Juan Munoz
According to curator Neal Benezra’s essay in the excellent catalog, the 1984 Spiral Staircase was the first sculpture Munoz felt was “really his own.” A wall-mounted miniature in dark iron, it has curvy, ornate, almost witchy lines. The staircase leads to a balcony with a railing, which immediately suggests a somewhat disturbing human presence: for reasons unknown, some tiny person will climb the staircase to look down on us. While a clean, glossy, straight-edged minimalist version of this piece would be about the purity of ideal architectural forms, the small irregularities in Munoz’s suggest particular if unknowable stories.
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A similar effect is produced by the four balconies of Hotel Declerq I-IV (1986), mounted high on the wall. The ornate lines of the balconies and the accompanying “hotel” sign suggest that a figure will emerge–Munoz’s pieces seem suspended in time just before some decisive action. But the clues are so sparse that the same viewer might complete the story in different ways on different viewings. The balconies might evoke nostalgia, especially in Americans who admire the older architecture of Europe. On the other hand, the drawing Untitled (Balcony With Fire) (1984), which shows one side of a balcony consumed by flames, is consistent with the vague dread these hovering forms evoke.
The viewer is invited to participate even more explicitly in the large installation Many Times (2000). Fifty short figures with vaguely Chinese features are installed on the second floor above the Art Institute’s grand stairway, some on each of the balcony’s four sides and a few on a landing. Benezra notes that Munoz, recognizing “that Western eyes are often unaccustomed to distinguishing specific Asian facial characteristics…exploited this inability…in his ongoing effort to ‘depersonalize’ his sculptures.” And to Western viewers, these figures do feel very homogeneous and “other,” almost a joke on the cliche of oriental inscrutability. Each stands and gestures differently, however. Caught in midact, the figures are too lifelike to seem frozen forever; perhaps they’re from a universe in which one of our seconds lasts a day or a week. Mingling with museum visitors in this high-traffic location, they seem visitors from some other world–but look at the figures long enough and real viewers, with their different ways of dressing, sometimes purposeless movements, and idle chatter, are the ones who start to seem “other.” (This may be Munoz’s little joke on the pointless, random way most of us, at one time or another, have wandered around a museum.) The figures at least seem to know what they’re about even if we don’t.
