Working with incongruous materials – thread, jam, chocolate syrup, ketchup, dust, toys, pigment, etc – chosen for their relationship to the image that they depict, Vik Muniz reconstructs images taken from art history or the media, images that belong to our visual collective history and that always resemble the memory we have of them. These images are then photographed in order to renounce the origins from which they spring and thus creating an illusory representation: from the best-known 19th century landscapes recreated with thread, to the fetishized images by Warhol recreated in chocolate, from the “Pictures of Dust” made for Vik’s exhibition at the Whitney Museum, to the “Pictures of Color” and the “Pictures of Air” shown at the Venice Biennale, to the images in diamonds and caviar of the series “Diamond Divas” and “Caviar Monsters”… the allusions are varied, the illusions are complete.
For the Gordian Puzzles series, Vik choses emblematic paintings such as the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, the Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat, and the Guernica and Demoiselles d’Avignon by Picasso, that he recomposes with puzzle pieces. Each image is made using several different puzzles printed with the image but cut differently, so while the puzzles remains unsolved, the image is “solved.”
In the Pictures of Paper series, Vik revisits the cultural and emotional relationship our society has with black and white photography. Inspired by the photographs of Brassaï, André Kertész, Robert Frank,Margaret Bourke White, Weegee, Andreas Feinninger, O. Winston Link, Dorthea Lange…, Vik recreates these images. Up close, the resulting effect is somewhat grotesque, but from a few steps back, the images are identical to the originals by which they are inspired.
Vik Muniz’s artworks offer an image that is sensual and ambiguous, but that interrogate the process of visual perception. He encourages doubt, and our ability to look at things and to analyze them: “vision is above all else a form of intelligence and recognition or identification is a comfort of sorts.”
Vik Muniz was born in São Paulo in 1961. He moved to New York in 1984. In 1988, Vik’s book The Best of Life, went missing and he thus began to redraw the images from the book from memory and then photograph them. The issues raised by this series on the nature of looking and the role of photography are intrinsic to Vik’s practice.
The documentary WASTE LAND follows Vik Muniz as he journeys from his home base in Brooklyn to his native Brazil and the world’s largest garbage dump, Jardim Gramacho, located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. There he photographs an eclectic band of “catadores”—self-designated pickers of recyclable materials. A handful of the few thousand people who work on the landfill are interviewed and photographed by Muniz, and eventually they are employed by Muniz for two weeks to recreate their portraits out of the recyclable materials that they themselves picked from the landfill (the “Picture of garbage” series). Muniz’s initial objective was to “paint” the catadores with garbage. However, his collaboration with these inspiring characters reveals both the dignity and despair of the catadores as they begin to re-imagine their lives. Director Lucy Walker (DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND, BLINDSIGHT and COUNTDOWN TO ZERO) and co-directors João Jardim and Karen Harley have great access to the entire process and, in the end, offer stirring evidence of the transformative power of art and the alchemy of the human spirit. This is not a sad documentary about poor people, the recyclers that are shown are quite proud of themselves. Some become pickers at a young age to help their parents, and some became pickers after drastic changes in life style. While it’s not ideal, most, if not all, of the pickers say that they are incredibly proud of their choices because their is more dignity in becoming a picker than selling drugs or becoming prostitutes. Watching the very personal interviews with the pickers through the art process you’re able to see the impact that Muniz and his art has made on their lives. More than just the USD$300,000 that was made through the sale of the art pieces (Muniz always said that the proceeds of the art sales will go entirely to ACAMJG – Association of Collectors of the Metropolitan Landfill of Jardim Gramacho). Waste Land scored 100% on Rotton Tomatoes, was winner of the Audience Award for World Cinema Documentary at 2010 Sundance Film Festival, nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 83rd Academy Awards, won the Human Rights Film award from Amnesty International and the public in the Panorama at the 2010 Berlin International Film Festival… The list goes on.
