A Trip to the Brooklyn Museum

Today I went to the Brooklyn Museum because they are hosting two exhibitions that I was very interested in seeing: a mid-career collection of Ron Mueck sculptures, and "Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005". Ron Mueck is a London-based artist who creates the most amazingly realistic human sculptures. Often naked, these sculptures are either massive in size, or very small in scale. They are crafted out of fibreglass and silicone, and then Mueck and his assistants painstakingly add all of the details that make them look so human: veins, freckles, age spots, goosebumps, raggedy toenails, shaved hair follicles etc. Mueck uses silicone for the face because it allows him to punch the hairs in, individually, so that they look like they are actually growing out of the skin. It's truly unbelievable. It's the opposite of what I experienced when I went to see BodyWorlds: I knew that those sculptures actually were human, but I couldn't believe it because they were just freaky collections of muscles, ligaments and stretched skin; whereas with Mueck's work, I knew they were fake but they seem so astonishingly real.

The other thing that makes Mueck's sculptures seem so alive is that they all have a certain vulnerability about them. Some seem unaware that they are being watched, others are hyper-aware of their audience, but all of them are frozen in a moment of poignant emotion. You can see more of Mueck's sculptures and read a Times article about the exhibit here.

The Leibovitz exhibit was also excellent. It is a collection of almost 200 of her photographs, culled both from her professional portfolio and from her private collection. Leibovitz is a photographer for Vanity Fair and she does a lot of their celebrity portraits - including the infamous early 90s cover shot of a naked and heavily pregnant Demi Moore. Leibovitz also did a very powerful photo spread of Sarajevo during the war for Vanity Fair. Unfortunately not many of those photos were on display, although they had her shots of the underground bunker where the newspaper Oslobodjene was published, amazingly, every day during the seige. Leibovitz's partner, Susan Sontag, lived in Sarajevo for several months during the war, and was good friends with the editor of this paper.

The photos of Sontag were the most beautiful, in my opinion. Leibovitz and Sontag (a well-known American writer and intellectual) were together for many years, during which Sontag suffered a recurrence of cancer, finally succumbing to the disease in 2004. Many of the photographs document her illness, and some are extremely intimate - Sontag having her hair chopped off, during chemo; Sontag in her hospital bed, naked and tended to by nurses; Sontag, aged rapidly by cancer and unrecognizable; Sontag laid out in her funeral clothes, alongside a careful description of why Leibovitz chose that particular outfit; a photograph of Sontag's unlit apartment window, just across the way from Leibovitz's, after her death.

Leibovitz gave birth to her first child in 2001, and had twins shortly after Sontag's death. There are many photos of her three daughters, as well as many photos of Leibovitz's parents, who were married over 50 years and madly in love. Her father passed away in her mother's arms, just a few months after Sontag died. Lest this sound like a totally depressing collection, there are also a lot of funny and quirky photos, like Brad Pitt in crazy leopard skin pants and Johnny Depp sprawled on top of Kate Moss. But, my favourites are the ones of Sontag and Leibovitz's family members because they are less glossy or portrait-like, and they are hugely affective. In a way they are similar to the realism of Mueck's sculptures, if you take realism to encompass not just the realistic but the reality of the everyday, ugliness, heartbreak and all.