Contemporary Art

JUAN MUÑOZ
(Spanish,1953-2001)

Piggy-Back (A Caballito), 1997
Bronze
Gift of the New Collectors 1997.2

The figures in Juan Muñoz’s Piggy-Back suggest a range of provocative narratives. Is one figure helping the other, like St. Christopher carrying the infant Jesus? Are they two aspects of one person? Or is this an image of the artist shouldering the "burden" of his art?

Muñoz leaves the interpretation of his work open to the viewer, hoping to draw us into the drama that takes place between the figures, their audience, and their surroundings. These two bald, fine-featured and apparently blind figures seem to be intimately involved with one another, but oblivious to us. Perhaps Muñoz is suggesting that a work of art does not exist simply for the visual appreciation of the viewer, but rather has an internal life of its own in which we are invited to participate.
Muñoz’s desire to displace the viewer from the traditional role of passive observer is part of the sense of dislocation that has become a signature of the artist’s sculptures, installations, and writings. Muñoz has created a body of work that ranges from poetic writings and drawings of open mouths to installations that consist of rooms covered with dizzying, patterned floors and with one or more figures of dwarves, ventriloquists, or androgynous people.

The past, Muñoz has said, is very much alive for him. His sources vary from classical and Baroque art to the paintings of Goya and Velasquez, to the whole spectrum of Modernist art. He draws on art-historical references as readily as he comments on the isolation and dislocation associated with contemporary life.

Piggy-Back also explores the phenomenon of silence and the mystery of communication. We can never know what these figures are saying to one another or to themselves or to us. They are intended, says the artist, to be blind, and are as undifferentiated as possible. As human as they may appear to be at first glance, they are not supposed to be realistic. “The more realistic sculptures are meant to be," Muñoz has said, "the less interior life they have."

Piggy-Back emits the mystery of an interior life – that of the artwork and of the relationship between its elements, its surroundings and its audience.