Ron Mueck
Until October 8, RSA Building

Thread
Until September 9; Ingleby Gallery

Since the grand, airy galleries of the RSA were refurbished three years ago, the National Galleries of Scotland have used the space only for shows of historical painting: Titian, Monet, Landseer, and the high-density jumble of last year’s Choice exhibition. The venue operates on a time-share basis with its historical occupants – the RSA, the SSA and other societies – who regularly show contemporary art. But these exhibitions, in line with academy shows of yore, favour a jumble-sale aesthetic which is itself historic.

With Ron Mueck comes a different kind of exhibition altogether. Ten monumental works fill seven generous rooms, the space taken up as much with the resin figures’ distant gazes as with their actual physical presence.

If a total of ten works seems like a poor return on the £6.00 ticket price, consider last year’s Ron Mueck show in Paris, where just five exhibits attracted a record-breaking audience of 110,000. Size does matter, and whether his human figures are larger than life, or disconcertingly small, their emotional power is intensified as a result.

Australian-born Mueck has only called himself an artist for the last ten years. Before that, he worked in Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, the model workshop responsible for the Muppets. His training has enabled Mueck to make human figures with incredible attention to detail; his oversized, gangly teenager is beautifully observed, from the pinkness of her eyes to the cold dapple of her pink and yellow skin.

Though all his super-real characters look as if they were, like Duane Hanson’s Tourists, cast from human beings, Mueck’s approach is more deeply embedded in artistic tradition. His figures, often imagined, are sketched and modelled in clay before he makes the final version in polyester resin, inserting real human hair, pore by pore.

While Hanson’s human replicas are socially incisive, Mueck’s examine the broader human condition. Often naked, his pallid figures are awkward, anxious, and vulnerable. They are seen at key stages in their lives, from the monstrous new-born baby to the miniature middle-aged man adrift in a weathered old rowing boat.

These are sculptures in a long artistic tradition; here are the ages of man for a new generation. Completely accessible, Mueck strips away fashion and resists stylistic cul-de-sacs, to leave us with ten incredibly poignant reminders of our own mortality.

While Mueck’s intentions are easily grasped, the festival show at Ingleby Gallery presents much more of a challenge. The thread that runs through the esoteric selection of works, according to the blurb, is the “idea of the presence of things”.

How fate was tempted: during the first week of the show two works simply failed to be present. John McCracken’s sculpture was detained in customs (you can just imagine the customs officers’ suspicion of the big, expensive, blue plank), and Richard Wright’s gold leaf drawing, expiring in July’s tropical weather, was whisked into conservation.

As a result of the upheaval, Carl André’s tiny copper floor-pieces migrated around the front gallery faster than a hungry spider, and on each of my three visits Ninth Cu Prime was to be found nestling nervously against a different wall. In that sense at least, the presence (or otherwise) of things was only too clear.

Ingleby Gallery is not the sort of place that indulges in spoon-feeding, so you’re left to discover the elusive thread for yourself. If you rely wholly on your response to the works themselves, you’ll be scunnered, because the dialogue largely takes place outside the gallery walls, in the wider preoccupations of the artists in question.

That John McCracken thinks of his plank-like sculptures as abstract thoughts made out of pure colour is not something which you might intuitively pick up on. That Alexander Calder is famous for his mobiles is not something you would glean from his charming film of 1931. You have to know your 20th century art to worship at the Ingleby temple.

Other works engage you more directly. Cornelia Parker’s magical installation is like a figment of your imagination, projected in mid-air. Smith/Stewart’s cardboard projection, filling up the whole back gallery, slides between two-dimensionality and three, totally in charge of your movement through the room.

David Batchelor’s illuminated bleach bottles look tame in the gallery, compared with the subterranean seduction of his two offsite installations at the old Royal High School. There, the exuberant colours shine bright against the sooty black stone of the gated cloisters.

From Batchelor’s urban polychromes to the dancing stripes of Davenport’s poured painting; unadulterated, domestically available colour is the thread. There are numerous ways to connect one work to another in the show, but none which links them all at once. Whether or not you can connect them intellectually, the objects just look plain awkward around each other. And that would explain why André’s copper blocks never did get settled in.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 13.08.06