In Jean-Paul Sartre's novel Nausea (1938), the hero Roquentin is working in a small French provincial town when he comes across the pollution-stained bronze statue of a local school inspector, who had died in 1902. Roquentin, a historical researcher, is both mesmerised and appalled by this effigy, which has become "guardian" of the local people: "This square may have been a cheerful place about 1800, with its pink bricks and its houses. Now there is something dry and evil about it, a delicate touch of horror. This is due to that fellow up there on his pedestal. When they cast that scholar in bronze, they turned him into a sorcerer . . . He has no eyes, scarcely any nose, a beard eaten away by that strange leprosy which sometimes descends, like an epidemic, on all the statues of a particular district."
The Spanish sculptor Juan Muñoz (1953-2001), whose brief but substantial career will be celebrated at Tate Modern later this month, was fascinated by "bronze sorcery" of this sort. His individual figures and large groups, made from bronze, resin and galvanised steel, exhibited varying degrees of eyelessness and deformation. The creepy freakishness of his big sculptural ensembles sometimes reached epidemic proportions - nowhere more so than in his last major work, Double Bind, the dystopian city he sliced out of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2001. Gangs of male "workers" went about their mysterious business high over our heads with their eyes tightly shut, and seemed to mock us both by their casual intimacy with each other and by their indifference to us. Yet Muñoz's bronze sorcerers are slaves as well as masters of their universe, and the lugubrious mood is leavened by a strong dose of whimsy and even farce.
Muñoz was the first major Spanish sculptor to emerge after the death of Franco in 1975, and it was perhaps inevitable that he should eventually grapple with the tradition of the naturalistic statue that goes back to 19th-century "statuemania". Many bronze statues of the dictator had been erected throughout Spain, and they were only slowly and haphazardly removed. The one remaining equestrian monument in Spain, outside Santander's town hall, is scheduled to make way for a car park in May.
Statues have thus had a political currency in Spain that they did not have in the rest of western Europe or the US: only in communist countries did bombastic statues of political leaders continue to be erected after the second world war. In the mid-1970s, Muñoz made a documentary film about public sculpture in Madrid, and he told an interviewer in 1990: "You can never separate the gluing moment of history, you cannot separate the general from the plinth, from the asphalt, from the cars that pass it by, from the hundred-year-old trees next to it, from the boredom it represents and from the anonymity which is the consequence of the passage of time." For Muñoz, historical consciousness was a bonding agent that, he hoped, would bring disparate people and entities together. At the very least, the "glue" of history should keep even the most strutting of feet on the ground.
Juan Muñoz was born into a prosperous, cultured family in Madrid in 1953. His father was a building contractor, and the built environment looms large in his work. He was bored at school, and was expelled at the age of 12. His cultural awakening seems to have occurred at the age of 14, when his father employed Santiago Amón, Juan's school Latin teacher, to give him and his brother Vicente private lessons at home.
Amón was also a poet and an art critic for the newspaper El País. He wrote a book on Picasso, and greatly admired Dutch neoplasticism, the leading lights of which were the painter Piet Mondrian and the architect Theo van Doesburg. Amón opened Muñoz's eyes to modernist literature, which was to become a key catalyst for his art and for his many published essays and sound pieces, which tended to be incantatory shaggy-dog stories, influenced by Borges and Beckett.
In 1970, Muñoz briefly studied architecture at the University of Madrid, but in October, frustrated by the conservatism of Spanish culture and politics, he followed Vicente to London. It was there that he became "passionate about art and the act of looking". He ended up staying in London for much of the decade, completing printmaking courses at the Central School of Art and Design and at Croydon School of Art. This being the heyday of conceptual art, Muñoz made kinetic sculptures, sound and photo pieces. On one occasion, he drew a walking figure in white chalk on a building in Croydon, and photographed it on a rainy day with people walking by, oblivious under their umbrellas.
In 1981, he spent a stimulating if unproductive year studying graphic art in New York - he made a single drawing, but befriended the minimalist sculptor Richard Serra. The following year, he returned to Madrid where, helped by a recommendation from Serra, he was able to curate a couple of exhibitions. It was only in 1983, at the age of 30, that he turned definitively to sculpture, and started to make a name for himself with a series of small-scale welded-metal architectural sculptures.
Rickety and attenuated, like Giacometti stick figures, they evoked watchtowers, minarets, pulpits, balconies, staircases and feeding tables for birds. If Only She Knew (1984) was an open metal watchtower packed with crudely carved wooden doll figures, whose muffled morphology was clearly influenced by Joseph Beuys. What gave these figures their particular distinction was the unceremonious way in which Muñoz stuffed them into the top of the tower like so many bread rolls. These ostensibly predatory "watchers" now seemed trapped, transformed into clownish voyeurs.
In the early 1980s, there was an artistic fashion for making enigmatic architectural forms that alluded to the idea of dwelling, while precluding access through awkward placement and scale. Muñoz's most impressive work of this kind was Hotel Declerq I-IV (1986), made for an exhibition in Ghent: a row of elegantly undulating black metalwork balconies, placed high up on a white gallery wall, beside projecting metal signs for HOTEL. It wasn't so much a case of "no room at the inn" as "no way into the inn".
These airborne balconies were not just comments on travel and alienation, however. They spoke the language of religious elevation, and one half-expected to find a brightly painted statue of that archetypal Spanish figure, the "Virgin of the Immaculate Conception", enshrined behind the bars. Muñoz may also have been remembering the V&A's huge collection of metalwork and architectural bric-a-brac. In the 1970s, it was the best place in the world to find balconies and random bits of staircase fixed directly to blank white walls.
From the 1970s onwards, artists have been taking minimalist-style forms and imbuing them with content, whether poetic and anthropomorphic or political and parodic. Muñoz's "banister" series from the late 1980s is among the most beguiling examples of this genre. These are the first of his works I ever saw, in a small show at London's Lisson Gallery in 1987. Short sections of wooden banister were fixed to the gallery wall, but some had strange kinks in them; they snaked up the wall and around corners, as if in a Dalí-style dream. They also suggested the wooden training barre used by dancers, only here the barre itself was doing the dance.
Beautifully crafted, the banisters tempted you to run your hand along their length. To counter this, First Banister (1987) had a flick-knife fixed to it, a real snake in the grass: "I was very interested in the idea of this work, inviting your hand to go out, and then the idea of danger."
The most elaborate of all, The Lines of My Hand (1990), was more subtly disturbing. Made for a group show at the ICA, it consisted of an open-ended cluster of criss-crossing banisters that extended far from the wall, 8ft long, laid out as if for inspection by a palm-reader. Here, one of the most banal fixtures from any building, made to be repeatedly touched by anonymous human hands, had become personalised lines of fate that jumped out of the wall at you. Although the "lines" were based on Muñoz's own hand, anyone coming across it felt suddenly exposed - as if it were a premonition of one's own handprint being found at the scene of a crime.
When Muñoz's work has been compared to other postwar art, either by himself or by critics, the frame of reference has tended to be sculpture, whether European Arte Povera or younger practitioners such as Bill Woodrow and Richard Deacon, both of whom he met in London. Yet Muñoz studied graphic art, and his subsequent work strongly suggests that when he lived here, the painter Francis Bacon may have been the living artist who meant most to him. In 1975, Bacon's fame - and notoriety - was at its height. His veneration for Velázquez and Picasso may have been a further attraction for Muñoz, as would his love of literature.
Bacon's celebrated "space frames" seem to lurk in the background of the banister pieces. These are the shimmering white tubular structures that hem in Bacon's homunculi, or provide partial support, like meagre perches, tables or railings. Bending and swooping, they take on a life of their own, like elasticated exoskeletons. Shimmering white "space frames" also map out and articulate the eerily empty domestic interiors in Muñoz's Raincoat Drawings (1988-early 90s), so named because he drew them on a dark fabric used to make raincoats. This association gives them a seedy allure.
What I think Bacon and his "space frames" crucially provided was a way of geometrically demarcating floor space within an artwork, so that it becomes a highly charged arena, neither fully public nor fully private. Muñoz's first room installation, The Wasteland (1987), named after Bacon's favourite poem, featured his first cast sculpture: a bronze of a small ventriloquist's dummy, perched on a steel shelf cantilevered out from the wall on the far side of the room. The floor was covered in linoleum decorated with a zigzagging pattern of interlocking segments. It's about being stranded - the dummy, because he has been left on the shelf, his little legs far above the ground; and us, because we feel locked out by this disconcertingly edgy floor and by the metallic little figure. "You read Eliot," Muñoz said, "and you have the impression it's a voice in an empty room." It's a good description of a painting by Bacon.
Over the next few years, as exhibitions and commissions multiplied, Muñoz's output became dominated by sculpted and cast human figures placed in carefully choreographed settings. His repertoire of characters was exotic: dwarves, ballerinas, laughing Chinamen, half-human hybrids, which introduced a strong social dimension to his work. The dwarves came first; they recall the court dwarves so sympathetically observed by Velázquez. Muñoz explained how this came about: "I don't seem to be able to make a person that I know. Because of the 'otherness' of figures, I think they create a wide distance between the spectator and the object.
"I talked to many friends in Madrid to see if they knew where I could find a dwarf. Someone advised me to go to this bar and talk with a waiter who knew a man called George. I went and left my number, and he called me. We arranged to meet. He asked me how he would recognise me, and I thought, that's the right question. He is putting me in the position that I am putting him in. In a way, I was terrified by this question. When I cast his face, it was covered with a white blanket and plaster - it made a horrific image. But it would never be him. I would never demean George, or myself. I do not reproduce any real human beings."
"George" was invariably shown standing to attention, eyes and mouth shut, a pint-sized general in settings that posed Swiftian questions about scale and difference. He was variously shown isolated in the middle of a gallery, "dwarfed" by three freestanding columns, or half-hidden inside a prompter's box inserted into a "dwarf height" stage. A female dwarf, "Sara", was more mobile. Muñoz showed her admiring herself in the mirror, or, in aspiring dominatrix mode, resting her heels on a broken chair. Muñoz never combined male and female figures in a single work; the sexes are always segregated, something that adds to the strained, non-familial atmosphere.
Muñoz's "bronze sorcery" reached its sardonic peak in the Conversation Piece series, the first of which dates from 1991. Each piece is a distorted life-cast that consists of an eyeless male upper body - all with a slightly different expression and pose - sunk into a bulbous semi-spherical base, like a child's toy. The upper bodies are thickly draped, and the fabric merges seamlessly with the base, like a straitjacket. (This may be why their creepiest showing was at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, which occupies the former Kilmainham prison.) They resemble a creature that has only half-hatched out of its chrysalis. But the feeling of arrested development goes with a streamlined self-containment that makes them seem indestructible. They confer with each other, as if in secret conclave, and sometimes a figure leans against the wall, an eavesdropping inquisitor whom Goya might have enjoyed.
Looking back, Double Bind has come to seem like a grand finale. Not only was it Muñoz's last and most ambitious work, it was also something of a homage to his London experiences. The title derives from Gregory Bateson's theory of the schizophrenic "double bind" - where a person receives a demand from a superior that he finds impossible to fulfil - which was hotly debated in British psychoanalytic circles in the 1970s. Even more importantly, the populated underbelly of Double Bind can be seen as a brilliant reworking of Francis Bacon's triptychs, some of which were on display in a room overlooking the Turbine Hall in the then recently opened Tate Modern.
By inserting two false floors, the far end of the Turbine Hall was divided into three levels. This tripartite structure, with two empty lifts passing continuously through the floors, suggested the work was eschatological, though there was no clear indication of which level might be hell, purgatory or heaven. The top level, consisting of a floor marked out like a minimalist cemetery awaiting the resurrection of the dead, could be viewed from the Turbine Hall's central bridge, but only the ground floor was physically accessible. This area became a basement illuminated by square apertures cut into the ceiling. These opened upwards into austere, white-walled compartments with louvred windows, like storerooms in a large building. The walls of these compartments were set back slightly, leaving a ledge on which a series of all-white male life-casts in a variety of busy-looking poses could be glimpsed.
The inmates of this sculptural polyptych were some of Muñoz's most dynamic and extrovert male figures - even down to the exuberantly emphatic way in which they clamped their eyes shut. Through one of the apertures, we could see four fully clothed men lined up one behind the other, in a weird approximation of gay group sex in a storeroom. Here, the closed eyes suggested both ecstasy and hilarity. Their notional blindness made us more intensely aware of the openness of our own eyes, and of our potential role as voyeurs. When we look at a Bacon image of writhing male lovers (as in the Tate's Triptych - August 1972), we are usually situated above them or on the same level, and they are a spin-cycle blur. Here, we had a clear, if partial, view and were situated far below, like sewer rats or members of an underclass.
Muñoz died suddenly on August 28 2001, a couple of months after the unveiling of Double Bind. Without him, contemporary art seems that bit slicker. Few recent artists have been so adept at inducing status anxiety in the viewer. By placing a wide range of types - physical, racial and social - in uncertain situations, and by deftly scrambling both architecture and body language, Muñoz unglued tired eyes.
· Juan Muñoz: A Retrospective is at Tate Modern, London SE1, from January 24 to April 27. Details: 020-7887 8888 or tate.org.uk
