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Paper Mirrors – Nara Roesler Gallery

ghivelder — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 19:17:21 +0000

Nara Roesler Gallery, São Paulo
April 2 – May 11, 2013

Vik Muniz’s latest series of large-scale photographs deliberately evoke a double take. At first glance they look familiar, a gallery of stolen, famous images: Courbet’s Origin of the World, Monet’s Vase of Flowers, Caillebotte’s Rib of Beef, Whistler’s Symphony in White. But, on closer inspection, they are not quite what they seem. Each picture is a collage composed from hundreds of images culled from magazines devoted to topics as varied as motor sports to guns, artfully arranged according to colour gradient. This giddy mosaic of overlaid imagery, which dissolves the picture plane into a multiplicity of focal points, has been scanned and enlarged so that you can see the hairs, the fibers, even the cellulose of the torn-edged paper. Lit from a single source, so as to imitate the natural light of a picture on a wall, they look almost three-dimensional. Photography acts like a kind of glue, revealing a dense, rag-patch quilt of media imagery.

“They have to be ripped so they look more accidental,” Muniz explains of his collage technique, “as if they just fell there like confetti.” Muniz once had aspirations to be a psychologist and is interested in Gestalt theories of vision, pattern recognition and completion. The artist’s work has long explored the idea of the deliberate accident – or, as Duchamp put it, “canned chance” – playing on the tension between contingency and intention, in how the eye and brain work together to, as Muniz calls it, create ‘multi-stable images’. He has conjured up, for example, the Medusa’s head in a postprandial plate of spaghetti, and other seemingly miraculous, iconic images in chocolate syrup, diamonds, sugar and caviar, where they manifest, as if by chance, like the stained outline of Jesus’s face on Veronica’s veil. In so doing he hopes to bring tired, well-known paintings and exhausted poster store iconography (Chaplin, Guevara, Monroe) back from the dead.

In his collages, Muniz acknowledges the influence of 1960s rom affichistes, artists who ripped off bits of posters to reveal other imagery hidden underneath in their ragged, subtractive dé-collages; or Fluxus artists like Al Hansen, who reconstructed icons such as the Venus of Willendorf in waste matter, including cigarette butts and coke cans. His own work has long explored such contrasts of low and high culture, of the can and canon. Indeed, Pictures from Magazines 2, Muniz says, was inspired by his work in Jardim Gramacho, Rio de Janeiro’s largest rubbish dump, where in 2010 he collaborated with the catadores on enormous, classical portraits created from the debris amongst which they worked (the subject of the Oscar-nominated film, Waste Land).

“When you’re in Gramacho,” Muniz explains, “you’re surrounded by something that’s between object and substance. Garbage hasn’t yet turned back into nature yet, it still has fragmentary bits of usefulness, things that you can identify, but it’s very confusing and tiring to look at because your attention is constantly diverted somewhere else.” Muniz draws a parallel with the saturated world of images in which we live; one scans the exhausting overload of pictures in a magazine with subliminal attention before affixing on something of interest, much as a garbage collector scours the dump. “The feeling of it all in your memory is similar to the junk,” he says. “Making a picture with all that crap is very symptomatic of the way we look at everything today, full of distractions.”

In the contrasting, pristine environment of the museum, Muniz once noticed that visitors were queuing to look at the paintings from a privileged viewpoint. From this distance they could just sense the picture frame, allowing the subject of the composition to fill their visual field, while allowing their eye to go inside it so as to explore the materiality of the surface, where the painting breaks down into an earthy mess of oil and pigment. He observed that viewers sometimes moved backwards and forwards, rocking in a kind of trance as they explored this magical border between concept and matter. It is this crossing point, Muniz contends of the encounter, that is the sublime in art: “These are the moments,” he has said,” that contain in their transcendence, the very nature of representation.”

In his large-scale photographs, Muniz seeks to extend that moment of sublimity. The multiplicity of imagery used to compose his collages adds a mediating, third layer that further ensnares the viewer and makes reference to all the cultural and visual baggage they bring to their encounter with art. The individual pieces that make up the overall jigsaw are pictures in themselves that draw in and slow down the movement of the eye, frustrating any smooth reading. It is hard to resist the search for meaning, but Muniz tries to resist whimsical juxtapositions, preferring a maze of surreal non-sequitors: “a picture of a giraffe next to a firefighter next to a toaster – the crazier and more stupid the better” (this suggests Lautréamont’s definition of the beautiful “as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table). Everything is left deliberately ambiguous, so as to offer only the minimal amount of security to the viewer whilst capturing them in a maze of confusing possibility: “I try to avoid any kind of closure,” Muniz says, “The moment you find closure in a picture your motion is to pull away from it.”

Muniz has a scholarly interest in optical illusions and jokes. “I explore both in my work,” he says, “and take them very seriously”. Much as scientist looks at optical illusions to show how vision works by exploring the moments in which it breaks down, he elaborates, linguists look at humor to understand language. At the climax of a joke, the rickety structure that has been conjured up in the mind of the listener suddenly collapses. “At that particular moment you laugh and, momentarily, you’re free,” Muniz explains. “It’s that moment I want to capture in my art – the moment where you have to deal with things yourself – and you have to allow a lot of ambiguity to let that happen… In a way I want my art to work as a machine that facilitates that happening. I’m the watchmaker, working in the back, manipulating the gears in a certain way.”

APERTURE REMIX

ghivelder — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 14:44:16 +0000

APERTURE REMIX:
A SIXTIETH-ANNIVERSARY
CELEBRATION

Featuring new work by Rinko Kawauchi, Vik Muniz,
Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs, Martin Parr, Doug Rickard,
Viviane Sassen, Alec Soth, Penelope Umbrico, and James Welling

Exhibition on view:
Wednesday, October 17–Saturday, November 17, 2012
Aperture Gallery, New York

http://www.aperture.org/2012/10/aperture-remix/

Scrap Metal

ghivelder — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 18:24:54 +0000

MIT Visiting Artist

ghivelder — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 20:27:58 +0000

MIT Visiting Artist Vik Muniz presents a selection of projects relevant to his residency at MIT providing a rare opportunity to learn what an artist sees “behind the curtain of science.” Vik is joined by Pattie Maes, founder and director of the Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group and PhD candidate Marcello Coelho.

Co-presented by the MIT Media Lab.

Pictures of Magazine 2 – Rena Bransten Gallery

ghivelder — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 19:39:08 +0000

San Francisco, CA
September 20 – November 10, 2012

Vik Muniz and Carlos Saldanha are among those who create T-shirt design for NGOs

ghivelder — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 14:57:52 +0000

Karina Maia

O Dia Newspaper- 09/22/2012

The fashion world will be united to the Art world Tuesday, At 19h, at the Museum of Modern Art, at the event “Friends Of”, open to the public. This is because the artist Vik Muniz and four other names invited by him will launch – sponsored by Intel and Levi’s – a must-have line of t-shirts. The team invited by Vik is remarkable: The trendy brothers Humberto and Fernando. Campana, recognized by design work, Carlos Saldanha, the man behind the animation ‘Rio’, and Mark Bradford, californian artist. The five talent employed in creating the t-shirts that will be sold in stores Levi’s for $ 79, and all income will revert to the NGO Spectaculu, which enables low-income youth in the techniques of visual arts. The choice of Vik is justified. “I wanted to do something popular. Carlos Saldanha has its side on game and animation, the Campana are good at transforming simple things of everyday life in beautiful pieces, and Mark rescues the fringe in his work, besides being the artist of the moment in the U.S., “he says. When asked about their own production, he doze off: “Given the power of creativity I see in youth at Spectaculu, my prints are crap” There are more than eight years Vik collaborates with the NGO created by actress Marisa Orth and the set designer Gringo Cardia. He stresses that his participation in the event is totally filantropic. “I do not make money from it, I do it to help young people” emphasizes the artist.

Vik Muniz – CAC Málaga

ghivelder — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 03:38:08 +0000

Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga.

Sept 4 – Dec 2, 2012

“La mayor parte de lo que hago combina una actitud propia del pop respecto a la temática, con un punto de vista pictórico en cuanto a procesos y materiales”, dice Vik Muniz (Sao Paulo, 1961). Comenzó su carrera como escultor y la necesidad de documentarse con fotografías para hacer su trabajo le llevó a cambiar de medio de expresión artística. Moviéndose continuamente entre diferentes disciplinas como el dibujo o la escultura, el artista traslada la inquietud que siente al enfrentarse a la delgada línea que separa lo real de la ficción. La reproducción de imágenes de conocidas obras clásicas, rostros famosos o simplemente personas anónimas en escenas cotidianas, empleando materiales nada convencionales, hacen que sea un artista único en el arte contemporáneo actual.

Para Fernando Francés, director del CAC Málaga: “Al profundizar en el mundo de Vik Muniz se tiene la necesidad de encontrar elementos reconocibles para reconstruir la realidad que el artista brasileño evoca en cada uno de sus trabajos. Una realidad que conjuga elementos habituales en el povera y en el pop, en elcollage y en la instalación, pero no tanto en la fotografía. Pero éste no es un juego fácil. Hay que ser consciente de que Vik Muniz lanza señuelos tramposos en todas sus obras. Invita al espectador a dejarse llevar por la apariencia de una imagen directa e inmediata a primera vista, especialmente a cierta distancia, para después, cuando éste se acerca, pueda descubrir el engaño. Es tarde ya. La obra ha cazado al espectador y la sorpresa no es otra cosa que la prueba de una red que cautiva la mirada sin poder ésta ya dejar de ser cautiva”.

Este ‘juego’ provoca que en el trabajo de Vik Muniz haya que tener en cuenta todo el contexto, el entorno, y la forma en la que su obra llega al público. El artista ha plasmado iconos reconocidos del arte actual y obras clásicas con una mirada diferente, incluso que llega a engañar al espectador: desde cierta distancia, la imagen representa obras de arte o rostros de personalidades conocidas, pero a medida que el espectador se acerca descubre el material del que están hechos, los detalles reflejados, y si bien en alguna ocasión no reproduce fielmente la imagen original, el espectador la reconoce a la perfección, con el ingrediente sorpresa de descubrir de qué está hecho, como Narcisus (2006), lienzo original de Caravaggio, pero representado con basura y trastos viejos.

El artista brasileño maneja como nadie la ilusión óptica. Ante su trabajo se aprecia una propuesta diferente y otra perspectiva de reinterpretar el arte. El ingrediente de denuncia social está presente en su obra. Los materiales no son escogidos por casualidad o porque puedan encajar visualmente mejor en el resultado final. Al crear rostros de estrellas de Hollywood con diamantes (Elizabeth Taylor, 2004) se deduce una intención por hacer eternas a determinadas personas famosas. Algo similar ocurre cuando trabaja con azúcar (Valentina, The Fastest, 1996) y los niños de las plantaciones, o al representar a personalidades brasileñas que aparecen a diario en las revistas de sociedad, incluyéndose a sí mismo, (Self Portrait, 2003) con trozos de papel de estas publicaciones. El empleo de polvo acumulado en las salas expositivas de los museos, salsa de tomate o chocolate son otros recursos empleados debidamente contextualizados en su obra.

Vik Muniz ha llevado a cabo un gran trabajo de investigación visual. A veces, con series cerradas y otras abiertas en las que no sabe cómo acabar. En su investigación, el artista persigue encontrar señas de identidad que coincidan en los distintos puntos de vista que aporta su obra. Vivir en el extrarradio de una gran ciudad le hizo desarrollar su forma de entender el arte. Canalizó su creatividad fabricándose sus propios juguetes y dibujando ilustraciones de los temas que explicaban sus profesores en clase.

Su habilidad para dibujar le permitió ganar una beca con 14 años para estudiar dibujo. Posteriormente, tras no poder estudiar Psicología, Vik Muniz se licencia en Comunicación en la rama de Publicidad. De hecho, su primer trabajo lo lleva a cabo en el medio publicitario. Aunque algo frustrante esta primera experiencia laboral, gracias a un incidente pudo comprarse los billetes para viajar a Estados Unidos. En este país, el artista desarrolla su capacidad artística en el ambiente de Nueva York en los años 80.

En la exposición del CAC Málaga, el artista agrupa por series parte de su extensa obra, invitando al espectador a que se deje guiar por la ilusión que evocan las imágenes que recorren la sala principal y parte del espacio dedicado a las exposiciones permanentes, convirtiendo esta exposición en una de las más importantes que ha tenido lugar en España hasta la fecha.

Vik Muniz colaboró en 2010 en el documental Waste Land dirigido por Lucy Walker, que contó con su trabajo en el vertedero más grande del mundo, Jardim Gramacho, en las afueras de Río de Janeiro. El filme fue nominado para el Oscar a la Mejor Película Documental en los Premios de la Academia.

En la última década, destacan las siguientes exposiciones individuales: Beyond the Bonundary between Celebrated Painting and Photo en el Jeonbuk Museum of Art, Gana Art Center, Seúl (2011); Vik Muniz en el Nichido Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2010); Vik Muniz en el Museum of Modern Art (MAM) de Río de Janerio (2009); Artits’s Choice: Vik Muniz, Rebus, en el MoMA – Museum of Modern Art de Nueva York (2008); Vik Muniz Reflex. Museum of Contemporary Art, Montréal, Quebec, Canadá (2007); Vik Muniz Reflex. Seatle Art Museum, Washington (2006); Vik Muniz. The Pennsylvania Academi of the fine Art, Filadelfia (2005); Diamond Divas and Caviar Monsters, Fundación Telefónica, Madrid (2004); Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Roma (ambas en 2003); Model Pictures, The Menil Collection, Houston; Laberints, Espao 13, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (las dos en 2002); The Things Themselves: Pictures of Dust by Vik Muniz, Whitney Museum of American Art, Nueva York; Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro (ambas en 2001).

Vik Muniz – Mint Museum

ghivelder — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 17:59:25 +0000

Mint Museum Uptown

(at Levine Center for the Arts)
500 South Tryon Street
Charlotte, NC 28202
(704) 337-2000

August 25, 2012 – April 28th, 2013

The exhibition consists of seven large-scale photographs, accompanied by comparative images of the historical works upon which they are based. It includes The Birth of Venus, after Botticelli (Pictures of Junk), 2008, which is a candidate in the Mint’s “Vote for Art” project. It is one of six works by some of the world’s top artists and designers that will be on display throughout the museum. Museum visitors will cast ballots for their three favorite works from the field of candidates, and the museum will acquire the three winning works and add them to its permanent collection. Visitors to the museum during the Democratic National Convention are being offered ballots, from September 1-7; voting for the general public runs October 1 through November 9.

The exhibition also includes a work that was a gift to President Obama. Marat (Sebastião), Pictures of Garbage, 2008, was generously loaned to the exhibition by the State Department Collection of the United States Government. It is modeled after the well-known painting by Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Marat, and named after Sebastião (Tião) Carlos Dos Santos, a man who made his living from the age of 11 by working as a “picker,” recovering recyclables at the world’s largest landfill, Jardim Gramacho, outside of Rio de Janeiro.

Pictures of Magazine 2

ghivelder — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 02:10:38 +0000

Rio + 20

ghivelder — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 00:54:36 +0000

Acclaimed Brazilian artist Vik Muniz serves up garbage Guanabara Bay for Rio+20 earth summit

RIO DE JANEIRO — From the ground, Vik Muniz’s new studio looks like a landfill, scattered with discarded bottles, tin cans and trash of all sorts.

Rise above it though, and Rio’s iconic landscape begins to take shape: There’s Guanabara Bay, pretty as a poster, and Sugarloaf Mountain standing proud over sweeping sandy beaches and azure waters. All of it made of trash.

The Brazilian-born, New York-based artist is turning Rio’s detritus into a unique portrait of the city in his new “Landscape Project,” a meditation on the ever-quickening pace of consumer culture that he is creating on the margins of the United Nations’ Rio+20 conference on sustainable development.

The idea is to build a giant collage out of trash and then take a photo of it from a bird’s eye view. The resulting fine-art print, as with others he has done before, will likely look so realistic that many viewers will not realize it’s not a photo of the Guanabara Bay itself, but rather a photo of garbage.

Visitors carrying empty soda bottles, juice cartons, jugs of water and other trash line up outside the tent where Muniz’ landscape is being assembled. Inside, a projector set atop scaffolding casts a shadowy image of the bay, a slide taken earlier this month by Muniz himself from the nearby Santa Marta favela, or hillside slum.

Project coordinators instruct visitors on how and where to place their contributions: blue plastic water bottles for the sea and sky, for example, and green bottles for the hills.

The project that opened its doors on Friday has proved a hit among visitors to the “People’s Summit,” Rio+20’s sister event, an open-to-the-public forum on the environment. On Sunday, alone more than 1,000 people streamed through the tent to donate their trash. Few resisted the temptation to stand atop one of the collage’s jutting hills, their arms outspread like Rio’s Christ the Redeemer statue.

After painstaking deliberations on where to place the dainty plastic cup of water he’d just guzzled down, 14-year-old aspiring biologist Victor Hugo de Aguiar struck a pose as his mother took a snapshot.

“I’ve never been part of a piece by a famous artist before, so I want to do my best to make sure it turns out great,” said Aguiar, who eventually added his cup to the sea of blue bottles, yet another drop that would eventually make an ocean. “This is a day to remember.”

An estimated three to four tons of trash will be needed to complete the project, and the visitors’ contributions are being supplemented by a donation of generally bulkier items from a recycling group. X-rays, tin cans that once held tomatoes or green peas, detergent boxes, motor oil jugs, abandoned cassette tapes, Nescafe capsules and Styrofoam peanuts round out the collage. Bird’s eye TV cameras capture tape the evolution of the piece, and Muniz’s assistants shift around the visitors’ contributions and add other bits of trash according to the artist’s instructions that are piped in through their earphones.

From up close, it’s almost impossible to see the method behind Muniz’s madness. From the ground-level, the tent looks more like a recycling center than an atelier where an acclaimed artist is hard at work.

But viewed from the elevated scaffolding above, the piece comes into focus.

“We have a chance to meditate on our place in nature by making the representation a symbol of that from within,” Muniz told Associated Press Television News. “It may not solve all the problems but it puts you in a state to meditate on our own decisions.”

Muniz has worked with trash before. The 51-year-old artist is best known for his portraits of garbage pickers at a Rio de Janeiro landfill made, using the same large-scale collage technique, out of trash. That project was chronicled in the 2010 documentary, “Waste Land,” which was nominated for Academy Award. Some prints from the project were sold at auction and the profits donated to an association representing the garbage pickers. The prints from the new project might go to an environmental organization, said Daisy Santos Soares, one of three of Muniz’s assistants working on the collage.

The piece was commissioned by the Brazilian Ministry of Culture and is partially underwritten by corporate sponsors including Coca Cola and Rio-based newspaper O Globo.

Normally, each collage takes about three weeks to complete, but the “Landscape Project” is slated to wrap up in just seven days, by the last day of the Rio+20 conference on Friday.

“I think this is a good idea to try to make people realize what we’re doing to the planet,” said teenage visitor Aguiar. “The politicians can talk all they want, but if they don’t convince people to change the way we’re living, we’re not going to be along for much longer.”

Associated Press Television News producer Flora Charner contributed to this report from Rio de Janeiro