The Wasteland (Tierra baldía)

Wasteland is one of the high points of Juan Muñoz’s work, and he was very aware of its importance: “I called the first piece of floor I built Waste Land, partly because of Eliot’s poem and also because that illusionist floor is completely barren. [...] The floor arises from the desire to build something real, something that people can walk across. I wanted to make a real object, not an object that supplanted reality.” 

For the floor, Juan Muñoz took inspiration from the image of a 2nd-century mosaic from Antioch that appears in Gombrich’s book The Legacy of Apelles. The spatial anxiety is inspired by dramatic resources from a Renaissance perspective, such as in Paolo Uccello’s The Miracle of the Desecrated Host (ca. 1467–1469), from the Ducal Palace in Urbino. Next to an image of this piece in his workbook, the artist wrote: “Draw the skin of a moving tiger.” 

This work should be read as an escape from modernity and as a statement of the problems that sculpture has to deal with in the present: the puppet waits for someone to make it speak, but its bronze consistency prevents it from doing so, turning it into a funeral monument to the decline of representation. The earth is devastated, empty of meaning, a desert of mute signs that we are unable to make speak. “The ventriloquist’s dummy usurps the viewer. It stands in front of the show and waits, speechless. [...] How can we explain a maybe with a perhaps?”

Manuel Segade