FINAL COMPILED THESIS

An Uncanny Art: The Hyperrealist Sculpture of Ron
Mueck

Elli Walsh
Bachelor of Art Theory (Hons.)
2013
School of Art History & Art Education, COFA UNSW

CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY

I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of
my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by
another person, nor material which to a substantial extent has been
accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any
other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made
in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom
I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the
thesis.

I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of
my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the
project’s design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic
expression is acknowledged.

Signed…………………………………………………

i
An Uncanny Art: The Hyperrealist Sculpture of Ron Mueck

While popular with the gallery‐going public, the hyperrealistic sculpture
of contemporary Australian artist Ron Mueck rarely attracts the attention
of prominent visual art theorists. This art theoretical neglect seems to
hinge on the microscopic verisimilitude of Mueck’s figurative sculptures,
for while some art critics venerate the virtuosity of his technique others
diagnose his hyperreal style as populist and conceptually impoverished.

This study forges a nexus between Mueck’s oeuvre and Sigmund Freud’s
psychoanalytic theory of the uncanny in order to ascribe deeper
conceptual import to the artist’s work. Employing Freud’s renowned
concept of ‘the return of the repressed,’ as well as his ideas about how the
(con)fusion of categorical divisions between the familiar and foreign, the
real and imaginary triggers uncanny feeling, I examine how Mueck’s art
generates uncanniness on two distinct levels. Firstly, I investigate how
certain formal, aesthetic and symbolic aspects of the works cultivate
uncanny feeling in the spectator. The second stratum of uncanniness in
Mueck’s work is tied to a much broader socio‐cultural field, inhabiting the
vicissitudes of the human body in contemporary posthuman culture. I will
argue that Mueck’s oeuvre can be read as a reaction to and a reflection of
the technologised, progressively unnatural being that is the posthuman
subject, carving an uncanny space wherein the familiar and unfamiliar, the
natural and the artificial, are in constant communion.

Two key aims have motivated this project. First, I sought to investigate
possible reasons for my own fascination with Mueck’s hyperrealist
sculpture, an attraction to his work echoed by its popularity with the
gallery‐going public. I also aimed to develop new knowledge on the work
of a contemporary artist who has achieved a relatively high profile in the
international art world but whose practice has received little serious or
sustained art historical and theoretical analysis.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To my parents, for being beacons of support – not only this year but
throughout my entire life.

To my brother, for always offering thesis advice despite the
incomparability between a neuroscience thesis and an art theory one.

To Toni Ross, for tolerating my deluge of emails and for being a
painstakingly precise and diligent editor and supervisor.

To my husband, most importantly, for making everything worthwhile.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION      1

CHAPTER 1: The Uncanny Aesthetic of Mueck’s Hyperrealism   10

1.1 Human and Inhuman, Real and Unreal: The Ontological
Ambivalence of Mueck’s Sculpture       14

1.2 Dolls and Death: The Dark Side of Mueck’s Uncanny Art    27

CHAPTER 2: Mueck’s Art as a Response to the Cultural Uncanny of the
Posthuman    37

2.1 Retreating from the Posthuman: Mueck’s Uncanny Incarnations
of the Repressed Natural Body    39

2.2 Mueck’s Sculpture as an Embodiment of the (Post)Human    54

CONCLUSION      60

ILLUSTRATIONS    62

WORKS CITED    75

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1. Ron Mueck, Wild Man, 2005, polyester resin, fibreglass, silicone,
aluminium, wood, horse hair, synthetic hair, ed. 1/1, 285 x 162 x 108 cm.
Tate/National Galleries Scotland.

Fig. 2: Duane Hanson, Tourists, 1970, polyester resin and fibreglass,
painted in oil, and mixed media, Man 152 x 80.5 x 31 cm; Woman 160 x 44
x 37 cm. National Galleries of Scotland.

Fig. 3: Ron Mueck, Spooning Couple, 2005, polyester resin, fibreglass,
silicone, synthetic hair, 116.5 x 104 x 79 cm. Tate/National Galleries
Scotland.

Fig. 4: Ron Mueck, Boy, 1999, polyester resin, fibreglass, wood, steel,
cotton, ed. 1/1. 490 x 490 x 240 cm. ARoS Museum, Denmark.

Fig. 5. Ron Mueck, Ghost, 1998, Aluminium, fibreglass, silicone rubber,
polyurethane foam, polyester resin, acrylic fibre and fabric, 201.9 x 64.8 x
99.1 cm. Tate Collection, United Kingdom.

Fig. 6. Ron Mueck, Baby, 2000, polyester resin, fibreglass, synthetic hair,
ed. 1/1, 26 x 12.1 x 5.3 cm. Private collection, New York.

Fig. 7. Ron Mueck, Dead Dad, 1996–1997, silicone, polyurethane, styrene,
synthetic & real hair, ed. 1/1, 20 x 38 x 102 cm. Stefan T. Edlis Collection,
Chicago.

Fig. 8. Ron Mueck, Shaved Head, 1998, silicone, polyurethane, aluminium
wire, synthetic hair, ed. 1/1, 49.5 x 36.7 x 83.8 cm. Hoffman Collection,
Berlin.

Fig. 9. Ron Mueck, Youth, 2009, silicone, polyurethane, steel, synthetic
hair, ed. 1/1, fabric, 65 x 28 x 16 cm. Anthony d’Offray Collection, London.

Fig. 10. Amerighi da Caravaggio, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, 1601‐02,
oil on canvas, 107 x 146 cm. Sanssouci, Potsdam

Fig. 11. Ron Mueck, Still Life, 2009, silicone, polyurethane, aluminium,
feathers, stainless steel, nylon rope, ed. 1/1, 218 x 91 x 60 cm. Anthony
d’Offray Collection, London.

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Fig 12. Ron Mueck, Pregnant Woman, 2002, polyester resin, fibreglass,
silicone, aluminium, synthetic hair, ed. 1/1, 252 x 73 x 68.9 cm. National
Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

Fig. 13. Ron Mueck, Mother and Child, 2001, polyester resin, fibreglass,
silicone, synthetic hair, 24 x 89 x 30cm, ed. 1/1. Bayerische
Staatsgemaeldesammlungen, Munich.

1
INTRODUCTION

Naked, a giant man sits on a wooden stool in the center of a gallery space.
His gargantuan body is carpeted with a jungle of dark hair, which gathers
in a tangled heap on his head and flows copiously from his chin. With his
uncivilised appearance – from the filth in his toenails to the knots in his
beard – this untamed giant brings to mind the mythical ‘wild man’ figure
of Western culture, and it seems that at any moment he could storm out of
the room with the force of a wild beast. And yet, the man also imparts a
strange sense of nervy anxiety that ill‐fits his savage, threatening
appearance. With a physiognomy freighted with fright, his hands clutch
the edges of the seat while his tensed body leans somewhat off the
vertical. Avoiding the scrutinising eyes of gallery visitors he stares fixedly
at an invisible object at the back of the room, and it is as though the man is
preparing to abruptly leap up and flee from these auditors who have come
to inspect him. Hovering over this uncomfortable scenario is the Romantic
trope of King Kong, for as we voyeuristically gaze at this uncivilised
spectacle of a man our own ‘inner beast’ is reflected back. Overriding such
a response, however, is the knowledge that, like King Kong, the figure
sitting before us is a fiction. It is fibreglass, and not fear, that renders the
man stiff as a statue. He, or rather it, is a remarkably realistic sculpture
and nothing more. This knowledge is acutely unsettling, for, despite a
stature that dwarfs normal human beings our ocular perception may at
first convince us that the wild man is real. From the calloused skin on his
elbows to the swelling veins on his hand, the illusion of life here is so
complete that despite our intellectual awareness of his artificiality there is
still the lingering expectation of signs of movement – the minute flicker of
an eye or the subtle exhalation of air. This conflict between what we see
and what we know, between the appearance of life and the knowledge of
lifelessness, conjures an emotion that dwells on the fringes of language
and rational explanation. It is disconcerting and mildly frightening, it
makes us feel uneasy, apprehensive and uncomfortable, and there is

2
something slightly repugnant or not quite right about the thing we see, yet
we cannot look away.

The following study will argue that such a response to Ron Mueck’s
hyperrealist sculpture – here Wild Man (2005; Fig. 1) – may be analysed
through the prism of the psychological phenomenon of the uncanny. Put
simply, the uncanny or unheimlich denotes a peculiar feeling of fear or
disconcertment triggered by something that appears simultaneously
familiar and foreign. It often creates cognitive dissonance in the
experiencing subject as they are, paradoxically, at once attracted to and
yet repulsed by the uncanny object. Though first explored by Ernst Jentsch
in his 1906 essay “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” it is through
Freud’s seminal study of 1919 that the uncanny has become a salient
thread in the fabric of psychoanalytically influenced cultural theory. The
edifice of the Freudian uncanny is built on the much‐quoted maxim ‘the
return of the repressed,’ in which repressed, once‐familiar psychic
material returns in a strange form. As Freud puts it, “the uncanny
[unheimlich] is something which is secretly familiar [heimlich‐heimisch],
which has undergone repression and them returned from it.”1 This, along
with other aspects of the uncanny, will be elaborated in the following
chapters.

Now regarded as a central text in Freud’s limited contribution to
aesthetics, “The Uncanny” can be aptly applied to a range of artistic forms.
While Freud posits realist fiction as having “more opportunities for
creating uncanny feelings than are possible in real life,” I suggest that
visual art that adopts a realist aesthetic is also a rich source of this
emotion.2 This is because the uncanny is “a remnant of a pre‐verbal and


1. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny (1919),” The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII (1917‐1919), trans. James Strachey
(London: The Hogarth Press, 1955) 245
2. Freud 251.

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unconscious dimension that language cannot fully express, and which
takes hence the shape of an undecidable, visual object.”3 This thesis will
argue that Mueck’s art – as a paragon of sculptural realism – is powerfully
freighted with uncanny affect.

***

Ronald “Ron” Mueck was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1958. The son of
German‐born toymakers, he grew up creating creatures, puppets and
costumes in his spare time, experimenting with various materials and
techniques. With no formal art training beyond high school, Mueck began
his career in 1979 as a puppet maker and puppeteer for children’s
television. In 1986 he spent time in Los Angeles working in cinema, before
moving to London to work for Jim Henson on Sesame Street, the Muppet
Show and the film Labyrinth (1986). Mueck then established his own
production company in London in 1990, manufacturing models for the
European advertising industry. His artistic career began in 1996 after
Mueck’s first sculpture Pinocchio – commissioned by his mother‐in‐law
Paula Rego – caught the attention of British art collector Charles Saatchi.
Saatchi commissioned Mueck to make a group of works for his collection
and, a year later, Mueck’s sculpture Dead Dad was included in the
exhibition ‘Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection’ at
the Royal Academy of Arts in London. This work attracted considerable
attention and catapulted Mueck into the art world. Since then, he has been
entirely devoted to his sculptural practice.4

The virtuosic arbitration between fibreglass and flesh that marks Mueck’s
art is the result of a laborious process undertaken in the studio. The artist

3. Fabio Camilletti, “’Introduction: Hauntings II: Uncanny Figures and Twilight
Zones,” Image and Narrative 13:1 (2012): 1.
4. N. a., “Biography,” Ron Mueck (Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain,
2006) 105.

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begins his process by crafting a series of small plaster maquettes after
which he sculpts the final figure in clay, incorporating microscopic details
of skin texture and expression. The figures are almost always larger or
smaller than life, and if the work is very large Mueck must first build a
metal armature, which is covered in wire mesh and plaster strips before
being enveloped in clay. When the clay sculpture is finished, it is coated in
shellac and a mould is made with silicone. Mueck then applies a layer of
gel‐coat with pigments to the mould’s interior, creating skin colour and
depth, and paints layers of fibreglass or silicone into the mould until the
required thickness and density are attained. Individual hairs are glued
into holes that have been drilled into the fibreglass of larger works, or
punched into the softer silicone surface of smaller works. Following this,
the sculpture is carefully removed from the mould and any surface seams
are polished away. Mueck then paints finer details on the ‘skin,’ such as
veins and blemishes, before finally setting the glass eyes into place.

Taxonomically, Mueck’s species of sculpture belongs to the genre of
Hyperrealism, sometimes referred to as ‘Superrealism’ or ‘Radical
realism.’ Predicated in part on the principles of Photorealism,
Hyperrealism possesses the hyperbolic clarity of a high‐resolution
photograph. The hyperrealist movement in sculpture was spearheaded by
American artist Duane Hanson who from 1966 to the late 1980s, made
hyperreal figural casts of human subjects. Hanson’s life‐sized sculptures
were cast in fibreglass from actual people, painted, and clothed with
garments from second‐hand clothing stores. His early work comprised
tableaux of socio‐political subjects such as racial violence and war, while
later sculptures focused on American ‘types,’ casting singular or paired
clichés of social class including tourists, waitresses and shoppers (Fig. 2).
Hanson’s hyperrealist aesthetic marked a significant departure from the
abstraction of modernist art, yet while many people admired the virtuosic
verisimilitude of his art others aligned it with the uninspiring figures in a
wax museum.

5
A similar critical logic of denigrating and prizing the same stylistic
qualities filters into contemporary responses to Mueck’s work. While
some commentators venerate Mueck’s technical prowess and view his
sculptures as sublime mirrors of the human condition, others charge him
with being a mere model maker, likening his figures to the lifeless
waxworks of Madame Tussauds. For example, critic Tom Lubbock sees the
works as having simple, populist appeal, much like academic art of the
nineteenth century. He declares, “Mueck’s figures carry their meaning like
a subtitle […] You get the guiding concept immediately and it's a familiar
one [...] frankly corny.”5 Here Lubbock recalls the sentiment of High
Modernism, which criticised realistic art as being artistically regressive
and too self‐evident. Similarly, in an article sardonically titled “If you like
this, you need to get out more,” Jonathon Jones adopts the skepticism
towards emotive or psychologically freighted art that marked much
postmodern art criticism, describing Mueck’s work as a “flimsy gimcrack
charade” that invokes “dumb bathos.”6 He brands the work as “brainless”
and argues, “it insists on the gut and provides the head with nothing at
all.” 7 This criticism is coded with the convention of derogating
representational sculpture’s ostensible absence of intellectual stimulation
and its ‘baser’ emotional affects, a convention that reached its apogee with
the Conceptual turn of art in the 1960s and 70s. Like proponents of
Conceptualism, Jones rejects modernist frameworks interested in
aesthetic emotion or visual appearance and venerates intellectual content,
declaring, “Art is cognitive before it is emotional."8 His response here,
along with Lubbock’s, appears to be nurtured on the residual binary of
academic and avant‐garde or experimental art that informs the modern
Western tradition of sculptural aesthetics. Such criticisms, however, are

5. Tom Lubbock qtd. in Sean O’Hagen, “Ron Mueck: From Muppets to motherhood,”
The Observer [UK], The Guardian 6 Aug, 2006.
6. Jonathan Jones, “If you like this, you need to get out more,” The Guardian, The
Guardian 9 Aug. 2006.
7. Jones 35.
8. Jones 35.

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countered by a stream of praise that flows from other responses to
Mueck’s art. One needs only to consider the record number of visitors to
the Fondation Cartier in 2005 to see how the artist’s work is popular with
the gallery‐going public. Colin Wiggins of London’s National Gallery was
astonished by the overwhelming reception of Mueck’s sculptures at the
2003 exhibition ‘Ron Mueck.’ He recalls, “It was the most amazing
response, you felt that they were confronting a sacred object.”9 For
Australian critic John McDonald, Mueck’s sculptures are so profoundly
affecting because they tap into our own subjectivity and subconscious:
“Even the most insensitive of viewers must feel that these sculptures open
a small chink in the armor of the ego.”10 This idea of opening up the ego; of
unearthing buried fragments of our psychology, is exemplified in author
Will Self’s reflection on Mueck’s sculpture In Bed (2005):

I felt faint, breathless, wanted to lie down. I realised – at the time –
that I was being simultaneously assaulted by the emotions I
experienced as a small child when I was confronted by my
chronically melancholy and bed‐bound postpartum mother,
together with my current apprehension of the extent to which
those feelings were still active in my psyche.11

Self’s response here – his apprehensiveness at the reactivation of
childhood feelings and memories – is suggestive of Freud’s basic formula
for the uncanny (the return of repressed infantile material.) It is my
argument that such an emotion colonises many responses to Mueck’s art.

***

9. Colin Wiggins qtd. in Sean O’Hagen, “Ron Mueck: From Muppets to motherhood.”
10. John McDonald, “Sculpture with the ‘wow’ factor,” Sydney Morning Herald,
Sydney Morning Herald 27 Feb. 2010.
11. Will Self, “Bigness and Littleness,” The Guardian [UK], The Guardian 28 August
2010.

7

Although, as I will demonstrate in Chapter One, numerous critical
responses to Mueck’s oeuvre either implicitly or explicitly refer to their
uncanny nature, no commentary on the artist’s work has detailed how
their subject matter, stylistic and formal features and technical means so
successfully convey uncanny affect. Margaret Iversen has suggested that
“the more something is familiar or conventional, the more it is likely to
become uncanny and disturbing.”12 This is because, according to Freud,
“the uncanny proceeds from something familiar which has been
repressed.”13 Perhaps Mueck’s art is so strikingly uncanny because it
encompasses one of the most familiar and conventional subjects of all –
the Homo sapiens.

Chapter One of this thesis presents a summary of the relatively small
corpus of art criticism written on the artist’s work, which indicates how
the aesthetic appeal of his human homologues is often described in terms
that suggest the uncanny. The chapter also elaborates ideas about the
psychological economy of the uncanny developed in formative texts on
this topic by Freud and Jentsch, as well as more recent accounts of the
uncanny by cultural theorists such as Masahiro Mori, Anneleen
Masschelein and Claudia Peppel. In this chapter I demonstrate how
uncanny feeling fostered by Mueck’s sculptures is intimately linked to
their hyperrealist style, in combination with other formal characteristics
including distortions of scale and anatomical proportion. Here, I argue
that Mueck’s ultra realistic style revokes categorical divisions, such as
those that separate the familiar from the foreign; the real from the
imaginary, and it is the ensuing ontological ambivalence of the sculptures
that causes cognitive confusion in the viewer and triggers the uncanny. I
also align Mueck’s work with Jentsch’s claim that cognitive uncertainty

12. Margaret Iversen, “Uncanny: The Blind Field in Edward Hopper,” Beyond
Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State UP, 2007) 22.
13. Freud 247.

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about whether an object is animate or inanimate may function as a
powerful trigger of uncanny feeling. The final section of Chapter One
extends Freud’s remarks about dolls as ciphers of the uncanny, which
hark back to repressed childhood memories or experiences, as well as his
idea that death and its associations are powerful triggers of uncanniness
because they tap into repressed fears dating from human prehistory. I
discuss the doll‐like appearance of some of Mueck’s works and the
psychically disturbing proximity between life and lifelessness conjured by
the artist’s early sculpture Dead Dad through the prism of these
speculations.

In Chapter Two I situate Mueck’s work within a much broader socio‐
cultural field, considering it as a response to what contemporary
commentators describe as the era of the ‘posthuman’ subject. Advances in
science and technology are fueling the contemporary landscape of
posthumanity, wherein previously established boundaries between the
human body as biological organism and as synthetic construct are
dissolving more rapidly and saliently than in previous phases of
modernity. This progressive dissolution of familiar constructs of human
embodiment generates collective existential anxieties regarding the
ontological configuration of the Homo sapiens. In this chapter, I propose
that Mueck taps into a collectively experienced ‘cultural uncanny’ linked
to the techno‐scientific complex of contemporary times by creating figures
that vacillate between the human and the inhuman, the natural and the
artificial. On the one hand, his ultra‐realistic human clones seem to
confirm contemporary visions of the posthuman where technologised,
artificially enhanced bodies are becoming the norm, while on the other
hand Mueck’s anthropocentric preoccupation with the corporeal
dimensions of human bodies suggests a retreat from posthumanity.

Throughout this study I employ Freud’s speculations on the uncanny as a
conceptual anchor, while supplementing these with a variety of secondary
writings on the uncanny particularly focused on art and contemporary

9
culture. This thesis also analyses a range of responses to Mueck’s art by
art critics, art theorists and curators in order to explain how uncanniness
is conjured by Mueck’s works and why this is significant in the
contemporary cultural context. Additionally, close formal and conceptual
analyses of selected works by the artist inform my argument that an
understanding of Mueck’s sculptural practice is enhanced by investigation
of the different modalities of uncanniness it unleashes. Finally, by treating
Mueck’s art as complex and intriguing both theoretically and aesthetically,
I have hoped to counter the conclusions of those critics who dismiss his
art as shallow gimmickry, artistically conservative or mindless.

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1: THE UNCANNY AESTHETIC OF MUECK’S HYPERREAL
HUMANOIDS

Early twenty‐first century artistic hyperrealism has been described as
conjuring illusions of reality so precise and meticulous that they exceed
the ‘real’ as such. Barbara Maria Stafford defines hyperrealism as
“something which is artificially intensified, and forced to become more
than it was when it existed in the real world.” 1 She suggests that
magnification or exaggeration of visual appearances typifies hyperreal art,
employing as a contemporary example the large scale paintings of
American artist Chuck Close, which detail “every pore, every strand of
hair” of the portrait subjects they depict.2 For Stafford, such concentrated
magnification causes a “surplus of reality” that “perpetually deflects the
question of where is the real in its overproduction of too many or too
much, so that one is unable to make a decision.”3 Reality is hyperbolised in
a way that erases the frontier between the real and the unreal, forging a
new species of reality; a hyperreality. This idea has its roots in the
philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, who described the explosion of new media
and information technologies characteristic of postmodern society as
creating a virtual image regime of simulated reality with no causal
connection to a pre‐existing or knowable real. This “precession of
simulacra” results in “a hyperreal henceforth sheltered from […] any
distinction between the real and the imaginary.” 4 According to
Baudrillard, simulation is not a replica of reality but a hyperreality in its
own right, composed of endlessly exchangeable signs of reality with no

1. Barbara Maria Stafford, “One Step Beyond,” Tate Etc., United Kingdom: Tate
Museum Publishers (2006): 1.
2. Stafford 3.
3. Stafford 3.
4. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (USA:
University of Michigan Press, 1994) 3, 4.

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locatable referents. Artistic hyperrealism aligns with this Baudrillardian
landscape where the real and the imaginary are conflated in a way that
recalls the disturbing intersection of familiar and unfamiliar in the
Freudian uncanny.

In “The Uncanny,” Freud examines this intersection through an
etymological study of the German words heimlich and unheimlich. He
discovers that while heimlich denotes the familiar and homely it has
another lesser‐known meaning – that which is concealed, repressed and
withheld from others. For the term unheimlich, Freud has recourse to
Friedrich Schelling’s definition: “‘Unheimlich’ is the name for everything
that ought to have remained [...] secret and hidden but has come to light.”5
Thus, according to Freud, unheimlich is a sub‐species of heimlich, for what
is heimlich (familiar and repressed) comes to be unheimlich (unfamiliar
and revealed). The uncanny is, therefore, “nothing new or alien, but
something which is familiar and old‐established in the mind and which
has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.”6
Freud adds to this definition by suggesting that uncanniness can also be
triggered by the effacement of distinctions between imagination and
reality. As a result, the uncanny can be read as “a peculiar feeling of
undecidability between a set of binary oppositions,” inhabiting an
interstitial space between such polarities as familiarity and foreignness,
fact and fiction, reality and unreality.7 This definition may be extended to
artistic hyperrealism, for it is indeed such ‘undecidability’ between what is
real and what is fabricated or exaggerated that comprises the genre’s
artistic genome. Moreover, hyperrealist sculpture perhaps has the
greatest potential for generating uncanny affect, because unlike hyperreal

5. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII (1917‐1919), trans. James Strachey,
(London: The Hogarth Press, 1955) 224.
6. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 241.
7. Fabio Camilletti, “Introduction: Hauntings II: Uncanny Figures and Twilight
Zones,” Image and Narrative 13:1 (2012): 1.

12
painting this species of sculpture withdraws divisions between the
artwork and the object world. Hyperrealist sculpture is like a three‐
dimensional incarnation of a high‐resolution digital photograph, with
microscopic details rendered with such hyperbolic clarity that the
sculpture appears “more real than real,” to use Baudrillard’s words.8
Where Freud posited realist fiction as a “much more fertile province” for
the uncanny than real life because it offers an imaginative space in which
the real and the unreal can be easily conflated, I suggest that
contemporary hyperrealist sculpture is similarly apt for generating
uncanny affects.9 Our inability to distil the real from the unreal or
hyperreal unsettles our psychic equilibrium in ways that echo Freud’s
speculations in “The Uncanny,” where distinguishing between fantasy and
reality is famously problematic.10

After consulting foreign dictionaries, Freud stressed that the German
word unheimlich is not easily translatable into other languages: “many
languages are without a word for this particular shade of what is
frightening.”11 Freud uses the word “frightening” to describe uncanny
feeling, as well as synonyms such as “dread,” “horror,” “repulsion” and
“distress.”12 Because of these qualities the uncanny has been neglected in
the history of aesthetics, which conventionally focuses on “the beautiful,

8. Baudrillard 29.
10. Amongst the numerous fictional instances of the uncanny, the only concrete
‘real’ example in Freud’s paper is an autobiographical account of his repeated
unconscious return to the red‐light district in an unnamed provincial town in Italy – a
scenario recounted to exemplify how involuntary repetition underlies uncanny
experience. However this personal anecdote is so heavily furnished with literary
markers, such as the metaphoricity of language, that it seems barely distinguishable from
other fictional examples of the uncanny described by Freud. The text thus becomes
autological insofar as it is what it describes; a fusion of reality and fiction.

13
attractive and sublime.”13 Yet for Freud, the uncanny is not simply a
negative phenomenon – it is an “aesthetic emotion” that also straddles
feelings of fascination, recognition and pleasure, and this peculiarity
allows us to distinguish the uncanny from those things that are merely
frightening.14

Freud’s uncanny doctrine seems to me definitive of the interplay between
attraction and repulsion in Ron Mueck’s hyperrealist sculpture. Critical
responses to Mueck’s work radiate Freud’s idea about the relative
untranslatability of unheimlich, for they are typically freighted with
descriptive commentary straining to articulate the uncanny without
invoking the term. One critic declares, “These works are cerebral in the
way they push the envelope of unmentionables,”15 while another speaks of
Mueck’s oeuvre as an “uneasy mirror” of humanity.16 Correspondingly,
author Will Self views the sculptures as convoking a “new form of the
sublime,” 17 and Australian art critic John McDonald describes them
oxymoronically as manifesting “fascinating ugliness” and activating
feelings of “attraction and repulsion.”18 There are, nonetheless, several
commentators who nominally diagnose uncanniness as the affective crux
of Mueck’s sculpture. Brian Appleyard draws a metonymic link between
the uncanny and Mueck’s oeuvre: “Mueck's works are, indeed, uncanny.
You cannot be in a room with one and ever feel you are quite alone […] It

14. Aesthetic emotions are emotions that are felt during aesthetic activity and/or
appreciation.
15. Charissa N. Terranova, “Ron Mueck,” Art Lies: A Contemporary Art Journal iss.
55 (2007): n. pag.
16. N.a., “The Uneasy Mirror: Ron Mueck’s Super‐Freaky, Hyperrealist Sculptures,”
TIME Entertainment [US], TIME Magazine 3 May 2013
17. Will Self, “Bigness and Littleness,” The Guardian [Aus.], The Guardian 28 Aug.
2010.
18. John McDonald, “Sculpture with the ‘wow’ factor,” Sydney Morning Herald,
Sydney Morning Herald 27 Feb. 2010

14
is time for the conceptualists to stand aside and make way for the
uncanny.”19 Similarly, Susanna Greeves identifies an uncanny confusion
between animate life and inert objectivity arising from the works,
suggesting, “We indulge the fantasy that as we turn away [from the
sculptures] a feathered wing might stir, a held breath be released or an
eyelid flicker, and we feel a genuine shiver of the uncanny,”20 while Clare
Dwyer Hogg sees Mueck’s sculptures as having a “life‐like spirit” that is
“uncannily strong.”21 Regardless of whether or not the word ‘uncanny’ is
applied to Mueck’s sculptures, the small literature addressed to his art
points to the uncanny as the nucleus around which responses to his works
orbit. Yet while writings about Mueck’s oeuvre seem haunted by the
ambivalent logic of uncanny affect, there has been scant attempt to explain
its raison d’être. Commentators almost exclusively itemise experiential
effects fostered by Mueck’s sculptures without examining the etiologic
agents of such effects. In this chapter, I will elucidate certain formal
peculiarities of Mueck’s hyperrealist sculptures that render them
particularly apt for the transmission of uncanny sensation.

1.1 Human and Inhuman, Real and Unreal: The Ontological
Ambivalence of Mueck’s Hyperreal Sculpture

Like the uncanny, Mueck’s work collapses binary terms. Conjugated partly
from photographs and live models but mostly from Mueck’s imagination,
the sculptures appear at once familiar and foreign, real and fictitious. At
the beginning of his essay Freud speculates, “Something has to be added to

19. Brian Appleyerd, “Acts of Creation,” The Sunday Times [UK], The Sunday Times
15 Apr. 2012.
20. Susanna Greeves, “Ron Mueck – A Redefinition of Realism,” Ron Mueck, ed.
Heiner Bastian (Germany: Hatje, Cantz Verlag, 2003) 29.
21. Clare Dwyer Hogg, “Bodies and Soul: Ron Mueck’s way of working is as strange
as his art,” The Australian, The Australian 4 May 2013

15
what is novel and unfamiliar to make it uncanny,”22 and he soon specifies
this ‘something’ to be reality and familiarity – the constituents of heimlich.
The uncanny ‘lifeblood’ of Mueck’s works issues from a categorical
instability that threatens the normal tendency of consciousness to keep
these polarities – the familiar and the foreign – distinct.

In his catalogue essay for the exhibition ‘Ron Mueck’ at the Fondation
Cartier in 2005, Robert Rosenblum interrogates the interface between
fantasy and reality in the artist’s works. Casting Mueck in Romantic vein
as a kind of post‐modern Prometheus or “modern Frankenstein,”
Rosenblum argues that his sculpted humanoids both mirror and alienate
us.23 While on the one hand Mueck “pushes the goal of human cloning
farther than any of his colleagues, right down to each eyelash and
toenail,”24 on the other hand the unrealistic scales of the works (either
larger or smaller than life‐sized) forge an aura of fantasy that transports
the viewer into “a world of the irrational.”25 Such “uncannily flexible
dimensions,” says Rosenblum, are indebted to a pictorial and literary
tradition that dates back to legends such as Odysseus’s confrontation with
the Cyclops.26 Although Rosenblum does not discuss the uncanny per se,
his reading of Mueck’s sculptures as slipping between human and
inhuman, reality and fantasy parallels the conflation of real and unreal
noted by Freud in his analysis of the uncanny.

As implied by Rosenblum, the unusual simultaneity of familiarity and
foreignness in Mueck’s sculptures dwells in the formal paradox of their
extraordinary visual verisimilitude and unrealistic scale. Modern
materials including tinted silicone, polyester resin, fibreglass and


23. Robert Rosenblum, “Ron Mueck’s Bodies and Souls,” Ron Mueck (Paris:
Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, 2006) 50.
24. Rosenblum 54.
25. Rosenblum 68.
26. Rosenblum 71.

16
synthetic hair enable Mueck to microscopically calibrate the realism of his
figures. Each minute wrinkle, freckle and hair strategically placed to
supercharge their sense of life‐likeness, while at the same time the
sculptures’ shrunken or enlarged sizes injects such verisimilitude with an
unsettling tinge of unfamiliarity. Hence, the human form – something
familiar and intimately known to spectators – is reproduced or returns in
a manner that renders it strange, following Freud’s formulation of the
uncanny as “something which is secretly familiar [heimlich‐heimisch].”27

Art historian Rachel Wells touches on these conflicting visual effects
imparted by Mueck’s works in her recent book Scale in Contemporary
Sculpture. Wells explores the relationship between measurement and
meaning in Mueck’s “uncannily realistic” sculptures, positioning them
within a plethora of sculptural practices over the last twenty years that
have experimented with scale.28 She echoes Rosenblum’s contention that
Mueck’s works both mirror and alienate us, conceding, “miniaturisation
and enlargement in sculpture, and their obvious relation to a reproduced
recognisable reality, can create [a] powerful tool of simultaneous intimacy
and alienation.” 29 For Wells, Mueck’s exaggerations of scale causes
“tension and unease” in the spectator. 30 By upturning conventional
calibrations of scale, such as the association of miniaturisation with
intimacy, Mueck makes us feel that “something here is not quite right.”31
His sculpture Spooning Couple (2005; Fig. 3), for example, depicts a
miniaturised man, naked from the waist down, and a woman, naked from
the waist up, lying on a low plinth, their semi‐foetal poses fitting together
like spoons. Although the idea of spooned couples typically signals
intimacy and affection, there is a great psychological chasm between these


28. Rachel Wells, Scale in Contemporary Sculpture: enlargement, miniaturisation
and the life‐size (England: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2013) 38.
29. Wells 44.
30. Wells 46.
31. Wells 46.

17
two figures visualised by their glazed, open eyes staring at nothing in
particular and their expressionless, almost melancholy, facial expressions.
As a result of this incongruity between scale and symbolic convention,
Mueck’s works trigger what Wells describes as “an underlying current of
concern, of anxious, uneasy, silent discomfort”32 – suggestive of the
uncanny. Yet although Wells addresses Mueck’s manipulations of scale she
does not discuss the imbalances of anatomical proportion that partner
such manipulations. Anomalies of proportion are found in many of
Mueck’s sculptures, for example Pregnant Woman (2002) and Dead Dad
(1996‐97) possess hands and feet that are proportionally too large for
their bodies, while other works such as Shaved Head (1998) and Boy
(1999) are configured in poses that Mueck’s human models for the works
found impossible to replicate. Perhaps one of Mueck’s best‐known works,
Boy (Fig. 4) is a five‐metre high sculpture of a dark haired, pale‐skinned
adolescent male crouching on a flattened cubic slab. Dressed only in faded
khaki shorts, the boy assumes an awkward squat position with his
shoulders curved over his fully bent knees and his clasped hands resting
lightly on his head. His arms and hands are proportionally larger than his
legs and feet, and we get the feeling that if this youth were straightened
out his upper body would surely overbalance his lower half. Here, the
evolution of Homo sapiens as bipedal creatures is tacitly interrupted by
memories of our quadruped ancestors. With his face turned to one side,
the boy’s piercing dark eyes peer out at his public from the protective
cover of his shoulder. His facial expression is ambiguous, equally
suggestive of apprehension, malevolence or furtiveness.

Boy has been exhibited in a number of gallery settings, all of a necessarily
grand scale to accommodate the enormity of a figure that dominates its
surroundings. The installation of the work ensures that viewers may fully
circumnavigate the figure and apprehend parts of it in extreme close‐up,
or, if stepping back, take in one whole side of the sculpture. For example,

32. Wells 46.

18
from a child’s eye view one might only see the ultra realistic clenched toes,
clipped toenails and bluish veins of the boy’s planted feet, yet if viewed
from behind and at a distance the figure presents us with a smooth
expanse of bare back bisected by mountainous indentations of a curved
spine and prominent buttocks tightly encased by the second skin of his
shorts. Installation photographs often show gallery visitors clustered
around this baby‐faced Gulliver like curious Lilliputians, and one can
imagine spectators stationed close to the sculpture gazing up at this
looming colossus and re‐experiencing those moments in childhood when
grownups appeared as giant, omnipotent beings. Ironically in this case,
the adolescent has dramatically outgrown the adult. While deformations
of dimension are not uncommon in the history of figural sculpture –
consider Michelangelo’s colossal David and his ill‐proportioned hands –
they have never before been rendered with such fully achieved sculptural
trompe‐l'œil. This carves out an intermediary zone where binaries
collapse and the uncanny thrives, for Mueck’s sculptures are, to use
Rosenblum’s words, “so shockingly real and so shockingly unreal that, like
an unexpected trauma, [they leave] an indelible imprint.”33

The uncanny contiguity between familiarity and unfamiliarity in Mueck’s
figures feeds into notions of the uncanny collapsing the boundary between
the living and the lifeless – an idea indebted to Ernst Jentsch’s “On the
Psychology of the Uncanny.” Like Freud after him, Jentsch aligns the word
unheimlich with feelings of not being 'at home' or 'at ease.' He suggests
that if the familiar is perceived in a foreign light it can cause
disconcertment and “psychical uncertainty.” 34 For Jentsch, the most
powerful stimulus of the uncanny is cognitive uncertainty about whether
something is living or lifeless, animate or inanimate. He thus suggests that
ultra realistic replications of the human form, such as polychrome

33. Rosenblum 46.
34. Ernst Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” trans. Roy Sellars, Angelaki
2:1 (1995): 6.

19
sculpture and wax figures, are uncanny because they breach the borders
between artificial and natural life, thereby forestalling our “intellectual
mastery” of such things. 35 Significantly, Jentsch posits a reciprocity
between the degree of artistic realism achieved and the force of uncanny
sensation: “the finer the mechanism and the truer to nature the formal
reproduction, the more strongly will the special effect [uncanniness] also
make its appearance.”36 He argues that such uncanniness in art manifests
as a type of aesthetic pleasure, for "Art at least manages to make most
emotions enjoyable for us in some sense."37

In literature and theatre ambivalence about whether a character is a
human or an automaton is a reliable device for invoking the uncanny, as is
the mistaking of a lifeless object for an organic creature, and Jentsch cites
the fictions of German Romantic author E. T. A. Hoffman as exemplary of
this uncanny psychological artifice. In Hoffman’s short story The Sandman
(1816) the protagonist Nathanial believes the robotic doll Olympia to be a
real woman and this is, says Jentsch, the uncanny kernel of the story. He
also suggests that manifestations of death, such as a corpse or a skeleton,
catalyse uncanny feeling because they symptomise the close proximity
between animation and inertia, life and lifelessness that haunts human
existence.

Mueck’s works would possibly be at the top of Jentsch’s list of uncanny
objects had they existed in the early twentieth century. The visual
vacillation between reality and unreality they enact germinates an
ontological ambivalence that confounds cognitive faculties of recognition.
As Freud declared, “An uncanny effect is often and easily produced, when
the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when
something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us


35. Jentsch 4.
36. Jentsch 10.
37. Jentsch 11.

20
in reality.”38 To exemplify this, Freud recalls a story he read about a
married couple that move into a furnished house containing a curiously
shaped table with crocodile carvings on it. One evening the couple
stumble over something in the dark and ostensibly see a vague form
gliding over the stairs, leading them to believe that the table had come to
life. For Freud, this melding of the real with the fanciful triggers a
remarkable feeling of uncanniness, and indeed Mueck’s art can be seen to
have a similar effect. Even if the illusion of life in Mueck’s work holds only
for a moment – and the most realistic sculpture cannot sustain the illusion
for much longer – this is enough to unleash the uncanny. In one of his very
few interviews Mueck has said, “On one hand, I try to create a believable
presence; and, on the other hand, they have to work as objects. They
aren’t living persons, although it’s nice to stand in front of them and be
unsure whether they are or not.”39 It is this equivocation between living
human ‘presence’ and inert art ‘object’ that provokes psychic
disconcertion by (con)fusing the poles of ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate,’ to
recall Jentsch’s central claim. Our inclination towards ‘intellectual
mastery’ of the works is thwarted by gallery prohibitions of touch, which
act as a kind of ‘fourth wall’ preventing the corroboration of our
awareness of the works’ artificiality with haptic evidence of their lifeless
silicone surfaces. Without the capacity to touch, the viewer is tempted to
imagine, like Rosenblum, that any doctor "could give an anatomy lesson
after cutting them open.”40

The lifelikeness of Mueck’s work encourages Susanna Greeves to describe
it as “living sculpture” which pertains to the classical myth of Pygmalion
and Galatea.41 In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pygmalion is a Cypriot sculptor


39. Ron Mueck qtd. in Sarah Tanguy, “The Progress of Big Man: A conversation with
Ron Mueck,” Sculpture: A Publication of the International Sculpture Centre 22:6
(July/August 2003): 30.
40. Rosenblum 54.
41. Greeves 26.

21
who falls in love with the ivory sculpture of a woman he created, which he
names Galatea. After Pygmalion makes offerings to Venus and requests a
bride akin to Galatea, the goddess grants his wish by bringing the
sculpture to life. This fantasy of sculpture crossing the threshold between
the space of illusion and the real world seems to grip many respondents to
Mueck’s works. For example, a documentary filmed by Gautier Deblonde
for Mueck’s recent exhibition at the Fondation Cartier chronicles how his
sculptures “suddenly come to life.”42 Responding to the same exhibition,
filmmaker David Lynch declared, “It’s just incredible. I feel like they’re so
real they’re breathing.”43 It is clear from such responses that Mueck’s
works collapse ontological divisions between art and life. Art historian
Jean‐Claude Lebensztejn informs us that this dissolution of the
conventional divide between the artwork and reality is the quintessence
of hyperrealism: “Hyperrealism refutes the foundation of classical
aesthetics – namely, the difference between art and nature.”44 Similarly, in
a lecture at the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu in 2010,
Emilie Sitzia speaks of a “lack of frontier” between Mueck’s humanoids
and real life.45 She says: “The distance between art and life is actually
fading here,” confessing that this made her feel “scared” and “ill at ease.”46
Such discomfort aroused by manufactured beings that too perfectly
resemble sentient humans bears a strong relation to the uncanny.

42. Gautier Deblonde, “Conversation with Guy Deblonde. Still Life: Ron Mueck at
Work,” Ron Mueck: Exhibition media kit (Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’Art
Contemporain, 2013) n.pag.
43. Olivier Lambert & Thomas Salva, “David Lynch Meets Ron Mueck at the
Fondation Cartier Exhibition,” Youtube, Youtube 11 June 2013.
44. Jean‐Claude Lebensztejn & Jean‐Pierre Criqui, “Locus Focus: ‘Hyperrealisms,’”
trans. Jeanine Herman, Artforum International 41:10 (June 2003): n.pag.
45. Emilie Sitzia, “Ron Mueck’s ‘Wild Man,’” Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o
Waiwhetu, Christchurch Art Gallery 20 Oct. 2010.
46. Sitzia 2010.

22
Japanese robotocist Masahiro Mori coins the term ‘uncanny valley’ to
designate this disturbance felt by human beings when inanimate objects
are increasingly anthropomorphised. In his article “The Uncanny Valley”
(1970), Mori argues that inanimate creatures such as robots are more
familiar and hence more likeable when they resemble humans, yet if they
become too familiar and too human‐like they incite an “eerie sensation” –
uncanniness.47 This recalls the reciprocity implied by Freud between the
degree of realism crafted in a fictional work and the force of uncanniness
that ensues. Mori charts this phenomenon in a graph, plotting the function
of familiarity against aesthetic acceptability. He places the corpse, the
zombie, and prosthetic hand in the ‘uncanny valley’ because for him, as for
Jentsch and Freud, uncanniness is often related to the normally repressed
human fear of death. Mori’s uncanny valley theory has been validated in
the field of neuroscience, with various experiments proving that the
human brain cannot properly compute or accept artificial humanoids that
are too lifelike.48 It is therefore no wonder, as Anneleen Masschelein has
argued, that computer graphic humanoids such as Gollum in Peter
Jackson’s Lord of the Rings or the Na’vi people in James Cameron’s Avatar
have worked best in mainstream cinema because they are not too human

47. Masahiro Mori, “The Uncanny Valley,” trans Karl F. MacDorman & Norri Kageki,
IEEE Robotics and Automaton Magazine 19:2 (2012): 99.
48. A study in 2011, for example, scanned the brain activity of 20 subjects as they
were shown videos of a human, a humanoid robot and a metallic robot. The humanoid
was Repliee Q2, an especially human‐like robot from the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory
at Osaka University. The team, led by Ayse Pinar Saygin of the University of California,
made videos of Repliee Q2 performing actions including waving, nodding, and drinking
water. The same actions were then performed by the Japanese woman on whom Q2 was
modeled and by a version of Q2 that had synthetic skin and hair stripped off to reveal a
metal robot with dangling wires and visible circuits. As participants in the experiment
were shown each video, their brains signaled typical reactions to the human and metallic
robot, yet when presented with the uncanny android they ’lit up like a Christmas tree.’
This suggests that the brain could not compute the incongruity between the android’s
human‐like appearance and its robotic motion.

23
and thus do not risk falling into the uncanny valley.49 Masschelein is
suggesting here that spectators of such films can comfortably identify with
these humanised characters because they exhibit sufficient differences
from their human auditors. Despite the extraordinarily sophisticated CGI
technology used to impart a sense of realism to characters in these films,
the audience remains aware of being outside what is patently a cinematic
illusion.

The contraction of any difference between human beings and their
representation is a feature of Mueck’s sculpture, which, in Mori’s terms,
causes a precipitous drop into the uncanny valley. Yet it is not only the
works’ eerie exactitude that closes the aperture between artwork and
audience but also an implied psychological dimension. Mueck has
admitted that he aims to invest his works with a kind of inner‐life or soul:
"Although I spend a lot of time on the surface, it's the life inside I want to
capture."50 This is a notable feature of contemporary hyperrealism, for
unlike the more literal objectivity of its sister genre Photorealism,
hyperrealist art is said to convey narrative and emotional connotations.
Mueck and the curators who work with him are careful to leave the
psychological aspect of his works open to interpretation. Robert Nelson
considers Mueck’s work to be “full of uncanny sentimental power,”
maintaining, “the audience marvels at the lonely characters and their
introspective situations.” 51 Similarly, McDonald describes Mueck’s
sculptures as “mirrors of psychological states,”52 while for Marina Warner
the artist “captures that extra bit, what we call the soul or spirit, that flame
inside that makes us ourselves.”53


49. Anneleen Masschelein, The Unconcept: The Freudian Uncanny in Late‐Twentieth
Century Cultural Theory (Albany: State University of New York Times Press, 2011) 152.
50. Ron Mueck qtd. in Sean O’Hagen, “Ron Mueck: From Muppets to motherhood,”
The Observer [UK], The Guardian 6 Aug. 2006
51. Robert Nelson, “Ron Mueck,” The Age Entertainment, The Age 3 Feb. 2010.
52. McDonald, “Sculpture with the ‘wow’ factor.”
53. Marina Warner qtd. in O’Hagen, “Ron Mueck: From Muppets to motherhood.”

24
Mueck’s work Ghost (1998; Fig. 5) provides a salient example of this
psychological mimesis. Standing over two metres tall, Ghost is a sculpture
of a lanky pubescent girl in a navy swimsuit leaning self‐consciously
against the gallery wall. Despite the conventional sex‐ridden connotations
of girls in swimsuits, this adolescent is distinctively desexualised. She has
plain, almost rodent‐like facial features: small reddish eyes, a long,
enlarged nose and tiny lips that barely cover an unflattering under bite.
Her mousy blond hair is unkempt, pulled messily into a low bun with
strands of stray hair falling in front of her face, while her skin is a
yellowish tone flushed with irregular pigments of pink – the latter
cumulating in her embarrassed red cheeks. As she reclines against the
wall the girl seems to be shrugging her shoulders in a non‐committal
gesture of apathy, and yet the rest of her awkward, anxious body language
tells us that she is far from indifferent. Her hands are clenched into fists
behind her backside while her elongated legs are tensed into straight
diagonals, which become visual vectors along which the spectator’s gaze
travels up to her hunched, scrawny torso. This teenager personifies the
awkwardness of adolescence and is suffused with a kind of developmental
liminality manifested in her overdeveloped height and underdeveloped
body. With breasts barely formed, jutting hipbones, shapeless figure and
gangly limbs, Ghost is an image of a girl caught in a clumsy state between
youth and womanhood. She is “in a state of becoming,” remarks writer Lee
Henderson, suffused with both “a social presence and a kind of dismissed,
non‐presence.”54 That Mueck titled the work Ghost is significant here, for
this girl indeed conveys a kind of spectral presence, lingering between two
states of being. She seems cognizant of this fact, silently longing to surpass
the plight of puberty that renders her no longer ‘at home’ in her changing
body. Painfully, however, the spectator knows that she will never
overcome this awkward period, nor indeed this embarrassing moment, for
she is forever frozen in time. Contrary to the common coupling of large
size with menace and threat, this awkward, shy teenager seems somewhat

54. Lee Henderson, “Ron Mueck,” Booster, Booster blogspot 21 August, 2006.

25
self‐effacing. With head downturned to the side and eyes averted so that
they will never meet the viewer’s gaze, she appears to be shrinking away
from us – an irony considering her overbearing size. The girl’s large size
here screens the magnitude of her mental anxieties, and it is this
psychological valence that helps to breach the distance between the
thinking audience and the ‘thinking’ sculpture.

Mueck’s detractors, such as Australian art scholar Rex Butler, base their
criticisms of his work on this lack of implied distance between the human
analogues he creates and spectators drawn to them. Butler contends that
the hyperrealism of Mueck’s sculptures allows spectators no “reflective
distance” in their apprehension of the work of art. 55 Drawing on
arguments developed by art historian Michael Fried, he insists that true
‘absorptive’ works of art are only able to emotionally touch or affect us by
inscribing a distance or difference between themselves and the viewer, or
between artistic illusion and ordinary reality. Butler deplores the fact that
with Mueck’s works, “the closer we get, the more we see: lines, moles,
freckles, blemishes,” an aspect of their hyperrealist appearance that
establishes an equivalence between artistic artifice and reality that “leaves
nothing left to be seen or said” on the part of the spectator.56 This lack of
distance between art and life is exemplified for Butler by Mueck’s work
Youth (2009), a miniature simulation of a barefooted, black teenager
wearing low‐slung jeans and a white bloodstained t‐shirt held up to reveal
a gaping gash in the boy’s side. Youth reinterprets the biblical fable of
‘doubting Thomas’ where the skeptical Apostle Thomas touches the

55. Rex Butler, “Please Don’t Touch,” 21st Century: Art in the First Decade, ed.
Miranda Wallace (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2010) 265.
56. Butler 256.

26
wound in Christ’s side for palpable proof of his resurrection. 57
Significantly, however, Mueck’s contemporary ‘doubting Thomas’ touches
his own wound, becoming, according to Butler, “the definitive metaphor
for our new narcissistic, self‐referential relationship to the image.”58
Butler reads the proximity between artwork and reality sustained by
Mueck’s sculpture as presenting a mirror of narcissistic auto affection for
audiences already primed in this direction by the collapse of any symbolic
distance between the real and the imaginary that characterises the
hyperrealism of contemporary digital culture. Yet this argument seems to
be snared on a cultural aversion to the uncanny affect of the ‘too lifelike’
analysed by Mori.

In a recent essay on Mueck’s art Anne Cranny‐Francis questions the
premises of such criticisms. She argues that dismissals of Mueck’s
sculpture by some critics are based on prevalent paradigms of artistic
worth defined by critical or intellectual “distance.”59 Because Mueck’s
work eschews distance and directly solicits emotional responses from
viewers, many critics identify this as a form of mindless populism.60 Butler
seems to follow this logic, arguing that work “sees itself for us.”61 Here he
overlooks the affective power that colonises the collapsed distance
between spectator and sculpture, for it is this peculiarity that plunges

57. According to the New Testament, when Christ was hanging on the cross a
soldier pierced his body with a spear (known as the ‘Holy Lance’) to be sure that he was
dead, and the Gospel of John states that blood and water poured out of the wound. This
wound collates with the four piercing nail wounds on Christ’s hands and feet, together
known as the ‘Five Holy Wounds.’ It is written in the Gospel of John that the Apostle
Thomas refused to believe that the resurrected Christ had appeared to the eleven other
apostles until he could see and feel the Holy Wounds received by Christ on the cross.
58. Butler 267.
59. Anne Cranny‐Francis, “Sculpture as Deconstruction: The aesthetic practice of
Ron Mueck,” Visual Communication 12.3 (2013): 24.
60. Cranny‐Francis’ interpretation of Mueck’s art will be elaborated in Chapter
Two.
61. Butler 266.

27
Mueck’s work deep into the uncanny valley. Instead, for Butler Mueck’s art
merely ciphers narcissistic modes of subjectivity in the process of being
normalised in contemporary culture wherein, like pleasure‐seeking
children convinced of the omnipotence of our desires, we “increasingly
take our imaginings and hallucinations for real.”62 In the next chapter, I
will argue that while Mueck’s art may reflect aspects of contemporary
culture, specifically definitional shifts in what constitutes ‘humanness’
engendered by technological advances, they do not wholly embrace this
state of affairs.

1.2 Dolls and Death: the Dark Side of Mueck’s Uncanny Figures

Building on Jentsch’s account of uncanny affect issuing from psychic
uncertainty over whether something is animate or inanimate, Freud
suggests that such confusions may announce the return of repressed
childhood feelings and beliefs that have been estranged from adult
consciousness “through the process of repression.”63 It should be noted
here that repression does not equate with amnesia; it consists of the
relegation of conscious material to the unconscious, material that can
resurface in uncanny form. Consequently, “Unheimlich is what was once
heimlich, familiar; the prefix ‘un’ [‘un‐‘] is the token of repression.”64
Unlike Jentsch, who considered children and ‘primitive’ peoples as more
susceptible to uncanny feeling, Freud argues that the uncanny is likely to
impact more powerfully on enlightened adults whose actions and beliefs
are tempered by the ‘reality principle.’ In Freud’s account of normal
human development, childhood behaviour is largely contoured by the
unconscious drives of the ‘pleasure principle,’ where the nascent subject
seeks immediate satisfaction of biological and psychological pleasures by

62. Butler 269.

28
whatever means possible. According to Freud, the reality principle
emerges in the minds of individuals alongside the gradual consolidation of
a (socially) educated ‘reality‐ego,’ as they learn to adjust their actions and
thinking to limits imposed by the ‘real environment’ or ‘reality’ into which
they are inducted. As Freud puts it,

An ego thus educated has become ‘reasonable’; it no longer lets
itself be governed by the pleasure principle, but obeys the reality
principle, which also, at bottom, seeks to obtain pleasure, but
pleasure which is assured through taking account of reality, even
though it is pleasure postponed and diminished.65

An important function of the reality principle is to enable the ‘reasonable’
subject to clearly distinguish between inner psychic experiences and
external reality, or to not mistake subjective fantasy for objective reality.
In general terms, the development of the ‘reality‐ego’ suggests the
triumph of the rational mind over passions springing from the
unconscious. However, as Freud points out, the anxiety induced by the
uncanny arises from occasions or phenomena where fantasy appears to
coincide with reality. It therefore follows that such perturbation would be
most pronounced in adults with a well‐developed ‘reality‐ego’.

Freud derives his premise that the uncanny marks a return of repressed
infantile memories from his analysis of Hoffman’s The Sandman. Unlike
Jentsch’s claim that the automaton Olympia is the most uncanny figure in
Hoffman’s tale, Freud agues that the primary catalyst of uncanniness is the
eponymous figure of the Sandman; the mythical man who tears out


65. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, vol. I, ed. & trans.
James Strachey (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1991) 402‐3.

29
children’s eyes.66   That Nathaniel is fearful of losing his eyes to the
Sandman is, says Freud, a reincarnation of the “anxiety belonging to the
castration‐complex of childhood.”67 Although typically associated with
males and the loss of the penis, castration anxiety is theorised in Freudian
psychology as a universal human experience and a necessary component
of psychosexual development. Simply speaking, it comprises a childhood
fear of genitalial damage being inflicted by the parent of the same sex as
punishment for sexual feelings toward the parent of the opposite sex.
According to Freud, such fears are overcome and repressed by later stages
of development, and uncanny stimuli in adulthood are thus those things
that tap into this – and other – repressed infantile complex(es). On this
basis Freud refers to the strange ontological status of the doll, writing:
“Now, dolls are of course rather closely connected with childhood life. We
remember that in their early games children do not distinguish at all
sharply between living and inanimate objects, and that they are especially
fond of treating their dolls like live people.” 68 Such illusions are
supplanted by the ‘reality‐ego’ as the child develops into adulthood, yet
certain things encountered in adult life – such as lifelike humanoids – may
activate repressed infantile memories thereby unleashing the uncanny.

In her essay “Impassively True to Life” Claudia Peppel expands on this
uncanny valency of the doll noted by Freud. According to Peppel, dolls are
vehicles of the uncanny because they transgress limits between the
natural and the artificial, the human and the mechanical. She writes: “dolls
inhabit a gap, an interstitial realm, by evoking distance while allowing us


66. In Hoffman’s story, Nathaniel is fearful in childhood of losing his eyes to the
Sandman, who he associates with his father’s colleague Coppelius. Coppelius becomes the
powerful, castrating father who kills Nathaniel’s real father. After having not seen
Coppelius for many years, Nathanial is about to marry his fiancée when he spots the
dreaded figure through his spyglass, leading to a paroxysm of insanity and a hasty
suicide.

30
to forget it, resulting in a performative presence that gives rise to the
believable conveyance of life.”69  Moreover, according to Peppel, dolls are
not merely images of reality, but material presences – physical objects
that provide psychic comfort to the child, ameliorating the necessary but
painful separation from the mother during the process of ego
development. For Freud, humans are born without a consolidated sense of
self or ego‐identity, which means that they do not clearly distinguish
between their own inner impulses or drives and external reality: there is
an “over‐accentuation of psychical reality in comparison with material
reality.”70

Thus the fantasy life of infants includes an imagination of symbiotic fusion
with the mother or primary caregiver. The child’s nascent self must
overcome this maternal dependence in order to develop a separate
identity or ‘ego.’ A number of psychoanalytic thinkers, including D.W.
Winnicott, have argued that dolls or childhood playthings function as
comforting substitutes for the maternal matrix who is progressively lost
to external reality. The doll therefore acts as a love object that stands in
for the absent mother or carer, and this is uncanny for Peppel because it
uproots ontological boundaries: “the doll exists on the threshold of ego‐
identity, where subject and object are undifferentiated and merge in an
erotic fusion.”71 As children develop, however, their belief that dolls or
other toys are living entities is repressed under the sway of the reality
principle, and incarnations of these infantile beliefs thus trigger the
uncanny.

If we employ Peppel’s definition that a doll is “a replica of a human or
human‐like figure,” then Mueck’s surrogate human bodies can be seen as


69. Hans Belting (2001) qtd. in Claudia Peppel, “Impassively true to life,” Image and
Narrative 13:1 (2012): 66.
71. Eva‐Marie Simms (1996) qtd. in Peppel 73.

31
members of this uncanny species of object.72 Some critics have indeed
spoken of the doll‐like aspect of Mueck’s sculptures, particularly his
smaller than life‐sized human simulations. Coincidentally, this idea is
biographically braced by the fact that Mueck often made toys as a child
and later created puppets for children's television programs. Yet while
John MacDonald declares: “His small figures are all dolls,” he also stresses
that Mueck’s doll‐like sculptures “do not invite playfulness.”73

Mueck’s work Baby (2000; Fig. 6) presents an obvious analogue of the
doll, as it recalls the ubiquitous ‘baby doll’ that proliferated throughout
the twentieth century and is now a staple children’s toy. At just 26cm tall,
this sculpture represents a naked newborn baby boy with arms akimbo
and tiny hands clenched into fists. Unlike the artist’s numerous, free
standing works Baby is mounted crucifixion style on a large expanse of
white wall, which exaggerates the infant’s diminutive physical presence
and bodily frailty. The child appears to be suspended alone in space as
though invisible hands were reaching through the gallery wall to hold it
aloft under its armpits as some kind of offering to the audience. As in all of
Mueck’s sculptures attention is lavished here on compositional elements
of human anatomy. The baby’s enlarged head, anointed with the flattened
fuzz of synthetic hair echoes the distended bowl of his belly, the curves of
his prominent, dangling scrotum and the delicate orbs of his kneecaps.
Also typical is Mueck’s painstaking application of paint to the silicone
surface of the sculpture to ensure maximum realism. For example, the
overall ivory skin tone of Baby is punctuated by subtle touches of pink
applied to his swollen, alien‐like eyes, shriveled umbilical stub, outsized
genitals and perfectly formed little toes. This sculpture might be awarded
a prize for the most anatomically correct baby doll ever created.
Significantly, however, although toy manufacturers have in recent decades
strived to impart ever greater naturalism to their products – the ‘Baby

72. Peppel 65.
73. McDonald, “Sculpture with the ‘wow’ factor.”

32
born’ series released by the German company Zapf Creation being a prime
example – even baby dolls able to cry, drink and urinate retain the
abstract, asexual bodies of their historical precedents. To function as an
imaginary playmate in childhood the doll need not be perfectly lifelike in
appearance, as the great range of playthings adopted by infants attests.
But in the case of Mueck’s Baby it is a combination of anatomical
exactitude and the artist’s construction of the child’s facial expression that
generates an unnerving affect, possibly only felt by adults. The little boy’s
face has that wizened aspect of a wise old man so common in newborns.
With his head slightly turned to one side and his chin resting on his chest,
his left eye, framed by swollen pillows of flesh, becomes the most striking
feature of his face. This single, staring eye is trained on the spectator as
though the infant is precociously cognizant of the spectacle he presents. It
is this suggestion of adult self‐awareness or gleaming intelligence
emanating from a helpless, infantile body that arguably animates
repressed childhood memories of dolls that we once mistook for living
beings. By bisecting the binaries of doll and human, the ontological status
of Baby is thus rendered ambivalent, precipitating a “dark feeling of
uncertainty.”74

Peppel’s discussion of uncanny aspects of dolls also addresses their
borderline location between animate and inanimate states. Recalling
Jentsch’s argument that the horror produced by the corpse is based on the
memory of a past animate state drained from the dead body, Peppel
proposes that the doll anticipates the irreversible conversion of a living
human into an inanimate ‘thing’ whilst also pointing towards “all
subsequent attempts to create man‐made surrogate bodies for the dead”
as a form of symbolic coping with the traumatic finality of biological
death.75


74. Jentsch 11.
75. Hans Gerchow qtd. in Peppel 70.

33
This idea draws on Freud’s premise that “Many people experience the
feeling [uncanniness] in the highest degree in relation to death and dead
bodies.”76 With this speculation Freud introduces a new modality to the
uncanny – the “very early mental stage” when infantile beliefs were once
harboured refers not only to children but also to so‐called ‘primitive’
civilisations.77 Just as repressed infantile psychology lies latent beneath
the consciousness of the adult, Freud postulates the persistence of
repressed primitive currents roiling under the ostensibly placid surface of
the minds of modern, rational subjects. Such currents – which can be
primitive beliefs, thoughts or fears78 – can spill into consciousness and
cause uncanniness: “everything which now strikes us as ‘uncanny’ fulfils
the condition of touching those residues of animistic mental activity
within us and bringing them to expression.”79 The uncanny is, therefore,
catalysed not only by the return of those infantile complexes that have
been repressed but also by those primitive modes of thinking that have
been surmounted.80 Freud speculates that the human fear of death is one
such source of uncanniness for the modern individual because this fear
has scarcely changed since our primitive beginnings: “Since practically all
of us still think as savages do on his topic, it is no matter for surprise that
the primitive fear of the dead is still so strong within us and always ready
to come to the surface on any provocation.”81 Confrontation with death

78. According to Freud, primitive civilizations were characterised by animistic
beliefs in magic and the omnipotence of thoughts, as well as the idea that the world was
peopled with human spirits.
79. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 240‐241.
80. Freud acknowledges, however, that not everything that resuscitates repressed
desires and archaic forms of thought is necessarily uncanny. Fairytales typify this, for
although they adopt animistic conceptions of the omnipotence of thoughts and wishes,
they are not uncanny because we have not invested ourselves in them as we would a
realist narrative.

34
and its associations may thus induce a sense of the uncanny because they
foster the return of surmounted primitive fears.

Mueck’s hyperreal humanoids may be interpreted as heralds of death as
much as masterful illusions of life. The symbolic propinquity between
animate and inanimate choreographed in the sculptures reminds us that a
latent inanimate state is always already awaiting human beings. Although
we may marvel at how lifelike they look, the works nearly all wear the
pallid skin tones of the cosmetically anointed corpse and their unsettling
inertia brings to mind the chilly motionlessness of a dead body. The
uncanny affiliation between the doll and death is given somewhat literal
expression in Mueck’s sculpture Dead Dad (1996‐7; Fig. 7), the first work
by the artist to gain art world attention. Dead Dad depicts a miniature
version of Mueck’s deceased father lying naked in a post‐mortem pose on
a flattened rectangular slab. Considering this is a representation of the laid
out cadaver of Mueck’s own father, it is perhaps surprising that the artist
maps the physiological landscape of the dead body with such
unsentimental matter‐of‐factness. Writing in The Guardian critic Craig
Raine aptly conveys Mueck’s forensic approach to this intimate subject
matter:

The sculpture dispassionately records every delicate and indelicate
bodily detail – detail that is alive with accuracy. Nothing is missing.
Tendons, toenails, the direction of dark hair on the calves, the hazy
pubes a little stationary mirage, the tidy graying hair, the polished,
modest, uncircumcised cosh of the penis at four o’clock, which
echoes the thumbs across the open, upturned palms.82

Additionally, the man’s pinkish closed eyes seem to be sinking slowly into
their cranial sockets before our very eyes while the sallow hue of death
settles on his bloodless skin. He has a gaunt, downturned mouth framed


82. Craig Raine, “The Body Beautiful,” The Guardian, The Guardian 12 Aug. 2006.

35
by bluish stubble, which gives an unnerving impression of post‐death
sullenness. Measuring a mere 102cm long, the work conjures connotations
of a doll or figurine and Mueck has been much quoted as saying that its
size is such that one could pick him up and ‘cradle’ him.83 However,
recalling McDonald’s observation, this piece certainly does not ‘invite
playfulness.’

Dead Dad could be situated within the long‐standing tradition of memento
mori art (Latin for ‘remember that you will die’). However instead of
iconographic symbols of the hourglass, the skull and the Grim Reaper,
Mueck’s sculpture literalises death by amplifying the physical minutiae of
the corpse. The work’s anti‐euphemistic title augments its matter‐of‐
factness, hampering the critical inclination to conceptualise this piece
beyond what it plainly represents: a dead man. Unlike other sculptures by
Mueck, Dead Dad features some of the artist’s own hair. Here, the
conventionally metonymic relationship between artist and artwork is
supplanted by a synecdochic one as a genuine fragment of Mueck’s body
literally figures in the sculpture. The inclusion of real body parts in art
works was heralded by the Spanish polychrome tradition of the Baroque
period, wherein real hair, bloodstains, and clothing were used, as
Rosenblum informs us, "to contribute to the uncanny illusion of a living,
and usually suffering, human presence." 84 In Dead Dad a physical
affiliation – mediated by the inclusion of real human hair – is created
between living human body and hyperreal cadaver. The transplanted hair
might thus be viewed symbolically as pointing to the contiguity between
life and death. With or without the knowledge that the sculpture’s hair is
Mueck’s, I suspect that most spectators could not view this flagrant
representation of literal death without imagining the day that they too
become a lifeless residuum. It is from such imaginings that our repressed
reservoir of ‘primitive’ anxieties is awoken.

83. Greeves 39.
84. Rosenblum 72.

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