21 Mar 2012

Research on the Work of Juan Muñoz


The meaning of some artwork is unclear or even non-existent when they are created, but waiting for individuals to find out, so that the uncertainty of artworks’ meaning results in multifarious interpretations from different viewers.  Such kind of work mainly focuses on the interaction between the artwork and appreciators, which makes the work full of mystery and promotes viewers to think critically, to some extent.  Thus, the feeling of viewers plays a vital and essential role in the work, which means that although artist creates the work without definite meaning, the public can create a wide variety of meanings: that is, a part of ‘Relational Aesthetics’ (Bourriaud, 1998), to discuss the relationship between individual and community, interaction between individual and individual, and transaction of aesthetic experience among different individuals. 

Under this circumstance, the artist enables viewers to become aware of their own present status in the perception of the artwork.  For instance, Juan Muñoz (1996) claimed that his work is about waiting, waiting for something to happen that might never happen. Thus, it can be seen, that, essentially, the meaning of Muñoz’s work is pure potentiality and the uncertainty of the future. When people asked Muñoz’s occupation, he would respond simply that he was a ‘storyteller’.  Actually, in some cases, he just creates or reforms a scene of unsettled story, in which the viewer is half part of ‘storyteller’ together with Muñoz.

In the work Double Bind (Fig. 4), Muñoz creates a space a given room for the public, in which viewers can receive a given experience at a specific given time instead of ultimately trying to transcend the physicality of experience.  In Susan May (2001) ’s opinion, the viewer becomes part of the space and the space becomes part of the viewer, and the physical sense of being is enhanced to such a degree as to almost become an ‘out of body’ experience.  Thus, in a sense, the viewer acts as an integral supplement to the space and every objects of stillness in the room are to highlight the viewer of movement. In a given time when a viewer sees the exhibition, the process of which exactly fulfils the uncertainty of the meaning, so that each and every one of the viewers can achieve his/her individual value in the given room, and then the meaning of the work is accomplished between Muñoz and viewers.

We are confronted in modern times with the task of placing and displacing objects in a given environment.  It requires an understanding of the physical framework, but also of the spectator’s arrival into the room.  You have to make this person trust for a second that what he wishes to believe is true.  And maybe you can spin that into another reality and make him wonder.  (Muñoz, 2001 p. 74)

In this day and age – a media-saturated age, high technology has become prevalent.  With the wide application of computers, some people claim that public exhibitions will not be needed because people can have a look at artistic objects works online.  However, the work of Muñoz can overwhelmingly refute the claim – when people stand in the given space, they can feast their eyes on all kinds of objects there and experience the exquisite layout and the wonder of another reality with their own eyes in an active way instead of in a passive manner by looking at what are being displayed to us by others on the boring, inactive and static screen.  Consequently, what we see from a computer screen is, after all, not exactly the same as what we see and feel with our own eyes on site, not to mention that, for Double Bind, the viewer is intimately bound up with it.

Indeed, this kind of confused meaning promotes people to think intellectually and emotionally on the grounds that his installations are contrary to people’s usual experiences and expectations in terms of aesthetic experience.  Unlike Bacon, whose aim of paintings is to record memory trace of past events, Muñoz’s installations are about the future – cannot completely be forecast, which means he leads viewers to think of their life and things happening in the world, either happy or sad.  According to Chunchen, ‘Just as our age is more and more globalized, art becomes more synthesized.  In this new tendency, art imperceptibly becomes more closely associated with audience, which results in collaboration and participation forms of art.’ (2009, p. 89)  As a consequence, the collaboration between such kind of artists and viewers is more intimate, complicated and diversified, which is beneficial for viewers to think more about the meaning based more on themselves and realize the importance of themselves in the process of appreciating artwork.

Nevertheless, in some cases, artists express the meaning of artwork hiddenly and potentially, which seems they merely express their personal emotions or viewpoints rather than focusing on the interaction between the public and artists themselves.  It is clearly natural that such kind of work is difficult to entirely be interpreted and the collaboration between artist and viewer seems non-existent.  However, it is, I think, an indisputable fact that all artwork has the meaning of existence, so that the expression of meaning in such work and the relationship between creators and appreciators is much more subtle. 

Towards the metaphorical function of two elevators in Double Bind (Fig. 5), in the conversation with James Lingwood in May 2001, Muñoz pointed out, ‘They aren’t metaphors for anything.  They are elevators going up and down.’  By researching most of his work, I am convinced that the medium of metaphor is the moment of elevators’ movement in the space of stillness instead of the objects themselves that are placed artificially.  In addition, the elevator and the movement of the elevator reflect the stillness and the movement, in which Muñoz creates a new space – an instant wonder moment, which is exactly the ‘another reality’ he mentions and the medium of metaphor he unintentionally hides.  In the metaphorical space, the viewer is the leading role of creating different unsettled stories.

According to Willats, ‘The artist directs the audience’s attention towards a given view, and provides them with the means to examine it in a particular way, but does not prescribe specific meaning that should be brought to bear on it.’ (1976 p. 3)  Though Muñoz called his work ‘sculpture’, it was more concerned with the movement of the object than with its presence.  Rather than showing us how objects look from one vantage point at one moment in time, he tends to be more interested in making viewers aware of the system of interaction, communicate everything they know and feel about a special space created by objects which, like visionary architecture, contains the viewer, thus encouraging them to question rather than passively accepting the ‘official’ version of things.  The process of questioning is exactly the process of collaboration between artist and viewer.  Naturally, it will result in multifarious outcomes.

Indeed, ‘the way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe’ (Berger, 1972 p. 8).  That is, what people can gain from the artwork depends on their artistic accomplishment and aesthetic experience, and naturally, the meaning produced by the viewers is different from the artists because nobody can truly speculate on the original intention of the work.  But the process of guessing and research is already meaningful, which is exactly a part of meaning of appreciating a piece of artwork no matter what the intention of the artwork is.

Fig. 4 Double Bind, 2001
Muñoz, J. (2001) Juan Muñoz: Double Bind at Tate Modern.  London: Tate Publishing


Fig. 5 The Elevator of Double Bind, 2001
Muñoz, J. (2001) Juan Muñoz: Double Bind at Tate Modern.  London: Tate Publishing


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