The puppet who wanted to be a real boy has encouraged artists to experiment with his image for over a hundred years. In the original, 1881 edition of Pinocchio’s story, cartoonist Enrico Mazzanti drew a marionette that appears a bit older than Disney’s 1940’s little boy, who wears a blue bow tie to the original’s frilled, white collar. More recently, Dreamworks presented Pinocchio as a women’s-underwear-wearing friend of the title character in Shrek. And in 1996, sculptor Ron Mueck presented the world with a very different version of Pinocchio per the request of—of all people—his mother-in-law. Mueck’s statue depicts the marionette post-human transformation and gives the line “I’m a real boy!” entirely new meaning. As with all the sculptures in Ron Mueck, by National Gallery of Victoria curator David Hurlston, the figure’s realism is simultaneously astonishing and unsettling. To put it bluntly, Pinocchio looks exactly like a real boy. He stands with his hands behind his back in nothing but white briefs. The sculptor carefully designed each feature: the little boy’s bright blue eyes have layered irises and pupils, and his flesh is pink and white and entirely convincing.

Pinocchio was not the first puppet to interest Mueck. His father made marionettes while he was growing up, and he began his career as a puppet-maker and puppeteer. He was also the Creative Director of a children’s program for half a decade, for which he created and animated puppets. As Hurlston notes, the artist has had a lifelong fascination with “the ability to animate an otherwise lifeless object.” Eventually, Mueck began creating works for himself, or as he put it, for “no reason.” He now sculpts using modern, artificial materials like polyester resin, silicone, and polyurethane to create figures that look entirely natural. Giving a sculpture a particular name, as he did with Pinocchio, is unusual for Mueck, since his works tend to capture people more generally (i.e. Standing Woman, Swaddled Baby). Yet each work, or rather each person, that Mueck designs seems to have his or her own history, thoughts, and concerns. Pinocchio looks out and up, perhaps satisfied with his new form, maybe a little bewildered or tired. The believable humanity Mueck gives each of his pieces makes him one of today’s most important sculptors. This catalog, which accompanied a major 2010 traveling retrospective exhibition of the artist’s work, will soon be available to the world outside of Australia and New Zealand from Yale University Press.

Page Spreads from "Ron Mueck", by David Hurlston