... In reality, newborn babies are neither beautiful nor ugly. Their parents don't love them because they are pretty, but because they are the mother and father of this touching, fragile, shapeless creature that has just survived a gruelling journey, perilous to mother and child, into the outside world.
But an image of a newborn the size of a small whale is conspicuously ugly. The very dimensions of the object negate its essential nature, and turn the small and the fragile into the monstrous.
The human body has a proper proportion, at which we respond to it as fully human: as Gulliver's Travels so memorably demonstrated, and as Mueck's models here amply confirm, the oversized is grotesque and the miniature is merely quaint.
But as already suggested, it is more than a matter of mere ugliness. ...
Christopher Allen
LARGER THAN LIFE
Ron Mueck
National Gallery of Victoria until 18 April
Person(s) regard
Man On Cube Seeks Ideal Man/Woman
Yesterday upon this square
I saw a babe who wasn't there...
I saw a babe who wasn't there...
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something ...
LOGOS/HA HA