 36,000-square-foot Turbine Hall, the piece featured two empty glass elevators that slowly and continuously ran between the levels. On the upper floor, visitors were restricted to a passageway, but they could look out over a vast, empty, geometric-patterned floor of pale, polished wood interrupted by dark nested squares that suggest depth. While some of the apparent recesses proved to be panels with trompe l'oeil designs, 12 of them were actual cut-throughs leading to the lower level. There, in dimly lit spaces, between the upper lobby's floor surface and the lower lobby's ceiling, the artist installed, in the corners and frames of the shaft ways, groups of half-scale figures positioned in intricate urban street scenes rendered in metal, wood and resin. Some of these tableaux were illuminated by hidden artificial lights, others by natural light streaming through the shafts from the skylights of the upper level. Like explorers in a strange land, visitors to the lower lobby were rewarded with an exhilarating sense of discovery as they came upon these half-hidden scenes.

The Tate installation was in many ways the culmination of Munoz's most thoroughly developed themes. Not long before his death, however, he produced a group of works that seem to hint at a new direction. Several of these pieces were included in Munoz's last New York gallery exhibition, at Marian Goodman in 1999, but are unfortunately absent from the retrospective. Among them, Crossroads Cabinet October (1999) is a large glass cabinet whose dozen shelves are stocked with neat rows of figurines and miniature casts in translucent resin of mundane and explicitly gendered objects, such as handbags, high-heeled shoes and hand-cream tubes. The work suggests a narrative, although the artist provides only the barest clues. Dominating the New York exhibition was a group of large, standing "Blotter Figures," abstracted personages made of gray-painted resin furrowed to resemble padded material like that of fencing outfits. These ghostly figures strike various animated poses. One of them holds a long stick; it suggests a blind man. Another, leaning against the wall, holds a silvery, mechanized globe. Apparently mesmerized by the spinning orb, this otherworldly creature might be a stand-in for the artist himself. One can imagine him, like a character in a Borges story, as a denizen of a parallel universe contemplating yet another alternate reality.

(1.) The first exhibition, "Correspondencias: 5 arquitectos, 5 escultores," opened in October 1982 at the Palacio de las Alhajas in Madrid and traveled to the Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao. The show included works by Frank Gehry, Eduardo Chillida, Peter Eisenman and Mario Merz, among others. The second show, "La imagen del animal: Arte prehistorico, arte contemporaneo," featured works by Joseph Beuys, Jannis Kounellis, Jaume Plensa, Per Kirkeby, Malcolm Morley and Juliao Sarmento, displayed alongside prehistoric artifacts and works of art. It opened at the Casa del Monte, Madrid, in December 1983 and traveled to the Fundacio "la Caixa" in Barcelona.

(2.) Munoz interviewed by Paul Schimmel in Juan Munoz, Hirshhorn/Art Institute of Chicago exhibition catalogue, 2001, p. 149.

(3.) Ibid., p. 146.

(4.) Ibid.

"Juan Munoz" debuted at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. [Oct. 18, 2001-Jan. 13, 2002], and is now on view at the Art Institute of Chicago [Sept. 14-Dec. 8, 2002]. It will appear early next year at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston [Jan. 24-Mar. 30, 2003], and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles [May 4-July 27, 2003]. The show is accompanied by a 228-page catalogue with texts by Neal Benezra, Olga M. Viso and Michael Brenson, and an interview with the artist by Paul Schimmel. "Juan Munoz: Double Bind" appeared at the Tate Modern, London [June 12, 2001-Mar. 10, 2002].

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