Vik Muniz
"Vik Muniz" by Dionne McAffee, Spring 2008, pp. 112-114
Warhol’s idea that a copy of a copy is an original is one of Vik Muniz’s most powerful propositions. Muniz’s exhibition at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal demonstrates his prodigious appropriation of images and materials with inherent symbolism. Like ice sculptures, Muniz’s works exist simultaneously as images and as base materials, yet because they are presented in photographic form, their symbolic, somewhat abstract properties remain active, allowing for broader interpretation. The sublime in art is, in Muniz’s words, “the moment when something becomes something else.” His series Pictures of Clouds reminds us that what we see is determined in equal part by what we know and what we want to see.
Muniz takes imagery that is either familiar or ubiquitous and draws or sculpts it in various substances, including thread, chocolate syrup, sugar, wire, caviar and soil. The resulting pictures are exquisitely wrought and ephemerally crafted from conceptually appropriate materials. They also reposition icons of art history that have entered the pop-culture canon. The means of production are inseparable from the import of the images, ranging from the pathos invoked in Muniz’s portraits of Brazilian street children inscribed in street debris (in the Aftermath series) to the celebratory irony of his portraits of famous actresses rendered in borrowed diamonds. Aftermath and Pictures of Dust are the most haunting and poignant series in the show: perishable lives pictured in transient materials, and intractable art objects rendered in the pulverized matter that surrounds us.
Muniz is an artist who has fully digested the projects of other great artists: Warhol’s presence is everywhere, most notably in Double Mona Lisa (Peanut Butter and Jelly) (After Warhol) (1999) and the series The Best of Life, in which “memory renderings” from LIFE magazine are photographed and printed in halftone, thus returning the images to the public domain. Other artists referenced include Stieglitz, Piranesi, van Gogh, Pollock and Judd. Appropriating such a vast and esteemed range of iconography is brave, but Muniz deftly produces work with a fi rm grasp of the language of concepts—his art is well on its way to becoming a part of art history, and perhaps open to appropriation itself. What is most striking about Muniz’s works is the fascinating awareness they generate of the following: that when we see something in a photograph it may be the only time that thing will be seen, and that you also have to see it from a certain angle—otherwise, it may well not exist.
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