Double Bind by Juan Muñoz

Juan Muñoz died on 28 August. His installation ‘Double Bind’ in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern remains utterly outstanding – the most distinguished work yet to be installed in this massive space where scale is so critical. Muñoz’s human figures at human scale have created, truly, as he himself said he intended, ‘an occasion for wonder’. In this architectural parody, it is only the humans who present any legible authenticity – communicating through scale with the viewer – as survivors of the imposed rational functionality of their immediate environment. The spaces rise from an artificial car space basement to a galleried installation where some ‘Alphaville’-like city offers only wells, walkways, and over-populated balconies. The use of real lifts to penetrate the vertical spaces simply underlines the meaninglessness of the scene – if it were not, that is, for the benign, yet alienated humans, the dramatic format of the flooring and the closed screening (double bind). If there had been criticism of the minimalist architecture of the new museum, Tate Modern, by Herzog and de Meuron, suddenly Muñoz’ creation, in its banal design negativity, emphasises the quiet beauty of the museum’s architecture

The fact that Muñoz was only 48 when he died two days ago, and at the height of his powers, deprives Europe, America and the world of an emergent master. Born in Madrid in June l953, into a Europe where the lid was about to blow from Berlin, to Paris, to Madrid, he grew up a child of humankind in an era where man could reassert his essential rights.

He arrived in England in the mid-l970s, and studied at Croydon School of Art. Following this came a period at the Central School of Art and Design. From there a Fulbright Scholarship took him to New York in l982. His experience ripened through contact with Mario Merz, for whom he worked as an assistant, as well as the sculptor Richard Serra. However, Muñoz followed his own path, in his own shoes. The pathos of such favourite figures as the ballerina or the dwarf-being, drew upon ancient European preoccupations with human dignity, yet proved arresting to the mind of the museum-goer in a similar manner to the devices created by Joseph Beuys, or the scale distortions achieved by Giacometti. In all this Muñoz remained a modernist, conveying the existential condition of man.

In Spain, the precursor to Muñoz might be the painter and graphic artist Juan Genoves, whose massed, silent, stencilled figures expressed the fragility not only of the contemporary individual in the l960s, but also of the flowing, directional crowd. But Muñoz, while able to haunt with silence, went further into sound media. About a decade ago his radio collaboration with the composer Gavin Bryars, entitled ‘A Man in a Room Gambling’ caused a sensation, a rare artistic collaboration, where the figure explained card tricks, how he did them, and won. More recently, Muñoz worked with John Berger to make the play ‘Will it be a Likeness’ for German radio in l996. Currently, he was further exploring sound with his brother-in-law, composer Alberto Iglesias. It is sad that in a war-torn 20th century Muñoz was never commissioned to create a figurative war memorial; that would have been something haunted by silence and sound.

In October, following the London installation, the Hirschorn Museum, Washington DC, will host a major retrospective of his work. Ironically timed to be a mid-career assessment, it becomes a commemorative show, and Muñoz would have appreciated the irony. The exhibition will also proceed to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. To sit, in spring, in Isozaki’s sublime MoCA courtyard, with its subliminal architectural references; to contemplate the ballerina and the dwarf, might be the greatest memory.