Unusual art for an unusual city

Christchurch seems to like the hyper-realistic sculptures of Australian-born artist Ron Mueck. Thirteen of his incredibly lifelike but jarringly not-to-scale works exhibited at the Christchurch Art Gallery late in 2010, attracted

135,000 paying visitors and set a gallery record. On the final weekend, fans queued down the street.

To put that into perspective, the same exhibition attracted 120,000 visitors in Melbourne. The previously best-attended exhibition at the gallery in its current location was a display of Cecil Beaton’s portraits in 2006, which was seen by 29,000.

Each of the visitors would have had a favourite Ron Mueck. Few who saw her could forget his Pregnant Woman – extremely and uncomfortably pregnant – a wonder of realism in fibreglass and resin towering over the viewers at about 2.4 metres tall. Or the model of his Dead Dad, a tiny fraction of his actual size.

Now, the Christchurch Art Gallery is on track to acquire, as the fundraising pitch calls it, ‘‘our own Ron’’ – a specially commissioned Ron Mueck artwork to join the gallery’s permanent collection. So far, it has raised more than $900,000 of the $1 million required.

Mueck, of course, is not to everyone’s taste. A rare contrary review in The Guardian in 2006 decried some of the same works shown in Christchurch as a ‘‘flimsy gimcrack charade’’ of parody people by an artist who ‘‘is really just a model maker’’, and not actually clever.

But maybe it was that accessibility of Mueck’s work which appealed to Christchurch gallery goers in

2010.

The exhibition was between the September 2010 and February 2011 earthquakes, just at the time we hoped things were getting back to normal and when we could not have foreseen that the worst was yet to come.

Many of Mueck’s people are naked. They appear vulnerable and sometimes frightened, but they can also be monumental, their humanity on display. Maybe that resonated in a city that had already been battered by the first of the quakes.

Another post-quake gallery acquisition, again paid for by public subscription, was Michael Parekowhai’s On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, a giant sculptured bull on top of what at first appears a fragile piano. When earlier placed amid the demolition sites and rubble of the destroyed city, it too communicated a meaning it might otherwise not have had.

Art has played a large part in Christchurch’s recovery – not just at the institutional level, but on the very walls and cleared spaces of the fractured city. Some of it has been transient – the light-filled Festivals of Transitional Architecture provide an example – but some will provide a permanent legacy of this time of change and transition. People realise this, which is why they have been willing to dig deep to pay for ‘‘our own Ron’’ – not just the big $100,000 donations, but also the small pledges to a Givealittle page, which by yesterday had registered promises totalling $71,500. There is even a Labour Weekend sausage sizzle planned to help raise more money.

No-one knows yet what Mueck will produce for Christchurch, maybe not even the artist himself. But those stumping up the cash in large and small amounts obviously hope that it will be something which speaks eloquently to our place and time.