Juan Mu%26ntilde;oz made no attempt to convince us that these are real people, not sculptures, except by providing one figure with a mechanism beneath his silicon skin to work his lips.Even so, I feel implicated in this dramatic scenario, called Shadow and Mouth, not just a spectator to it. Mu%26ntilde;oz was my closest friend, and I watched many of his works being made and installed. But my awareness of the work’s artifice and construction, the fact that these figures are a matter of materials and method, does not diminish their impact for me - rather the opposite.It would be simplistic to regard this somewhat sinister tableau, which comes towards the end of Tate Modern’s retrospective, as being related to the fact that Mu%26ntilde;oz grew up in Madrid while Franco was still running the country. “I would have had a more repressive childhood,” Mu%26ntilde;oz once told me, “if I’d been sent to an English public school.” In any case, while inescapably a Madrile%26ntilde;o, Mu%26ntilde;oz resisted being burdened with the stereotypical cliches of Spanish art. For the generation of Spanish and Portuguese artists emerging in the 1970s and 80s, the real problem was one of international visibility and recognition. The art world was smaller then, and there was no internet. Mu%26ntilde;oz came from the wrong side of the Pyrenees, and so he travelled.He studied first in London and then New York; he lived for a while in Sweden and Rome. As the demands of his career became more intense, he was always on the move; airline tickets were his bookmarks. For one so vocal and driven, there was much silence and stillness in his art, and he talked of the spectator as being an immobile actor on an empty stage.Once, we were in a New York taxi, speeding past the Rockefeller Centre, when Mu%26ntilde;oz turned and said: “What this city needs is an afternoon call, like in a Muslim city. At three every afternoon there could be a call, and everyone would stop and look up for one minute.” It was as if his art could provide a kind of antidote to motion sickness. His ballerinas, sunk up to their waists on their bowl-like bases, tilt and turn but have nowhere to go. His large groups of figures reciprocate glances and gestures, but are trapped even within their apparent liveliness, their inexpressive laughter. Standing between three fluted columns, a dwarf made of the same terracotta as the columns themselves waits, and goes on waiting. Mu%26ntilde;oz’s figures outstare us and never blink. This is always a condition of the sculpted figure, but one that Mu%26ntilde;oz turned into a potent image.Pressed about whether the stasis of his figures had anything to do with Samuel Beckett, he once angrily replied: “My work is about a man in a room, waiting for nothing; it has no relation to Beckett.” Except, of course, it did. He frequently disavowed the idea that his work had anything to do with stage scenography, but at the same time described himself as a detached observer of the works he had created, like a man wandering the set after the theatre had emptied for the night.We were on our way in the New York cab to the Dia Art Foundation, where on the second floor of a large warehouse he was installing an indoor, twilit street of blind windows and closed shutters, false doorways and walls, giving on to fake courtyards and unsettling, inhabited rooms, among which was Shadow and Mouth, the two seated, spotlit figures now at Tate Modern. This installation, A Place Called Abroad, was like a film set, but the only movie ever made there was some impromptu footage of a dog who had wandered in and padded along Mu%26ntilde;oz’s fake street, and, seeming to know exactly where he was going, turned a corner and disappeared.The Dia Foundation installation anticipated Double Bind, Mu%26ntilde;oz’s Unilever project for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, in London, which opened in the summer of 2001. Late that August, buoyed by the success of Double Bind, and taking a break from finalising arrangements for an American mid-career survey show due to open in Washington DC that October, Mu%26ntilde;oz died, while on holiday in Ibiza with his family, following a stomach haemorrhage. He was 48. The Washington show suddenly became a posthumous retrospective.Mu%26ntilde;oz’s work presents curators with a number of difficulties. He was hugely productive, and frequently made several versions and variations of works. Having far more ideas than he could execute, many exist only as folders of notes. Reconfiguring sculptures and tableaux for the spaces they came to inhabit, Mu%26ntilde;oz had a real talent for installation, and it is impossible to duplicate his exacting choreography of the relationships between his figures, between the figures and the space, between us and them. It was through this dynamic that his works came alive and found their meaning. He made the placement of an object, whether it was a drum pierced by a pair of scissors, or an iron balcony screwed high on a blank wall, really count. To keep things fresh and alive, full of the surprise of confrontation (both for himself, and for us), Mu%26ntilde;oz treated works as material to be revisited according to circumstance. Making exhibitions of Mu%26ntilde;oz without Mu%26ntilde;oz, as I did for a show in New York in 2006, one is very aware of his absence.As with all retrospectives, it is necessary to tell a story through the work, and sometimes the best examples are unavailable. The Tate show does not include Mu%26ntilde;oz’s last major work, the derailed, rusted steel model of the French TGV high-speed train, in whose shadowy, piled-up compartments are city squares, a tree, balconies. Instead, we have a small version of an earlier overturned car, whose seats and passengers have been replaced by a turn in a city street, a shadowy and uneasy corner of Madrid. Only an infant crawling by, or an adult prepared to get down on hands and knees, is likely to notice this strange world inside the car. The train will be in Bilbao, when the show travels there, and there is a chance Double Bind might be reinstalled in Spain.But whatever one misses, there is still enough here to catch one’s breath. There is The Prompter (1998), a dwarf standing under a cowling at the edge of a low stage, at whose rear is a large drum. We are kept at the threshold, unable to act. There are the series of tall bathroom cabinets, filled with flick-knives and grimacing mouths, pots of toiletries, gaping makeup bags and little models of the artist, leaning against the wall and staring at his wife as she lipsticks her mouth in a bathroom mirror. This is a rare autobiographical image. He looks at her; we look at them both, and wonder what we are being told and not told.Walking into Mu%26ntilde;oz’s 1986 tableau The Wasteland, in which a bronze ventriloquist’s dummy is seated on a little shelf above an optically patterned floor, we are aware of having entered the territory of the sculpture itself. What is really disconcerting is the thought that our presence has been somehow incorporated into the work, and that we have taken our place, as it were, inside the image. There is a pleasure, too, in watching others make their way with trepidation across this space, which has three possible doorways by which to approach or leave.One door takes us into the show’s largest space, where Many Times, a crowd of more than 100 grimacing figures with Asiatic features mill about the room. Each is unique, though all their faces - cast from a Belgian ceramic art nouveau bust, yet also having expressions reminiscent of the 17th-century Austrian artist Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s Character Heads - are the same. The repetition renders their expressions meaningless (rather like words repeated over and over). Walking among these grey, slightly less than life-size figures, it is we who feel other and strange, observed and insubstantial. Mu%26ntilde;oz, who often talked of “the condition of presence” in his art, makes us aware of it by making us feel, paradoxically, on the verge of disappearance.He insisted that his figures were sculptures, not people. “They’re zero,” he told me, “in the same sense that the minimalists, and other modern artists used the square and the cube as a zero reference, and then they could make a longer rectangle, a black rectangle, a shorter rectangle, two rectangles next to each other, and so on.” He felt the human figure had an equal potential, and could be dealt with without getting into the expressionistic aspects of the representation. The figure, for Mu%26ntilde;oz and for a number of European and American artists of his generation, became a way of opening up sculpture - after minimalism, after conceptualism, after arte poveraBut it would be a mistake to see this as any sort of plea for humanist values, or an appeal to sculptural tradition. Thinking of his work in terms of images as much as objects and form, Mu%26ntilde;oz never felt himself entirely a sculptor. Uneasiness and a sense of displacement permeate his work. He turned this to great advantage, and it became a sort of metaphor, in his discussion of place and presence, the spectator and the artwork. This estrangement also allowed him to investigate other ways of working - with composers and writers, producing prose works, spoof lectures and works for radio, which, he said, was the territory of the imagination.Mu%26ntilde;oz could be inspired by someone else’s art, by something witnessed on the street, a chance remark, the minor paintings of a 20th-century Spanish expressionist, an incident in a novel, a baroque church in Rome, the storytellers in the great square in Marrakech. They all find their places in his generous art, and we alongside them: without the spectator, the work is incomplete.%26middot; Juan Mu%26ntilde;oz: A Retrospective is at Tate Modern from Thursday until April 27. Details: 020-7887 8888.
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