When the industrial productive capacity ultrapassed society’s consume capacity the product became less important than its image. We live today in a world of images which we do not only consume but also we have started to communicate through the mechanisms that fabricate them. Any intention of subverting such situation can be perceived as a challenge though the ever shrinking space for creative thought is located precisely where we not only transgress but also dissect and expose some of the these mechanisms.

There is a great cheese shop down on First Avenue, where I go quite often, often enough to notice that the person behind the counter never displays a cheese without first cutting off one eighth of it. When I asked why he did that, he blantly answered, “It’s obvious….otherwise it won’t look like cheese.” To analyze the tensions between the objects and their images one must negotiate the position of the object in the historical time with the object itself, and the history of its own making.

It is 3:30 A.M. and the plane crosses the Atlantic on the route Rio-Madrid. At this altitude the outside world seems to be of little or no importance. Inside, on the contrary everything has a specific value which has been dictated by its utility Everything inside the plane seems to be essential and in the present tense. Useful goods are designed not to have a memory (hints about their construction) or a future (technological overlaying advances). Taken by this form of useful and civilized schizophrenia I start to search my bag for personal photos or a stupid or meaningless ornament (now I understand why Sartre wanted a grotesque meaningless ornament over the mantelpiece in the set of Huis Clos). I search for Proust’s Madeleine, a divining rod. Freakish, stupid, something that would not compete or criticize the system which now my life depends on. Instead something that would show me other ways to deal with such a system (In Sartre’s play every object in the set is used: the second empire chairs, the knife, the door, except the ornament. Garcin never suspected the only exit to the hellish fate of the “ living” eternally in the present tense resided precisely in the contemplation of that object, the merciful gift of the author to his characters). Out of the window the earth is a massive object, dumb and unique. But from down near its elements interact not so different from the elements in this airplane’s interior.

The broken, the dwarfed, amputated, retarded, the residual. One can make of failure a working strategy (in fact one can be quite successful in failing). Like the bad magician transcends illusion, failure in the only device one can use to understand reality. The object or the picture has to fail (in a sort of Christian fashion) for you to meditate upon it (remember 3 miles inland?) But since failure is also a mans invention (who else would invent a plane crash or a flat tire) the failing object , before it fails, has to conquer a certain complicity with the viewer (Clown seduction?!?)

Galatea and Pinocchio failed as objects to become human. But its good to remember that they were “more human” as objects than after their change. Pinocchio and Galatea are exceptions, mistakes that may change the way and order in which we perceive all the other wooden puppets or Greek statues. Like a vaccine they were processed and given back to the world of object (although they became humans they area always referred to as puppet and statue).

The Golden , the frigid Tin Man of Oz and Disney’s singing and dancing household appliances are for the storyless industrialized goods what the movie stars and circus freaks are for factory or office workers: the ultimate customized reflection, a vehicle for transcendence. Handmade or handbroke, used, overgrown, dwarfed or simply pathetic, the art object should always behave like a freak, a continuous changing twisted mirror, challenging, cheating, destroying and outlining the meaning and importance of all the things around us.

In my mind, the visual history of Latin America starts with a photo of a shirt. A strange advertisement; the soiled, blood splattered, garment worn by the emperor Maximilian at the moment of his execution, eternalized by the camera of his court photographer, Francois Aubert, in June 19th, 1867. Although taken by a European artist, this stunning image has epitomized the iconographic spirit of a vast cultural territory even to our days. The image is an essential Latin American photograph, an imperfect and ruptured membrane; a flag, a pamphlet, a cry striving to emblemize the cultural and economic divides of its fallaciously changing political context.

From Mexicali to Terra del Fuego history has never flown; it has always erupted intermittently forging a society that although extremely adaptive, has become chronically dependent on novel images to define its identity. Latin American images are not designed to document the passing of time; they seem to be made to keep it from happening. This frail sense of continuity has shaped an exceedingly history-conscious iconography; images that while overtly aware of their power and function always seem to be searching for an innocence they never had. The Latin American image is often a hot weapon seeking for redemption.

In times of peace, images serve the economy. They penetrate the innermost desires of the individual with the promise of personalized satisfaction, of distinction and exclusivity. In turbulent political circumstances, the cone seems to invert. Revolution does to information, what war does to science; it intensely promotes its development in a single direction. The past and the present become irrelevant; life becomes a balancing act over a bottomless reality through a dogmatic, but flimsy version of the future accompanied by a prevailing sentiment that the truth is never “out there”.

For most of my lifetime, the history of my continent was got to me in two conflicting versions, one sensed in the often incomprehensible clamor of society and the other clearly disseminated through the state controlled media. My formative years were spent dwelling in the vertigo of this chasm separating my reality, an ambiguous amalgam of reflective sensations of past and present from the opaque and synthetic adaptation presented by the “authorities”. A sensation that became more pronounced every time I became aware that no matter how thunderous the chaotic racket of popular culture announces its weight and substance, it is always taken as a triviality in face of the imminent requirement of an “official” story. I grew up immersed in this laborious semiotic black market, where information could be neither readily consumed nor easily dispersed. I think that the main reason why I decided to become an artist was to come up with a “grammar” that would explain and fill this divide.

The essence of our iconography always seems to emerge from this rift. It is precisely in the chards, the debris, the shrapnel left over in the concocting of these chiseled, monolithic information structures that true artists search for what is still preciously human. I see the true face of my continent reflected in the uncomfortable gaze of Martin Chambi’s studio subjects, In José Medeiros trendsetting beach scenes, I see it in the awkward posture of Alvarez Bravo’s longing adolescent girl leaning over a rail; a self, trapped in a body that doesn’t seem to be her own. I see the eternal plight of the individual trying to conform to something beyond its nature, a strange and continuous becoming. I see my continent in this search for the accidental, this illusion of innocence, and in this identity discrepancy.

Over the last two decades, globalist economic and cultural trends along with the advent of the Internet helped improve considerably the understanding of photography in isolated contexts such as Latin America, Africa and Asia. These movements have also enabled the local artist to speak to a much wider audience. This new exposure has deeply affected their production pushing it beyond local contexts and stimulating the creation of cultural artifacts with broader international ambitions. Contemporary visual production in Latin America has transcended its traditional vocabulary of tangible and objective themes but has not done away with its shrewdness, attentiveness and grit. Yet, the international market has still been reluctant in absorbing these artists into its high echelons.

American and European images have greatly helped to forge the cultural identity of the Latin America we know today. As our continent gradually ceases to be simply perceived as a subject, It will be extremely interesting to observe, in the years to come, if the favor may be returned and the fresh, vigorous and ambitious art of Latin America may be finally granted the authority to infuse some new life into the bloodstream of American and European culture.

“Interesting Phenomena occur when two or more rhythmic patterns are combined, and these phenomena illustrate very aptly the enrichment of information that occurs when one description is combined with another”
-Gregory Bateson

I had been working on three very distinct bodies of work for over four years when the need to put together an exhibition of “recent works” forced me to think about what these series had in common. In one of these series I used pure loose pigment to reproduce the images of familiar paintings as Tibetan mandalas gone berserk. In another, I used GPS guides, retro diggers and helicopters to produce and photograph gigantic earthworks that depicted extremely banal objects such as a pair of scissors, a saucepan or an electric outlet. A third group of works dealt with re-creating paintings depicting mythological characters using discarded goods, heaps of junk or garbage.

During my entire career I have always felt the need to work on different scales, methods and scenarios simultaneously to keep my interest alive on what I am doing as a whole. I try to do extremely different and disconnected things at the same time so one activity makes me miss the other paying no attention to the way ideas and concepts developed in one body of work instinctively penetrates another, no mater how it differs in material, scale and subject.

I asked Germano Celant, a great curator, art historian and friend to help me connect these last series into a somehow convincing format trusting his crafty ability to connect concepts and objects rather than believing in the existence of such associations. Germano, on the other hand didn’t have to scratch his head to think of an excuse for them to be together. With his characteristic nonchalant Italian eloquence, he told me, over the course of a bottle of wine, that it would be impossible for an artist, no matter how he tried, to work simultaneously on bodies of work that did not share a main central idea and the idea behind these works, although very general, was being made poignant and unique by the way that I was treating it in such different approaches: I was trying to define my relationship to the earth by the mapping of its borders.

All of a sudden the entire equation made sense to me; yes there was a common denominator, maybe one that unconsciously, I was fighting to deny because of its ubiquitous presence and overuse in popular culture. I was dealing with ecology all along, but with an ecology of the border spaces separating our minds from our immediate environments. In the pigment series, I was trying to point out that every human creation, no matter how fanciful or ideal, comes from the stuff of the earth. The Mona Lisa, the International Space Station, the paper the pen and the piano that helped Mozart communicate the creation of “The Magic Flute”, everything had to be produced from stuff dug from the ground, hence my unswerving need to display material somehow separated from subject. In these series, I was treating the earth as the only possible material, with its inexhaustible simplicity, flexibility and willingness to be shaped according to any human fantasy.

On the Pictures of Earthworks, I use the earth as a canvas, a support, perhaps saying that no matter how we try to distill the materiality that shapes our consciousness into a symbolic, linguistic environment, we are only left with that same primitive material canvas as the unexceptional means of fixing and transmitting our knowledge. If in the Pictures of Pigments, I was saying that every material in every human creation comes from the earth, here I am saying that all the human processes, techniques and languages can ultimately only be reflected on the environment where they were developed. In the pictures of Pigment, the vulgarization of the material, pointed to the possibility of a single primitive source of all materials, in the Pictures of Earthworks my intention is to treat the earth as a single unifying depository for all ideas and concepts; the source of all human activity can only be reflected in the way it leaves traces on its immediate environment. I wanted to bring Plato’s Cave to open air.

Ultimately, the Pictures of Junk and subsequently, the pictures of garbage, are a meditation on the effects of time on human activity. Everything we create, including thinking, produces an amazing amount of waste, and since we no longer have to stick to objects or ideas for a lifetime, we hide the unedited trace of our existences in containers, closets, attics, plastic bags, and hidden empty lots making us a distilled subtraction of what we no longer want to be. Working with garbage involves polluting a clean surface and cleaning it at the same time in order to end up with an image. The garbage here comes to represent the entropic chaos of nature, the loss of order and understanding due to an ungraspable complexity. When a figure or anything distinguishable emerges from this clutter, it is because of the cleaning and the reclaiming of the forged simplicity that lies beneath. All that mankind has accomplished in centuries of civilization was the separation of itself from this primitive chaos and clutter. The entirety of human knowledge was based on this kind of hygiene. What would happen when we can no longer separate ourselves from the waste we produce, when we will have to live with a less than ideal past that is not only a memory or a legacy but also a complex variety of immediate olfactory sensations and visual bewilderments? Until fairly recently, a society was being valued by what it was able to consume and waste. Would producing less rubbish make us less human? I have become fascinated by what we so desperately try not to be and what we are unavoidably becoming.

The earth was a theme, perhaps by then, the only possible theme, the source of all things and the end of all intellectual and material achievement. The only material and place for man to act and leave marks of uneven importance and effect. A scarred earth that is slowly becoming a massive residue of human significance, nevertheless the only reflex of our pale presence in the universe, where we see ourselves great, brave, and eternally beautiful, a beautiful earth.

I was born and raised in São Paulo, a city that not unlike Tokyo, Mumbai or Mexico City, exemplifies the struggle between the human drama and its set. Scarcity turns space and nature into valuable and expensive ideas. As I was finally installing The Beautiful Earth exhibition in Tokyo, I could not imagine a better place for it to be. In over a decade, Japan has placed itself as a great leader on environmental issues and despite of its being at the forefront of technological and industrial development, has kept a logical and productive dialogue with its natural environment. Japanese Culture’s extreme devotion to nature and simplicity has managed to prevail above material concerns in a way no other nation has managed to do it. Tokyo in particular, being the largest urban center in the planet has consistently produced intelligent solutions for waste and pollution management and control. I could not possibly be more grateful to the city of Tokyo and specially the entire staff of Tokyo Wonder Site for its unbounded energy enthusiasm and dedication to this project. I sincerely hope that this catalogue and exhibition will inspire others to think about their own relationship to nature at its most instinctive level. Only when this relationship is clearly defined, our thoughts about this beautiful earth will transcend the subject of mere survival and attain the dimension that will enable our thinking and our hearts to evoke real and lasting change.


Vik Muniz,


Rio de Janeiro, January, 2009.

First of all, I would like to thank all of you here. I have to confess I don’t go to artists’ talks very often, so sometimes it takes an enormous effort for me to give a lecture. I would also like to thank everybody involved in the Humanitas lecture series, especially Elena Foster who is here and is a generous supporter of the programme. I was a little bit hesitant to accept the invitation because speaking to an academic crowd always makes me feel somewhat uneasy. Not having been exposed to any kind of formal education, whenever I’m speaking at a college or to a group of academics I feel like a bit of an imposter. I’ve been involved in visual literacy and arts and education for the last twenty years in many ways and perhaps my need for this kind of involvement stems from the fact that I was never exposed to much education. Nevertheless, I think the feeling of being an imposter actually helps me in some ways. My parents were very poor. My father worked as a waiter his entire life and my mother was a switchboard operator at a local phone company. Because they both worked during the day I had to stay with my grandmother. I’m going to tell you the story of my non-educational development before we get to the subject of this lecture.

Self-Taught Dyslexia
My first memory, as far as I can remember, is this: I’m sitting on a grey sofa, a kind of greenish grey (almost the colour of these seats, actually—I was looking at them and thinking about it earlier) and I’m sitting on my grandmother’s lap and she’s teaching me how to read. I’m four years old. She drags my fingers around the words of an old Encyclopaedia Britannica that my father won in a pool game. It was the only set of books we had in the house. As she uncovers and covers the letters she tells me what the words mean and she somehow evokes the feeling, the taste, the scent of these words. She taught me how to read the same way she taught herself, without having gone to school a single day. She taught herself how to read by looking at her children’s books really hard. As a result, I was reading chapter books, as my kids say, at the age of seven.

I remember my favourite book then was Treasure Island, but it took me three years to learn how to write. Non-education has its benefits! Because I couldn’t write during dictation, I developed a system of shorthand notations. It was very close to stenography. I would make a little, very fast drawing for each word I could not spell. Those drawings started proliferating in my notebooks to the point that they started looking like the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was the only one able to decipher them and for many years that became a very marking trait of my personality: I was the kid who made the drawings. I made these drawings so often that at one point I started improving on them a great deal, and my identity as the kid who stays at the back of the class drawing caricatures of his teachers and passing them around started sinking in. One day I was caught by one of my teachers, the math teacher, who asked me to go see the principal. To my surprise, the principal wasn’t mean to me. On the contrary, he invited me to be part of an art contest for public schools. I remember the day I went to this place: it was the happiest day of my life until then because I met kids like me, who were still involved in a type of relationship with the world that most of the other kids had already lost.

Semiotic Black Market
When people ask me how I become an artist I remember a talk I attended with an artist from New York—actually it was Julian Schnabel and I can say it since he’s not here—and somebody asked him ‘When did you start painting?’ He replied, ‘It was at the age of five’. In my mind I was thinking, ‘Who didn’t paint at the age of five? Everybody starts at the age of five!’ At that point I realised I don’t know when or how I became an artist, but I remember very well when most people around me stopped being artists.

I was raised in the 1960s, in a climate of military dictatorship in Brazil. As a result, not only was I interested in presentation, but also in the idea of how information sort of floated around. This was very important to my development as an artist. In a military dictatorship you can’t say what you want to say so you have to resort to metaphor. All of a sudden you realise that artists are developing this relationship to language by stretching it, by discovering to what point they can express something with something else. My cultural heroes at the time were people like Caetano Veloso and Chico Buarque de Hollanda, who were pretending to write and sing love songs when really they were bashing the government. But there was a code—an underlying language—within these love songs that separated some people from others. People felt they were intellectuals because they could decode the love songs and understand, have an insight into what they really meant. This immediately made me think about studying more, about understanding history, and all of a sudden I began calling myself an intellectual.

The other trait of a military dictatorship is that all the information that comes to you has to be scrutinised, you have to know what it means, where it’s coming from, what it’s really doing. You become cynical. These two things—cynicism and a resort to metaphor—informed my drawings and led me to study representation a little bit more than its execution.

The Primacy of Perception
Going back to the contest, I won a scholarship there to learn academic drawing at a private school in São Paulo. I was fourteen years old. Imagine a fourteen-year-old spending an entire afternoon drawing naked people. I didn’t miss one class! I became very proficient. But there’s a learning curve in drawing. By the time I felt I was at the top of my game I started thinking about what a drawing was and how people understand things within a picture. I tried to understand the history of representation, but most of all I developed a keen interest in psychology. There was a book in the library—probably the only book there that dealt with this subject—by a Princeton scholar called James Jerome Gibson. It was a study commissioned by the US Air Force about trying to improve the interface between pilot and machine for the newly developed jet planes. In this book he talks about the body as a perceptual device. That was fascinating to me and I began to think about it when I was drawing. Because drawing is a passive activity, I began to ask myself of how I could make use of my entire body and so I started taking theatre.

Selling Ice Cubes
I tried to attend the school of advertising at the University of São Paulo twice, but I wasn’t a very good student. For two consecutive years I could not follow it and as a result I settled for a half-scholarship at another private school for advertising. I thought with advertising I would be able to bring together my interests in drawing, representation and psychology. What I really wanted to do was to airbrush naked people onto ice cubes and use them in whiskey commercials. It was a big thing called ‘subliminal seduction’ and it was actually what got me into advertising. But soon I realised I didn’t want to sell whiskey; I wanted to sell ice cubes. There was something about advertising that wasn’t quite fulfilling. After so many years of political dictatorship we’d reached a point of saturation.

My generation was tired of political songs. We couldn’t listen to another song by Joan Baez: we had had enough. There was a guy named Geraldo Vandré and I could not listen to his songs. It made me uneasy. My entire generation was, I would say, a generation of well-informed dilettantes who, instead of sticking to the programme of absorbing politics and trying to respond to them, really started downplaying the value of our opinions and started to study the mechanics of representation very carefully. We realised that it was by understanding things better or making people understand things better that we create more discernment, better judgement. This would be our way of influencing politics.

One day I was shot in the leg while trying to break up a fight. With the compensation I received from my injuries, I left Brazil. I arrived fresh in New York to a career in theatre. The theatre there offered me the same pleasure and circus-like excitement as experimental theatre had done in Brazil. To my surprise, the avant-garde in New York was emerging directly from punk and so, many times I had to endure spectacles like watching twelve naked, unattractive middle-aged men screaming obscenities for three hours straight, like in a show by Richard Foreman. There was that and then there was Cats; nothing in-between. I slowly gave up my interest in theatre and began pursuing what most people my age were doing at the time, which was going out drinking every night and rubbing elbows with celebrities. I was in the right place at the right time and surprisingly the East Village—that horrible, rat-infested neighbourhood—started becoming the scene of a cultural revolution at the beginning of the 1980s. There were clubs popping up everywhere and garage-sized galleries in which the gallerists actually talked to you! Can you believe that? There was a dialogue happening, and the scene was absolutely amazing.

I remember I started having a relationship with gallerists and going to openings at the same time that something very important was taking place. There’s a moment in history—and I think everyone needs to be attentive to it—when you realise that the tide is changing: your generation has stopped being a simple consumer of culture and has started producing culture based on everything you ever lived through. All the books you’ve read, the TV programmes you’ve watched, the songs you’ve heard. It was in the East Village that I began to encounter art that reflected my sensibility as a media consumer. Nobody had to explain to me what Cindy Sherman was all about or what Jeff Koons was doing. Besides, a lot of people were beginning to acknowledge the effects of the media on the conscience of the world. By looking at the art of that generation I understood my own confusion. Mine was probably the first generation of individuals who were raised under the spectrum of television. By the time I was twenty-something I could not differentiatea dream from a book, from a novel, from a film, from a TV programme. It was all a mess in my head. The art of these people was about trying to understand the precise point of intersection between the world of media and their immediate experience.

I thought about becoming an artist right then. I rented a studio in the Bronx and painted it white. I found a really cool modern chair in the garbage, I put it there and I said, ‘Now I’m gonna make some art’. I sat down on the chair and with outstretched arms I said, ‘Come!’ It took a while for it to come. Making art is about becoming a filter in which you collect the history of your time. The residue may become the work that you’re going to leave for posterity. The wider the filter, the more you collect, and the more superficial your art becomes at times, but that’s not a problem.

I have students in America who are about seventeen and sometimes I ask them what their work is about and they say, ‘Oh, it’s primarily autobiographical’. I say, ‘Why don’t you go live a little bit before you tell the story of your life?’ I hadn’t lived enough at that age, but my experiences were primarily filtered through my understanding of and my curiosity about media. I find advertising fascinating and I still have a great respect for commercial artists. I think people like Paul Rand are as important in the history of the twentieth century as Warhol.

I think design plays a great role in the way we see and interact with the world around us. I thought maybe I could do something that had something to do with advertising.

In advertising you give shape, colour and identity to gels, powders and liquids. And nothing else. You can create something out of nothing. I thought about making objects that had identity crises. I was a bit of a museum rat. I come from a culture that is opposite to this one here in Britain, where young trees are two hundred years old. In Brazil, the oldest artefacts that you find around you are from the 1950s. It’s like, ‘Oh, it’s very old, like thirty years. It’s from the sixties.

The first work I did was a series called Relics. This is the Clown Skull, a relic from a race of entertainers who drowned in South America a long time ago. This is the Ashanti Joystick. It’s so old it was made for Atari. Here is the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica bound as a single volume, for travel purposes. This is a pre-columbian coffeemaker. And here are the Tupperware Sarcophagus, the Disney Fetish and the half-tombstone, for people who are not dead yet.

Surprisingly, I got a show in a gallery in Soho, and the owner felt it was important to photograph the work for the purposes of documentation and advertising. The day the photographer came was the best day of the show. He came with two assistants, backgrounds, lights. It was like the works were finally getting the limelight they deserved. He gave me these really beautiful Cibachromes, 4 × 5 inch perfectly-lit photographs. I looked at them for a long time and realised something was wrong with them. To find out what was wrong I bought, at the age of twenty-seven, my first camera. It was a bad camera. I loaded it with bad film, took pictures under bad light, took it to the bad developing place, and when I got the pictures back they were good. There had to be a little bit more than chauvinism to this. So I started looking at the wrong pictures and the right pictures to find out what the relationship was between them. It was actually something very mechanical: it had to do with memory. The good picture was perfectly lit; it was a good representation of the image, but not for me because that image had a story that preceded that picture.

Children and autistic people or anyone who hasn’t had enough contact with symbolic exchange or written language, for instance, have an uncanny ability to rotate mental images on a visual field. We lose that as we start learning, reading, writing and even drawing more and more. What we do before we make something is to imagine it from a specific vantage point. So if I’m to make a sculpture of a bottle, before I make it I would imagine it from a certain point of view and then I would materialise that idea. Then when it’s done I would put it on a base, walk around it and when I finally find the perfect match for this physical object that exists in the world with the mental image that originated it, I’m happy.

The photographer had no connection to that image, and when I realised this I started thinking about mental images as something that helps us connect to something we encounter; that connection being the stuff of art. At the same time, I had a book, the first book I bought when I arrived in Chicago, called The Best of LIFE. I loved this book because I could approach anybody and say, ‘Do you remember this?’ and they would say, ‘Oh yeah, sure, the man on the moon. I saw that’. But you know, nobody saw it! It was almost like approaching an uncle or an aunt with a family album. It was something that could be shared. These images are Pulitzer Prize-winning pictures we’re tired of seeing, but from time to time we have to reload our memory of them just so we can have a more accurate picture in our minds.

I lost the book, and as an exercise—at the onset I didn’t want this to be an artwork—I started making pictures from memory, from the photos I had seen before. When I didn’t know something, I would call somebody who wasn’t looking at the picture and say, ‘How many buttons on John-John’s coat as he salutes his dead father at his funeral?’ or ‘The woman from the Kent State shootings, is she wearing a watch? Does she have a scarf?’ I composed these pictures in my head as they spoke. With certain images I had to fake some things, like the pattern on a guy’s shirt or facial expressions, which I realised are extremely hard to reproduce.

When I was offered a show for these pieces I didn’t want to show the drawings because they didn’t look very good physically, and I had grown attached to them after working on them for two years. So what I did was photograph them. I put the pictures of the drawings up for sale and kept the drawings themselves. It was a really good deal! When I photographed the drawings, I photographed them slightly out of focus, to erase the markings of my hands. And when I printed them, I printed them with the same half-tone dot pattern. It was the language in which I had seen those drawings for the first time. And so another circle was closed.

When I showed these at the exhibition people were more tempted to question the quality of the printing than the veracity of the drawings, because when you look at them, the important thing is that the picture in your head and the picture that I made meet halfway. So when you look at this picture you can relate it to an event, something that really happened in the world. This is what happened. That’s the main reason why I never got sued by the Associated Press or Reuters over the copyright of those images, because they are extremely different.

The fact that the images met in the middle made me aware of something absolutely amazing, magical: art is not something you can make yourself—you need a spectator, a viewer, an audience. It is a collaboration. We have this tendency to see things in other things. We want to see them, to transform the entire world around us with language. Proof of that is that when we look at clouds we always see things in them; things we know. I wanted to make people aware of that power. Another thing I discovered in photography: If you look at this image and you see, for instance, a guy in a kayak, a lump of cotton and a cloud, you can only see one of them at a time. If you see the guy in the kayak, you forget the cotton and the cloud, and so on. We are born with this handicap called attention. It’s what allows me to deliver this lecture to you, but it is also what keeps us from delivering three lectures at a time (I wish I could do that). It’s a bad thing, but it’s also a good thing because you can choose what to see. You just have to change your mind- set slightly. Why not take advantage of this? This is called a multistable image; it’s done by hand.

We’ve been doing this for a long time; it’s not a novelty. Like Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise in Florence. They are a perfect example of a multi-layered media structure in which Ghiberti used haut-relief, which was a medium that had existed for the longest time, and mixed it with a one-point perspective, which was the new way to depict images during the Renaissance. The result of that is total overkill. You get locked between two modes of representation, trying to find a way out. (Obviously this is a projection of that image, so you don’t get the effect that you do when you’re standing in front of these panels.)

Pictures of Wire
I wanted to do something similar, but obviously I didn’t have sixteen years to make a piece and I don’t know the Pope. So I layered two types of representation; one that is very old and we normally tend to disregard being drawing. I superimposed a simple line drawing onto a photograph, so when you look at it first you say, ‘Oh, it’s just a pencil drawing’. (It’s very small, by the way.) A pencil drawing is something you’re most likely to judge by the degree of likeness it has to what it’s trying to represent. But when you look at it you see that it’s not a pencil drawing, but an object made of iron. Sometimes, before you know you’re looking at something, you’re thinking about the way you’re looking at something. The encounter I mentioned before is actually provoking a conversation, it’s creating a questioning attitude: the questioning that’s necessary for you to really understand what you’re looking at.

Pictures of Thread
When I started making this drawing I went through a variety of subjects—this is a monkey with a Leica (I tried to put naked people on those ice cubes, but it didn’t work)—and I started trying to explore this in a range of subjects. The first pictures I ever made were lines, so I thought maybe I could try to play with lines some more and explore the ideas of distance and landscape. I used to fly kites when I was a kid and each spool of thread was three hundred yards long.

That meant distance, and distance is very important in the study of perspective. I started making landscapes that looked like old prints, but upon closer inspection were just accumulations of sewing thread. The photography versus the pictorial reading of the picture was very conflicting, and you had to navigate your way through that mess. At this time I also realised I was making a picture that was made out of layers. It was not something that could be assimilated readily; you had to clear one hurdle and then the next.

One thing that occurred to me was that if I relied on the work of other artists before me I would be extending that into art history. That idea seemed very appealing so I started working on pieces based on the work of other artists; in this case a work by Gerhard Richter, which is also based on a Rembrandt. The idea of standing on the shoulders of giants, the idea of schemata—that artists only make things because of other artists who came before them—made it possible for the works to become very clear.

The Sugar Children
From lines and from my newly acquired familiarity with the medium of photography I started working with dots. This picture is called The Sugar Children. It has a lot to do with playing with photography, because sugar is formed of crystals and basically a photograph is just that, silver crystals.

They are very pointillist and are done in negative. They also started something very important for me. It was after the recession of 1992 that I started creating these pictures. I was about to get a job and stop working as an artist when I decided to take a vacation. I traded work for a vacation on the island of Saint Kitts, where I spent three weeks playing with the children on the shores of a hotel on a black beach there. On my last day, the kids were wonderful. One of them took me to meet their parents and the parents, on the contrary, were sad, very weary people; humourless.

When I came back to New York I thought, ‘How do those children become those grownups?’ I then realised the sugar had been taken from them; the sweetness. I was reading a poem by Brazilian poet Ferreira Gullar in which he describes that road from sweetness to bitterness, and ends with a seminal phrase: ‘It is with the bitter lives of bitter people that I sweeten my coffee on this beautiful morning in Ipanema’.

I remember thinking about that and saying to myself, ‘Well, I can draw with sugar! I can also add the idea of taste to it’. Drawing with sugar is easier than drawing with a pencil because you can just lick your finger and move the sugar crystals around. And it also tastes good! I gained a few pounds doing it, but it also got me in touch with children. The subject of childhood is very dear to me in that it has never left me. For me the most important thing is that these pieces are now in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA New York, the National Gallery, and also in the library in Saint Kitts, where these kids came from.

Pictures of Chocolate
Taste adds something to pictures, I thought. But not just sugar, it’s too simple. I want to work with something that is a creation: not an industrial creation, but a cultural one. Chocolate can mean many things: it means romance, for instance (it’s a brown goo and still it means romance!), it means guilt. It means a whole bunch of things, but when you take something that’s very complicated and try to make pictures out of it you can gauge the interference of these two elements. The sugar pictures took a long time to make—these I had to make in less than an hour to be able to come up with a picture. Otherwise, the chocolate would dry and become dull and it wouldn’t work. I started from the upper left-hand side of the picture and worked my way down to the lower right side many times until I got something that was satisfactory. I made pictures of people kissing each other with chocolate and people killing each other with chocolate. For me it was a way of developing a relationship between the material and the image. And because I did them very quickly, I could do lots of them and improve my research: you don’t use elephants for genetic research, you use fruit flies. Here’s Jackson Pollock doing his scatological thing. Pictures of crowds were particularly appealing to me and the scale of the work started to increase.

I’m one of those people who go to museums and look at people. Sometimes it spooks people out; they don’t like that. But I sit around and see if they go by the left side, if they go by the right side. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but every time someone goes to a museum they walk towards a certain point—let’s say there’s a landscape right in front of them, maybe a Ruisdael, a beautiful landscape of a guy fishing—and then they stop as if there’s tape on the floor and look at it from close up and then from further away. It’s perfectly natural to do this because by approaching and then distancing themselves from the painting they’re doing the two very important things that you have to think about in art. First they see a picture, something that is idealised, that came from an artist’s fancy, from the mind. Then when they approach they get to see what it’s made of. It’s just paint. Paint is very mundane, it’s something that comes from animal oils, the earth. Most pigments come from the earth. As people distance themselves from the painting they see mind, and when they approach it they see matter. In this back-and-forth they can find the precise moment when one thing turns into another. That’s the sublime thing about art. When we finally connect or sense the fine membrane that separates the world we see from the world that’s out there through the limit of our senses. Only art can do this. I say this all the time and it still gives me goose bumps because it is something that is very important. It’s a way to connect our human sense to something that we virtually ignore, but we can feel.

From substances, I increased the size of my studio and this is kind of where my idea of working with education comes in. By increasing the size of the studio I realised that the scale of my work was directly conditioned by the studio and that I could do a little bit more than that. This is a toy soldier. I worked with toys because I find that art is a metaphor for playing, which is very important to me. Once you deal with things that have no consequence you are able to be more creative, and that can serve as a model for more practical things. People should play more often.

Pictures of Junk
I thought, ‘Well, I have a slightly bigger studio now so I can start making really exciting work. Why don’t I get a really big studio so I can make bigger things?’ It sounds like a cliché, right? Just trying to make big things. I had to do it.

There’s something very curious about these large works. You tend to develop a physical and haptic relation with the image’s subjects. You see an image that initially seems flat and suddenly the pieces come into perspective, since you can stand in front of these works and see them from a vertical point of view. On the floor of the studio they don’t look anything like that; they are elongated and trapezoidal. They are what we call an anamorphosis and can only be seen in this rectangular shape from a tower that’s twenty metres high, because the drawing is done on a forty-degree angle—or forty-five or sixty, depending on the width of the drawing.

I then started working with mythology, because mythology offers you very clear moral messages. Everything is black and white. You’ll notice that Saturn appears where there’s no garbage. Actually it’s not even a colour picture when you come to think of its making, of its process. It is just a high-contrast picture. But the idea that the meaning emerges where there’s no confusion is very important to the conceptual make-up of this work.

Speaking of big things, I am very informed by the art of my time. I’m not a Brazilian artist. I’m sorry to disappoint you —I know I was billed like that. I am an American artist because I developed my interest in art by analysing, studying and scrutinising art history from the time I was born. That means art from the sixties and seventies is at the core of my work. I think my work is influenced by artists like Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol, but I’m very informed by minimalism as well. Minimalists sometimes try to make impossible things—they try to connect mind and substance in the most beautiful ways. They’re almost stubborn about it. I think that really informs the poetics of what I’m trying to express most of the time. There is a gap between mind and substance that often leaves a lot of room for reverie. Spiral Jetty is one of these things. I don’t ever want to go see Spiral Jetty. I’ve been invited many times. A guy I know bought a plane and he was like, ‘Oh, I have a plane, we can go!’ and I said, ‘No. I don’t want to, because I’ve been to the Pyramids and I thought they were too small’. I want to keep Spiral Jetty in my mind just the way it is. It is big, sometimes full of ice; sometimes it’s in the night. I think about it and it’s beautiful. Smithson made a sculpture in my brain and because it’s so far I don’t have to go there.
I learned I’m also a member of a generation of people who learned about art history from looking at reproductions. I was brought up in Brazil—we didn’t have the Louvre or the Prado around the corner. The first artworks I ever saw were in the same Encyclopaedia Britannica that I described earlier. They were reproductions that were so bad you didn’t know if they were really good drawings or really bad photos. And they were tiny. I remember seeing a Jackson Pollock that was about an inch big! I was disappointed when I saw the big one. See, this is how it works: I wanted to do something with Spiral Jetty so I started making props in the studio, seeing if I could maybe create a relationship between the studio work and the real thing, trying to mediate my relationship to this thing that existed only in my mind. And I realised Smithson had had so much more fun than I did because he had actually done it.

Pictures of Earthworks
For six years I bought a local mining company in Brazil, which let me use their equipment and their grounds to make land works. Obviously I didn’t want to make land works like Robert Smithson, because most of the land art projects of the 1960s and 1970s were geometric abstractions. I remember the first time I saw a picture of Spiral Jetty. The first thing that came to my mind was, ‘Wow! How did they manage to take such a good picture?’ In my mind, the whole land art movement was just a photographic movement. So I wanted to go to the trouble of making these enormous pictures, really stupid pictures based on copyright-free images like clip art I found on a CD and then photographing them from a helicopter. There were thirty of them, some of them as long as one kilometre, but I mixed them with fake ones, some of them done at a scale of sixteen inches. So the fake ones made the real ones look fake and the real ones made the fake ones look real. The idea was to incite you to realise how much you know about pictures.

After a long time I stopped thinking I was dealing with an uninformed audience. It’s very fashionable for people to say, ‘He’s ahead of his time and no one understands him’, but I realised that if you have a pair of eyes and you know how to use them, you’ve been getting the kind of education that is necessary to appreciate my work since the second day of your life. That’s a long career right there. So I have great respect for my audience. One thing that is important is that when you are working towards this meeting point you have to be perfectly aware of what the viewer is bringing to the bargain. In this sense, working with archetypes, stereotypes or icons is very useful because you know people have at least seen things that look like that before.

Pictures of Clouds
The idea of making big things and placing them where nobody usually looks was very appealing to me, so I thought, ‘What if I did something that everybody could see at the same time?’

I always loved the idea of skywriting, but it is always used to sell stuff. What I wanted to provide was an experience. If you are walking around here in Oxford and you look at the sky you can expect to see a cloud, but never as a drawing. Before the idea that every single cloud can mean something else emerged, I wanted them just to mean ‘cloud’ and nothing else. But obviously this looks like a sombrero. This is a much better one; I did this in 2011 over Manhattan. Whoops! That one that went by very fast is pretty much the time you had to see these things drawn on the sky. I remember making that one and getting a letter from a couple in New York. They had just lost a son who was very involved in the baseball community in New York City and they sent me a picture of the cloud saying that at their son’s burial everybody looked up and saw a huge baseball glove. I said to her, ‘It was the wind’. I failed miserably at making a cloud that looked just like a cloud! This one was over Miami and everybody said it looked very phallic. I have to agree.

When making big things you work at a scale that is not ergonomical, so huge things like this have to be imagined before you can make them and still, like Spiral Jetty, they have a place in your mind. Small things are the same way. I’ve been doing a residency at MIT for the past four years, trying to develop things that are unimaginably small. I work with that machine and have no idea how it works. It’s called an FIB: Focused Ion Beam. With that, you can just blast ions onto a single grain of dust. Some of the pictures I’ve decided to put on single grains of dust are castles. The scale is so small you cannot move things around so these are like incidental imageries, just other grains of dust. We had to design the software to be able to do this,but also the software to scan it with an electron microscope. The beauty is that it is such a small drawing, such a feeble thing, that when you draw with the ions and you scan with the electrons, the electrons actually erase the drawing that was there before. So you have to scan it about five thousand times and ultimately you end up with the same grain of dust you started with. And they are massive. They are the highest-resolution microscopic images you can find.

At the same time I began working with the department of bioengineering because I wanted to do things with mould— things that grow, that I can make films of. I got a lot more than I bargained for. I worked with an Israeli bioengineer called Tal Danino, and we figured out a way to create these microsystems where we can actually grow living cells and bacteria. What you see looks like the wallpaper of your dorm, but they’re actually live liver cells. They are very large images: you can even spot all the nuclei. Liver cells are binucleated: most of them have two nuclei—it’s fascinating! Then we decided we were going to make a whole bunch of pictures like that. It turns out that every cell has different behaviors so we had to change the scanning process, the stamping process. It’s taken about ten years for this to come to fruition. Cervical cells move around very quickly, for instance, so they’re better to do thin lines with, and they have influenced the drawing process. For one of these pieces we got a circuit. I started with a few set patterns and then branched out to different types of patterns, like circuit boards, traffic jams and crowds. We’ve also been able to draw with neurons, among many other things.

Pictures of Magazines
This is a relatively new series. I started it about four years ago. It’s called Pictures of Magazines. Before, I used to make these things with an X-Acto knife whenever I travelled by airplane, but now they don’t let me take the knife on the plane anymore, so I have to rip it by hand. I call it ‘plane art’. When you look at a magazine, before you find something that’s interesting or worth reading, you scan it. All that scanning produces a kind of imagery, a kind of information that you don’t have anywhere to put. It just stays there. When I was doing the garbage pieces I realised it was a very simple project. The meaning emerges from the background, where the garbage isn’t. But this isn’t quite the way we see it in our minds. If I have one ethical responsibility towards my audience it is to show the world as it can be seen and imagined at this precise moment in time. I’m always trying to get to that picture. A lot of people have been to Provence, for instance, and they know that Montagne Sainte-Victoire is not the colour that Cézanne painted it. But it was the way it could be seen at that particular time.

I’m looking at this zebra and it tells me a lot of things. It tells me that pictures do not appear from nothing, they don’t just stand in the ether of your brain: they always emerge from a background of sheer confusion. It’s what you can’t recognise versus what you can, and it takes an enormous effort to focus on that picture and keep it there for just a little bit before you can make anything worth thinking about. At least my mind is like that. I’m easily distracted. Also the picture is just a composite of everything you’ve ever seen that is zebra-like or zebra-related so when you look at this picture you are lookingat it through the filter of every single zebra you’ve seen in your entire life, and it’s still hard to focus because the picture is composed of a myriad of little distractions that are non-zebra-like. Between the zebra and the non-zebra ideas that you have, you can make a very fleeting, very evanescent picture that may or may not be a part of a more complex line of thinking. I really enjoyed doing this series because it’s about information that is spread around; it’s about collective history. Things anybody can relate to.

Albums
There are other types of images that speak to us directly. My work has spanned twenty years, during which there have been significant developments in media. The role of paper, for instance, has changed considerably, as it has gone from being something you use to spread information to being something that you merely use to retain it, as a document. The photo album, something that exists in everybody’s house, used to be like genes: families would give them to the following generation and they would be passed on as a natural part of their cultural heritage.

I’ve been collecting personal pictures and albums for twenty years. I thought I could have money at one point to buy every single photo album that came on the market. Now I’m running out of money. In the past five years loads of bulk images have been put up for sale on eBay—and I’m still trying to buy all of them! I find these orphan images and I wonder, ‘Where are they going?’ They deserve to go somewhere and I can host them. I don’t have any more storage space left, but I started thinking about how every single family album in my collection is very similar. You open it and it starts with a baby picture. From the baby picture you get the Bar Mitzvah, or the First Communion if you’re Catholic, and it goes on to the first vacation, school, graduation. It always tells the same story, but ends at different times. These pictures that exist in everybody’s albums are stereotypical pictures. They are part of a collective; they mark the rituals we all go through. The individual pictures are what connect the person to the event. Something I’ve noticed is that I can go to a really good book of photography like, say, Photographs of the Twentieth Century, and I might like ten pictures in a book that has three hundred images. But I can go through a bag of three thousand personal pictures and there’s absolutely not a single one that I don’t like because these moments were deemed important by someone, they’re part of a history of somebody I’ve never met and will never know. They carry so much mystery within them.

I started to actually connect these two things by making these very generic pictures. In this case, that’s me. I only have eight pictures of me as a kid because my aunt who lived in Miami used to take pictures of me when she came to visit, and then she would bring the pictures the following year. That is also part of the reason behind my obsession with personal pictures, because I didn’t have any. Every single detail on the pictures has a little face, a little something on it. They’re made out of millions of other pictures. It’s a series that will be exhibited in three days in New York in an exhibition called Album.

Verso
One of the hardest things for an artist over the course of many decades is to manage their creative flows. I’ve recently reconnected with sculpture. I was invited by the Museum of Modern Art in New York to curate a show. I put together a group exhibition called Rebus that talked about linear processes and seriality. I remember the first time I walked into a museum.

I was seven. It was the São Paulo Museum of Art, an amazing museum created by Lina Bo Bardi. Lina was very aware of the fact that if you see an exhibition in which the paintings are linearly placed on the walls, you will see a completely different exhibition if you start from left to right than if you start from right to left because there’s a cumulative effect with each subsequent image that creates a sort of phrase, a statement. This is what my show at MoMA was about. What Bo Bardi did was put all of the works in glass panels, facing you, and it was a very beautiful greeting: all of the pictures in the museum are looking at you. You can go this way or that way and every time you visit the museum you’ll be visiting a different museum and going through a different narrative, a different story.

I have to say, it looks very beautiful, but as a seven year-old I couldn’t care less about the Raphael or the Velázquez they had there. What I was really into were the spider webs and the little rusty things that were on the backs of the paintings. We’re talking about the history that’s for everybody and the history that’s just for a few people: your personal story.

The front of a painting is supposed to look exactly like the moment it was finished, the moment it was varnished, and it’s supposed to look like that forever. The back of the painting, however, changes. Every time it goes on tour, it gets a different label. A few years ago I was walking with Lisa Dennison, who at that time was the director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and I came across something that caught my attention: I saw the back of a painting again. It was the back of Woman Ironing, a really iconic painting from the collection, one of my favourites, and I said to her, ‘Is this Woman Ironing? Can I photograph the back?’ and she said, ‘Yeah’. So I said, ‘Can I bring my big camera to photograph it?’ She said, ‘Sure!’ And I did it, and from then on I started asking all the museums in New York and everywhere else if I could document, measure and scrutinize the backs of the paintings. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I initially thought I would make big pictures, but they turned out to be really boring. With time I realized I wanted to make sculptures, so I created perfect life-size copies of the backs of very important paintings—they are not photographs, but photorealistic copies. This is the Demoiselles D’Avignon. I asked Kirk Varnedoe at MoMA if I could photograph it and I was so surprised when he said, ‘Yeah, sure, take it out! Photograph it!’. You start to see the painting from the other side, the side that only the painter saw.

I had to hire some really bad people, forgers, to make these labels and we had to manufacture the hardware that was originally made to stretch the paintings. My collection of famous backs of paintings was up to thirty-five at that point, and I bugged the Louvre for six years until they let me do the same to the Mona Lisa. As you can see I’m very happy here. I got there! The Mona Lisa leaves its wall the first Monday of November every year and on that day, not even security or maintenance is allowed inside the museum; only people who carry this little badge. I photographed the painting, and for a year and a half I worked with a group of conservators from the Uffizi—who are actually the people who care for its maintenance—to make a perfect version of it. It was cracked in the 18th century and was repaired with a butterfly joint. They made an electronic band for it so that if somehow it should open even a millimeter, some guy will get an SMS and will go there straight away to try to fix it.

I worked with the Uffizi team in developing working versions of the electronic band for my piece and actually allowed them to improve on theirs, so I have the new version on the back of my picture. The result is this. The cool thing is that they let me bring it back the following year to compare it to the real one and more than half of the people there could not tell the difference. This is me happy again with the back of my picture and the front of theirs.

Getting out of the studio, going to MIT, photographing bacteria, going to the Louvre to photograph things… All of this makes the world your studio. That for me is the most important thing. A few years ago I embarked on this great adventure. Prior to that I was doing a retrospective exhibition that was traveling around the United States. While I was putting together a catalogue raisonné I had the chance to go back to these twenty-five years of work and analyze it. When I was young, the main motivation for me to make art was that I wanted to be an artist. I wanted to be an artist and that’s it. After twenty years you don’t have that excuse anymore. You are an artist. You’re actually getting old. And then what’s moving you? It’s got to be something more than paying the rent. It has to be something more than just having some spare money to throw dinner parties and things like that.

I started thinking more about why I was making art and what it entailed. There are so many things involved. It took me five years to have a second show in Brazil. When you’re an artist you deal with two things: there is a wide audience of people with whom you want to connect; you want to be in the world and talk to this world. But on the other hand you need rich sponsors in order to make that possible. In the gallery I was among collectors, buyers, rich people from São Paulo, and in come my father and my mother. They walk in, they feel extremely uncomfortable and I cannot in my mind put these two things together. It took me another five years to begin to make peace with this poor boy I had left in Brazil before I came to the US and started working, and connecting him with the society in which I now lived. I started to receive an enormous pleasure from this connection, from being part of a bigger family and being able to manage these two things.

Pictures of Garbage
It started here in England, when I did a show at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. Michael Hue-Williams introduced me to a producer called Angus. He came with a film director called Lucy Walker and they said, ‘We want to do a documentary about your work’. I said to them, ‘Every time I do a documentary about my work I get a divorce so I don’t think I want to do this again’. Instead I suggested—and this got me a divorce too—we do something else, we document a body of work from the beginning to the very end. And that’s what we did. I wanted to create a work about something that doesn’t inspire the gaze. Garbage is something we’re always hiding, that we don’t want to see. It reminds us of death, something that tends towards invisibility. For that reason I thought it would be very interesting to make something with that. So I went to a garbage landfill site in Brazil. I wanted to prove to myself that art was important, and for that I conducted an experiment in which I got a whole bunch of people together and I made their portraits with them. These people had nothing to do with art. They had never read an art book, they’d never been to a museum and they were only used to seeing themselves in tiny pictures that they took on the cell phones that they found. Their self-image was very different to the one we have.

I didn’t want to add anything to the equation so I used the same materials that they dealt with every day for this project. For three years we were able to produce these drawings and it changed their entire lives. The great thing about documenting this process was that you could see how their lives changed and how my life changed as well because it showed me that there is something else there. Art has the amazing power of humanizing people, of showing them that there are other things to do, that there is a—I love this word—diversion. Diversion in Portuguese means entertainment; it’s almost derogatory when you use it to refer to art. But in English it means a detour,something that strays from the way you go about things every day. Art has the power of changing the way you look at things and challenging your vision of the world. Doing that challenged my vision of the world. It’s that important, really. It’s so important that if you question it, all you have to do is, for a moment, think about a world without images, not a single one. You cannot imagine that. But there was a time when there were no images in the world. And a distant cousin of ours, as they walked into a cave, saw something in the accidental patterns of that cave that reminded them of something else. Not just something else—it reminded them of an animal. Not just any animal—it reminded them of a bison; a bison that had been hunted the previous winter. They thought of that image and all of a sudden they were thinking about the pursuit of the beast with their fellows. The way they rushed towards it, the fear. Everything came together at that moment: the blood gushing, the taste of the meat, the feast afterwards. Then it all disappeared and all they had left were just some cracks on a wall. Not happy with that, they picked up a blunt instrument and carved the missing parts of that picture, something that they had already imagined when they were remembering the hunt. And so they came up with the first picture.

What’s great about that is that the invention of representation is perhaps the most important thing after the control of fire.

Through this, they could not only see something that wasn’t there anymore, but they could also pass that along to their fellows. And when they died their children could see what had happened that winter. I see what we do today in museums, or even what people do with virtual reality, as the continuation of an unbroken straight line from that moment. From that moment we made amazing discoveries. We developed every structure of belief that involves symbolic exchange. We developed religion. We developed economy. We developed politics. To understand something you have to let yourself be fooled temporarily and by letting ourselves be fooled more and more we developed a language and a civilization.

The idea that there is an unbroken link from that moment to now is very interesting. But it is not quite so. Around the early nineties, very powerful technologies—image technologies— made a dent in that narrative by allowing us to cross the threshold of visual convention. Until then, seeing was believing. If you looked at anything and could attest to its being there that would prove that it existed. Technologies like Photoshop or Corel have corrupted our minds, and through them we’ve learned to believe in things. It’s very interesting. When the first image was made the whole tribe was probably astonished by it for like a week. The following week they would just go see it and say, ‘Mmm, it’s just a crack on a wall with some marks, let’s add a little color or some shadows’. The story of the development of representation is this: just a constant race between technology and cynicism. Cynicism is always a little bit ahead, to the point that the whole project of representation has come to a sort of closure. We’ve managed to produce representations so powerful, so convincing that we’ve lost the link to the thing that happened. That winter, that bison, that taste of the meat.

If I can point to a culprit in all of this it is probably photography. The implications of it are very serious. We learned how to believe and we knew how to layer these structures of belief until now. I see a lot of people changing their profile pictures on Facebook. They erase pimples and wrinkles. Sixty years from now they’re going to look just like they look today and they’re going to ask, ‘What happened?’ We’ve lost or made obsolete a vehicle we’ve trusted our entire history—both collective and private—and now where are we going to put it? How are we going to continue the process of history if we don’t trust what we see anymore? What we see—the authenticity of things—is not only confirmed by convention, but also by coding. Today, to ensure that something is real or authentic, normally you look underneath or in the back—like I did with those paintings. In this way we’re creating a system of authentication based on ignorance and exclusivity rather than one based on convention. It doesn’t seem like much. You think, ‘Oh, it’s Photoshop, it’s fun’, but I see something really serious emerging. There’s a gap between what’s represented and what is—a widening. This gap can only be filled by the only tool we have available, which has always been the way in which we perpetuate the driving force of culture: education. The culprit is an education that does not allow us to fulfil that process. With the development of photography we have lost the need to draw, or to learn to draw. Drawing is not a way for us to come up with pretty images. It’s an exercise. Before photography was around people had to learn how to draw to be able to relate to reality in a graphic way, in a richer way. The Victorians, for instance, were notoriously good draughtspeople. The idea of learning to draw—of practising drawing frequently— probably led to an entire generation of polymaths who were responsible for the Industrial Revolution in England. You have to acknowledge it has something to do with that. They had worked the right side of their brain to such an extent that they could make wild associations; they had an amazing associative power.

I’ve been involved in arts education for a long time. I’ve seen that happening. I think we now have a very clear idea of how visually rich education can enhance our understanding of the world we live in thanks to the creation of kindergarten by Friedrich Fröbel. It is said that Modernism is the result of this turning point where the entire social, economic and political situation transformed our vision of the world. But that vision wouldn’t be possible if people weren’t informed enough to have ways to describe it. It is a known fact that most of the early Modernist masters—I’m talking about Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Frank Lloyd Wright—were exposed to that type of education. Fröbel believed that when you start to get into the mode of symbolic acquisition these symbols are not just there in the ether; they have to have a strong background of abstract and visual education. At the same time, when kids stopped being artists, when they started reading and writing, that wouldn’t happen. They would still have the support of a very visual education. I think in the future, because we won’t have the comfort of a medium that can represent everything that goes on in our lives, we will have to understand what images are a little better. In the last twenty years our world has changed enormously and our perception of it has followed, but our education has done nothing to follow that progress.

I’m now opening a school in Brazil that’s based on the two types of anxieties that children have today. During the industrial revolution, public education was developed in the United Kingdom and in the United States to provide the world with technocrats, bureaucrats and soldiers. With time, that function has become obsolete and today I see that our education is simply creating consumers. But what do children consume? They consume images, which is what prevails in their environment, and they consume technology. And they learn to be passive about it. I think we need an education that empowers our children to make videogames rather than simply watching them. There are a lot of really amazing efforts to that end. Instead of watching cartoons, make cartoons! Instead of looking at drawings, make them! To become actors in this world in which they so long to participate. In the last five years, with the prospect of building the school I’m opening in a favela, I’ve been coming across amazingly creative people and great education is proliferating. I’m not the only one thinking about this, but I find it very hard to consolidate these things into one discourse. This is what I’m trying to come up with. But more than that this is the story of somebody who had no artistic education and is now talking about artistic education. I don’t think I would be a better artist if I had received a formal artistic education. I probably wouldn’t be an artist at all. I went to a meeting in New York a few years ago where they were giving a prize to a teacher who was an amazing arts educator. The first thing she did was show a huge bruise on her arm. She told us she had gotten it that day and went on to say: ‘I’ve been teaching art for the last twenty-five years and I’ve never, in these twenty-five years, formed a single important artist. But I formed better policemen, better lawyers, better doctors. And I wish, from the bottom of my heart, that I had formed the nurse that drew blood from me this morning.’

Art humanises. It makes us aware of a world beyond our immediate existence. The job of improving, updating and making people aware of this world that extends beyond us is assumed to be the job of an artist. But I’ve think it shouldn’t be. Otherwise art would turn into some boring didacticism (just as I’m probably boring you now by talking so much). I also think art should expand into education; it was there once, but has now been robbed from it.

Thank you very much.

I first heard of Holt’s chairs in 1989 as we both attended a group show at the now defunct Meyers Bloom gallery in Los Angeles. After the press conference she asked me if I wanted to drive with her to Malibu to watch the pelicans. What about them? I asked. They can’t land right, she said. We spent an entire afternoon watching the comedic creatures crash land while talking about what things were meant to be as opposed to what they actually were and how one notion obscured the other. Hearing Holt talk about meaning as expectation, and the hypotheses of the pelicans landing as gracefully as starlings if we lived in a world of language made all the sense in the world. Well, Holt would not get to these delicious logic quagmires from the pelican end of the bargain. While watching that aviary slapstick, between every disastrous touchdown, her intimidating diatribe would tap into Marxist theory, Adorno, Lukács and Jameson, weaving it through Buster Keaton, Freud and Monty Python, mainly for my comfort. That’s why I am doing the chairs, she said: there’s more to it than intention. Things do not necessarily become what they are supposed to be on the onset, even language can’t accomplish that, let alone political systems and cultural movements

For nearly a year, I followed the chairs’ development, as she rummaged through used furniture stores in the tri-state area looking for Eames chairs and consequently amassing a large quantity of them in her West Village home-studio. Holt’s studio looked like a huge car repair shop with a large enameled bath tube in its center. For over four years she had been working on a sort of twisted brand of conceptualism that involved over-burdening signs with materiality and history. Her pieces were something right out of a Lucy Lippard’s nightmare. It was like reading Tom Wolfe’s “The Painted Word” backwards. The degradation of meaning was a constant theme in Holt’s mind and that somehow did not align with the predominant discourse of art’s itinerary towards immateriality at the time.

The fact that her soiled, mended panneaus with a single letter or number divided a lot of opinions right upon her arrival in the New York art scene in the late eighties, immediately propelled her to the critical limelight. Legend says, she had already been a concert pianist and a highly ranked tennis player, and at twenty eight, she was one of the main precursors of what was later named “scatter or abject art” and became one of the most sough after names by private and museum collections around the country.

For us, artists, she epitomized the character of a post-modern superhero. She always looked like an Ivy League tornado survivor with her unraveled hair and her worn out preppy brand name clothes. Her battered shirts with Polo logos seemed like an extension for her enigmatic tarpaulins. For Holt, all signs and conventional symbols were markers on a complex conceptual gauge to monitor semantic entropy. The fact that she lived precisely and uncompromisingly the way she thought and worked left a lasting, profound influence on me. I would visit her often. She always had pizza and beer around. She spoke in fast riddles, with a soft voice and a disarming sweetness that seemed to settle all the paradoxes and the hypocrisy of an art world I was so terribly trying to understand. It’s been over twenty years and I still miss her as a friend.

She would stare at the modernist chairs, as if asking them to tell her their stories, to talk about their former owners and their former surroundings; one of them could’ve belonged to a freight elevator operator in a Garment District sweatshop, another to a 75-year-old Wisconsin widow. Three seats had been adapted to a bar and could’ve been the ones placed outside a gas station near Nogales or an airport in Panama City, another two samples, could’ve come from a kitchen of a childless young couple from Sacramento and another from a Greatful Dead teenage fan from upstate New York. She would distress them, make them cute covers and pillows, apply stickers to their backs and change their bases. She was doing to the modernist icons exactly what she did to her numbers and letters; she humanized them. The chairs were mass-produced, with a few color and base variations, but every single buyer, had a different name, a different body and a lived a different life. Holt’s perspective was not from production, but from the absorbing end of cultural utopias.

Wittgenstein once said that no matter how powerful a telescope could be, one of its ends would always be the size of a human eye. The art of the late 80’s was about self-projection and the re-mapping of the role of the individual in an expanded media environment. The art of the nineties shared similar philosophical concerns but within a radical shift in dynamics; instead of focusing in the objective, it emphasized the eyepiece. Two exhibitions in 1990 set the course of things to come: Mike Kelley’s “Arenas” at Metro Pictures with its diagrammatic Freudian tableaux comprised of play blankets and plush toys and Holt Quentel’s Eames chairs. In both cases, the mass produced object had encountered its redemption in its staining contact with humanity. The Inherent ambiguity of Kelley’s suggestive psychological schemes and Quentel’s traceable decadence of conventional aesthetics marked a clear break from the formal, language-based conceptual and political art that was produced at the time. It was conceptual art, but it had a smell, a patina, an ergonomic logic and a story that would seduce by its ambiguity and lack of closure.

Like the hard landing pelicans, Holt’s chairs were about what things tend to become if they divorce themselves from their maker’s intentions. While history heralds Charles and Ray Eames’ high modernist icons as universal standards bound to have a place in museums and books, Holt’s versions seem to tell a myriad of other stories. Since then, customization has become a luxury, not a consequence, and yet, these objects still have the power to make us think about the long forgotten symbiotic partnership between maker and user. Holt’s working process had always involved amalgamating the ends and their means. They were individual stages that while originally designed for apathy and restraint, streamed an eloquent verve of possibilities.

The chairs not only mark Holt’s most conclusive body of work, but also the consummation of her quick stint in the art world. More impressive than her vertiginous rise in the art scene, was her Google-proof disappearance. Unlike Duchamp, she did not announce or market her retirement. She pulled a Pynchon and simply vanished from the grid. She has since become a myth. Whenever I talk about Holt, even if I manage to fully control my nostalgia, people who know me, suspect that I am inventing the artist I always wish I were; a fearless ideologist, so unbearably connected to the world around her that she did not care about which role she would play in it. The writer, pianist, tennis player, artist, they were all versions of an individual deeply devoted to find a real bind between the self and its cultural context. She is a different bird at every landing still teaching me how to become a better pelican.

Vik Muniz
Brooklyn June 2013

Hokusai tried to paint without the use of his hands. It is said that one day, having unrolled his scroll in front of the shogun, he poured over it a pot of blue paint then, dipping the claws of a rooster in a pot of red paint, he made the bird run across the scroll and leave its tracks on it. Everyone present recognized in them the waters of the stream called Tatsouta carrying along maple leaves reddened by autumn.”
(Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art)

One generally recognizes representation based on the fact that the depicted image looks like something one has already seen, learned, or experienced. This mediation between newly acquired and previously apprehended sensory stimuli occurs through the faculty of “semantic memories” a process through which data is voraciously retrieved from the chaos of the external sensorium. Here, everything is “abstract” at the outset. Whenever the semantic memory fails to locate a precise equivalent to a given stimulus it compulsively forces the equivalence, making use of approximation. Thus, the interpretation of forms (abstract to one’s experience) becomes the result of an entirely personal process.

And yet relation appears,
a small relation expanding like the shade
Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill
(Wallace Stevens, Connoisseur of Chaos)

The watching of clouds, whether as a method of forecasting or a form of amusement, has gone on for centuries: What one person sees as a chariot, another may see as a bear, or as a gathering of angels. Visualization comes from within the observer. Consider, for example, that on a certain day the clouds overhead begin to form the perfect likeness of Dede Korkut, astride a horse with weapons drawn. If one is unfamiliar with the Turkish epic poem that bears his name, this image passes away unrecognized.

Despite its ambiguity, this hermeneutics of proximity lies at the very root the development of written language.

In certain non-Western languages, where graphic characters may have a more direct, or more even adverse, relationship to what they represent, the interpretation of a written text occurs in a far more dynamic manner than in occidental cases. The emphasis on calligraphy in Asian cultures has certain curious effects, for instance, when the writer tracing the character meaning “house” enables the reader to easily discern the type of house based on the formal structure of the character. In ideographical writing, the complicities between form and content are much more acute. One does not necessarily arrive at content through form or vice versa: There is, rather, an unaccountable simultaneity.

The numerical and alphabetical abstractions of Western languages have fostered a much greater reliance on convention and arbitrary assignation of form and content, paradoxically rendering their proximities even more distant.

In the West, the antagonistic perception of the relationship between form and content has generated material for centuries of ceaseless argument. Plato, for example, is perhaps the most prominent figure to isolate form from content (which for him didn’t matter at all). This “pure form” (virtually invisible to Aristotle) was to be perceived with the “eye of the soul.1)” Plato’s method was to move not from induction, mechanically tracking down elements shared by all species and subsequently compounding these elements into a new whole, but rather to discern the totality of that generic form in each particular idea, just as one makes out a figure in an unclear image.


Aristotle (perhaps out of annoyance) considered that form could only be known through its content, and content through its form. He reinscribes an inductive method whereby knowledge is gained through the collection of all individual instances. For Aristotle the enumeration of all specific instances on attributes leads to higher concepts, which are poorer in content yet broader in range. It is Aristotle who introduces the notion of abstraction as involving an increasing distance from immediate experience. A dynamic relationship, still in the form of a duality.

The tactic of declaring form and content to be the same simple renders the term meaningless and abandons them as tools. As soon as one pays attention to how the words work, both pure Form and the Oneness of Form and Content disappear into an invisibility not of transcendence, but of linguistic non-meaning. They go where mistakes in grammar go. They go where the vehicles of metaphor go.
(Thomas McEvilley, On the Manner of Addressing Clouds)

This ingrained separation has gone from a primordial principle to an extreme and routing practice. Today, for example, most creative activity seems to stagnate at both poles of this antagonism. As a result, we have on one side a disembodied form of socio-political conceptualism and, on the other, an auto-referential modality of a Greenbergian formalism, both engaged in what may be seen as a renewed form of Neoplatonism.

Things look like things, they are embedded in the transience of each other’s meaning: a thing looks like a thing, which looks like another thing, or another. This eternal ricocheting of meaning throughout the elemental proves representation to be natural and nature to be representational.

MIRACLES, OR THE MYOPIC EYE OF THE SOUL

Miracles happen, not in opposition to Nature, but in opposition to what we know of Nature. (St. Augustine)

Why is it that seeing a perfect image of a centaur in a cloud is not unusual; enough to be considered a miracle, but if the same centaur is discerned in the mineral patterns or in the external shape of a stone, it is undoubtedly miraculous? Miracles depend entirely on the notion of proof and substance.

The natural pictorial patterns in stones have often been considered auspicious emblems sent from heaven.2) The Shen-i chi reported the discovery of a turtle-shaped stone on which were written the four characters Li Yuan wan chi: “Li Yuan (Founder of the T’ang Dynasty) has every fortune on his side” — a sign that spelled out the heavenly sanction of Li Yuan’s kingship. Not reading Chinese, how many such portents may we have encountered unknowingly.

Less literal, and perhaps more suited to Western comprehension are the stones bearing amazing images of ruins, landscapes, portraits, and so on. Wonder passes immediately into certitude. It is, paradoxically, the loss of wonder that constitutes a miracle.

“…Moors, bishops, lobsters, streams, faces, plants, dogs, fishes, tortoises, dragons, death’s heads, crucifixes-everything a mind bent on identification could fancy. The fact is, that there is no creature or thing, not monster or monument, no happening or site in Nature, History,Fable or Dream whose image the predisposed eye cannot read in the markings, patterns and outlines found in stones.”

“…the observer is always finding fresh details to round out the supposed analogy. Such images miniaturize for his benefit alone every object in the world providing him with stable duplicates which he may hold in the palm of his hand, carry about from place to place or put in a glass case.”

(Roger Caillois, L’Ecriture des Pierres)

In his book, Roger Caillois gives a special emphasis to the Tuscan paesinas, also known as “ruin marbles” whose sections depict in detail the debris of classical cities. It is interesting to note that such depictions predate by millennia the birth of the cities portrayed.

Not only stones, but a myriad of natural forms and imagery have driven their faithful discoverers into a compulsive frenzy. The shape of a saint inscribed into the whorls of a tree trunk in Connecticut is said to draw thousands of pilgrims each year. Numbers found in the wings of butterflies are said to have won lotteries. There are stories of pieces of driftwood found in the shape of human limbs: these natural ex-votos are said to have healed the maladies of those who found them. Patterns in the tea leaves in the bottom of a cup have been a great tool for predictions and evaluations. In the fourteenth century in the south of France, a baker drew two loaves from his oven, one bearing the visage of Jesus Christ, the other bearing the perfect inscription of the word resurgum.3) God knows I have tried to find this word in a number of medieval Latin dictionaries with no success at all!

Recognizable shapes in Nature are as much a cause for mythical assumption as they are for simple affection. Ripley’s Believe It or Not has, though the decades, catalogued hundreds of photographic documentations sent by the proud owners of hermeneutical beasts. Cows bearing a variety of symbols ranging from hearts and numbers to swastikas have been recorded. Animals bearing the pictures of other animals are not uncommon. These syntactical traits elevate such creatures to the level of mascot. But again, one sees what one knows: One of the entries describes the case of cow whose hide bore a spot depicting the exact inverted map of southern Pennsylvania.

The basic premise of all these miracles is the metamorphosis of something totally ubiquitous into something entirely specific. Similarly, Rorschach’s aggregate collection of stains have begun to function in an alphabetical manner with the psychological language. Curiously, before this, they never harbored a referent other than themselves, like marble before a ruin, like a butterfly’s wing before the invention of numbers.

FABRICATIONS, OR THE NATURE OF FICTION

“…when you look at a wall spotted with stains, or with a mixture of stones, if you have to devise some scene, you may discover a resemblance to various landscapes, beautified with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys and hills in varied arrangement; or again you may see battles and figures in action; or strange faces and costumes, and a variety of objects, which you could reduce to complete and well drawn forms. And these appear on such walls confusedly, like the sound of bells whose jangle you may find any name or word you chose to imagine”

(Leonardo da Vinci, The Practice of Painting)

The same mechanism that induces the mind into ceaselessly associating visual “second meanings” to thing, also allows it — for its own amusement or convenience — to consciously force or introject meaning into the ambiguity forms. Not even the traditional objectivity of photography escapes such genre of manipulation. For example, material processed by the Warren Commission — as photographic evidence for a second sniper in the JFK assassination — shows, in its detailed analysis, ambiguous shadows and inchoate shapes, that according to the prosecution are meant to outline the silhouette of the supposed second killer. Examining the same evidence within a completely different set of references, friends of mine found in the same shapes the images of a moose, a cello, and an upside down monkey.

This transience of meaning among things reveals itself continuously. Perceptions are constantly manipulated so as to multiply significance either for aesthetic reasons-as in the case of botanical topiary-or for commercial ones, where subliminally one wonders about Dionysian frolics and written obscenities while gazing candidly at the ice cubes in a glass of bourbon in a magazine ad.

Metaphors, lies, misunderstandings, visions, abstractions. We may glimpse these semantic microcosms of forms with the same “quiet panic” with which we gaze at the stars on a clear night; as is often the case when we momentarily loose our tools of understanding and interpreting to become fully aware of the mind’s instinctive predisposition to fabricate thing for interpreting and understanding.

Adam, having run out of things to name and afraid of losing his job, started naming the already-named things after other things they “looked like.” Having reduced the entire universe to a system of categorical simplifications, we derive wonder and amusement from the occasional natural exceptions to such rules. But, perhaps, in the undecipherable essence of complexity, something other than the purely formal transcends the ingenuity of our senses. If so, the joke is definitely on us.

The author would like to thank Tom Zummer for extensive discussions and collaboration of the subject of this article.

1) Plato. The Republic, Book VII.
2) Shen-i chi, Anonymous, cited in Jing Wang. The story of Stone. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), p. 72.
3) Cited in Walter Cooper Dendy, The Philosophy of Mystery (New York; Harper & Brothers, 1845)

In a dark corner of the church of Santa Cecilia in São Paulo lies the mesmerizing image of the child-saint Santa Donata. Her prostrate position combined with the uncanny anatomical veracity and naturalistic coloring with which she is rendered gives visitors the charged sensation of watching someone sleep. The priest of this parish once confided to my grandmother that every two or three years, they had to open the glass casket in which the image rests, to trim her hair and fingernails because they had not stopped growing since the image arrived from Rome as a papal gift in the eighteenth century. The explanation of this miraculous phenomenon, legend has it, is that beneath the waxen surface of the statue is the actual body of the saint, preserved by a remarkable embalming technique. Its surface is meticulously worked to render the image true to life. In the 1930s, the image had to be encased in glass because skeptical visitors, drawn by the legend, would poke at the relic to see if it would bleed. Far removed from the Platonic geometry of the standard coffin, here we find a being encased in its own mimetic image.

I have often pictured those skeptics’ faces as they watched the dark blood ooze from the frail body of the saint, not sure if what they were witnessing could qualify as a miracle. Discovery, the unnominanted tenth muse, lures us with black holes, Klein bottles, and South American gods who live inside their own bellies, only to leave us with matroshki as consolation prizes. What is it that makes us desecrate sarcophagi and smash piñatas, travel to distant places and perform autopsies, repaint houses and wear costumes, slash canvases and wrap gifts? What is it that fuels this ritual of surface orchestration if not a fundamental predisposition toward pure and empty interpretation? Interpretation is the compulsive recycling of surfaces.

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearance. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

OSCAR WILDE, in a letter

As I stroll along a supermarket aisle, I notice that with the exception of those packages which contain liquids and powders, every single one bears a picture of its contents. If solid products were treated with the same ambiguity as liquids and powders, most packages would be opened illicitly. The instinctive understanding of perceptual shortcomings is the reason why people buy liquids in unillustrated packages when, epistemologically speaking, all contents of all packages share the same synecdochical mysteries inherent in powders and liquids.

Language as an organization of the more stable aspects of surface was devised to multiply the perceptions of seemingly fixed surfaces through representation. By enabling the senses to experience many surfaces at once, language has formulated a concept of depth and substance that convincingly probes the universe behind immediate sensorial stimuli. The problem is that, as this universe is experienced solely through representation, it is understood to be a feature of surface: Only surface communicates.

As language develops through the deliberate manipulation of representational surfaces, sophisticated systems of signs tend to become more superficial than primitive ones. In fact, what fuels linguistic evolution is this lapidarian thinning of surfaces. Photography, projected cinema or television are perfect examples of these attenuated surfaces. Knowledge is the painful longing for transparency and representation is its analgesic.

Varnish is to philosophy what formica is to politics: the isolating of surface into a manageable representational meta-structure of belief. The role of rhetoric is to simplify dichotomies existing in form, content, and substance into a dichotomy of representational surface and form, flattening complexity into a diagrammatic dimension. The fabrication of complex representational surfaces acts as a believable trompe l’oeil for depth and substance. If we consider the rhetoric of power as a quest for surface control, we will find in art – especially in painting – the ultimate simulacrum of this quest. Art as a twisted branch of politics is simply better equipped to generate such models because time for the artist is invariably in sync with the models she or he produces. The artist is the link between the surface and the promise of the surface’s own depth.

Painting, masks, effigies, ornaments, and stories: Ritual is the only possible venue in which to physically experience what lies beneath and beyond surfaces. Sensation, doubt, feeling, emotion, and wonder: Faith has little to do with pure interpretation. As surfaces emerge, new rituals should follow. The role of the artist is to adapt ritual material to contemporary surfaces.

As, recently, modern design has begun to take place at a molecular level, so does serious artistic inquiry operate at the thinnest crust of its perceptible environment. Art has always been superficial. Using the vicissitudes and ambiguities of visual ideas to probe their structure, the artist evokes superficial abysses – for whatever lies behind what we see and perceive can only be created.


Vik Muniz text originally published in Parkett, No. 46 (1996)

A Sunday afternoon in the Louvre — I could not pick a worse day to visit a museum. Wandering in, unable to decide what to see, I’m dragged by the thick flux of tourists to the Denon wing: The place where the Mona Lisa hangs. In the ample room, an endless line is formed by those who, for a second or two, will share a moment of partial intimacy with the famous painting. Nearly everyone in the room carries a camera. Some don’t even get to see the work with their bare eyes: cameras glued to their faces, they approach as close as they can, taking as many pictures as the patience of the next in line allows.

The steady movement of the line and its clicking possesses the aura of a strange cinematic event, in which each frame, after being exposed, departs to a completely different destination. This deconstructive “cinema” perfectly traces the trajectory between the universal image and its ultimate image for personal (even if mechanical) interpretation.

Like an eye test, each photograph will gauge the relationship between photographer and subject. Hundreds of thousands of photographs are taken here every year, and indeed the subject smiles differently in every single one of them.

Because of its reflective protection, it is virtually impossible for one to photograph the Mona Lisa without photographing oneself. An impossibility that can also be perceived as the most curious form of self-portraiture.

Either literal or metaphorical, this reflection seems to be a common property to everything in the museum. In their solely visual function (no touching please) all these objects and paintings seem to rely on the presence of the viewer in order to exist.

Reflection can also mean introspection: Thinking about a thing particularly with the notion of meditating upon a previous experience or event and its significance.

I look at myself in the mirror and suddenly I come to realize that not only my image, but everything else purely visual, can never avoid posing.

Both mirrors and museums are not mere subjects; they are subjectivity itself. And the same neurotic instinct that leads us to photograph mirrors (the mirror can tell you how you are but never what you are), leads us, in a social scale, to photograph museums: The arrest of this reflective convolution (the same one that killed Narcissus), the tricky metamorphosis of the viewer into the voyeur.

It is not the figure of seduction that is mysterious, but that of a subject tormented by its own desire or its own image.

Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories.

Narcissus knew that he could never have himself. But if he’d had a photograph maybe his tragedy would have been avoided.

Photography has enabled society to have itself through the evanescent disembodiment of its own symbols. More than just a copy, each personal Mona Lisa represents the theft of a fraction of a second form the (exclusively) visual life of the symbol, a distorted echo no two people can hear.

In photographing the unchangeable, we always end up with the same image. But in doing so we shift the emphasis of the photographic act from the subject to our own presence in relation to it. For some reason this makes me think of The Forbidden Reproduction, a painting by Magritte in which an apparently generic man gazes deeply into a mirror that oddly only reflects the back of his head.

Photographing the museum has not always been as ingenious and spontaneous as we commonly see it today. As early as the first half of the nineteenth century, photographers like Talbot and Fenton were already taking their (much larger) cameras to the museum; an instinctive and technical choice of subject that would eventually become frequent practice among major photographers throughout the history of the medium. But it wasn’t until recently that artists’ concern to redefine their own social relevance would allow the serious professional to borrow the eyes and perspective from his or her instamatic counterparts.

By coldly categorizing these cultural spaces with the same unflinching eye of the security surveillance camera, photographers like Hiroshi Sugimoto, Candida Hofer and Thomas Struff make the viewer oscillate between seduction and alienation, vision an voyeurism. Others such as Louise Lawler and Olivier Richon place their emphasis on the artifices of representation and value through a vocabulary of symbolic elements and conceptual juxtaposition. Zoe Leonard, as well as Doug and Mike Starn, enhance the distance between image and event. Concentrating on subjects consistently involving pose and display, they give back their subjects a token of material objectivity. Often creased and without touch up, their prints contrast the common place of universal imagery with the materiality and presence of the self over the subject.

It is a world where anyone can take picture, art photography has always sought uniqueness, some elusive “decisive moment” to set itself apart from the realm of drugstore snapshots. Defying these odds, this generation of artists has turned their lens to the most mundane of all subjects. Whether through directness of artifice, their remarkable efforts stand out as art in itself; something soon to be photographed by another Sunday tourist.

Vik Muniz text Originally published in Blind Spot, Vol. II (1993)

Life itself is not the reality. We are the ones who put life into stones and pebbles.


Frederick Sommer


The Good Picture

“Smile!” commanded the despotic man in the burgundy jacket. We obeyed immediately, only to be rewarded by the blinding light of a flash. At the age of four, I didn’t question why I should smile without being happy. Apparently, neither did my parents. Smiling for a camera seems to be imbedded in the genetic coding: even the blind do it.


Looking at the impromptu portrait from Sears thirty years later, I am struck by the fact that we–my mother, my father, and I are all smiling in ways we never did in life. Something had been altered; even my ugly orthopedic shoes, which I wore well after my thirteenth birthday, were nowhere to be seen. But somehow our smiles still manage to reveal the twelve hours a day my mother spent behind a switchboard at the phone company, the two jobs my father held as a waiter to support my grandparents and me, and my own confusion toward the world I was just beginning to know. Through the lie of the photograph, I can still discern the desires and intentions of my family as well as our striving to conform to the format of a portrait–to make the “good picture.”

Since the earliest days of photography its development has been linked to increasing control of the photographic process as evidenced in the final print. Traditionally, the photographer concerned himself first and foremost with issues surrounding the quality of the image: ensuring that the subject be properly lit and arranged harmoniously within the frame, timing the picture to capture the best possible moment, and retouching any imperfections in either the negative or the subject’s appearance.

Today, in the aftermath of significant breakthroughs in the field of digital imaging, the photographer’s control over the image is potentially unlimited. This new development raises interesting questions. How will the way we look at photographs change? How can a photograph be trusted as a reliable picture of reality? And how will our memory of the past, which is so often buttressed by photographic images, be affected?

Whenever a powerful new technology has been introduced in the past, it has forced the re-examination of existing technologies and their power and purpose within society. In the nineteenth century, the advent of photography allowed painters to move away from “factual” representation, and to develop a more conspicuous style of execution. Surface and texture became important issues, brush strokes more signature-like; the painting’s “truth” became embedded in its treatment of the subject, rather than in the subject itself. In a similar way, digital imaging has exposed long overlooked aspects of photography, forcing the medium to abandon all ambition toward either absolute truth or persuasive illusion, and to assume a more critical position. As a result, artistic photography has either become more casual (snapshots and unfinished-looking printing) or overtly staged in such a way that the viewer can trace the entire mechanism of representation in the image. This latter strategy, which allows for a greater degree of variety and complexity than the former, is the subject of this exhibition.

It is significant that this investigation of staged photography should occur at a time when technical developments in the field of digital imaging have ostensibly rendered pre-photographic fabrication completely obsolete. In the face of such sophisticated technology, set-up photography can be used as a critical tool to expose the photograph’s illusion of reality. By choosing to fabricate their subjects and photograph them without much artifice, the photographers in this exhibition ultimately resurrect a nostalgic view of the photographic subject as staged presentation.


Double Negatives

A kid I know was watching the Oscars. When the actor Christopher Reeve came on stage he said, “Everyone thinks this guy is Superman. I know who he really is. His real name is Clark something.”

When an actor pretends he is someone other than his character, he reinforces the presence of his role with an act of false denial. The play within the play in Hamlet, for example, allows the truth to emerge. A similar thing happens when we attempt to photograph things that are in themselves representations of something. The simple exercise of discerning what is real from what is fake within an image makes us instinctively raise and lower, like an elevator, the grounds of our belief.

Since 1840, when Hippolyte Bayard took an image of himself as a drowned man to protest France’s failure to acknowledge his participation in the invention of photography, we have lived with the knowledge that photography does not always tell the truth. However, the eye takes enormous pleasure in being fooled and we have even developed a taste for such hoaxes. The joy we experience in looking at photographs of fabricated images–the Loch Ness monster for example–comes partly from the fact that while these images (whether you believe them or not) cannot prove the existence of this mythical creature, their utter audacity an unreality has the peculiar effect of underscoring the reality of the world outside the photograph.

Although the tabloids that regularly feature such images are now produced by complex technological processes, most of their images still maintain a low-tech feeling; we can clearly discern the retouching, the intentional blur, the artificial materials employed to fabricate aliens, devils, and Elvis apparitions. These same imperfections, accidents and distortions have also become the semaphores of reality in today’s set-up photographic representations.


Making it History

The camera records what is focused upon the ground glass. If we had been there, we would have seen it so. We could have touched it, counted the pebbles, noted the wrinkles, no more, no less. However we have been shown again and again that this is pure illusion. Subjects can be misrepresented, distorted, faked. We now know it and even delight in it occasionally, but the knowledge still cannot shake our implicit faith in the truth of a photographic record.


Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography 1964

During the early days of photography all studio photographs were necessarily ritualized and in this sense, set-up or fabricated. The sheer number of exposures necessary to create a satisfactory image required long, ceremonious preparation not only by the photographer but also by the subject, who had to “become” the image beforehand. Still-life vignettes needed to be carefully arranged, portrait subjects well combed and dressed in their finest attire. Some even wore perfume.

The introduction of the calotype, a technique developed in 1840 by the British mathematician, scientist, and linguist W.H.F. Talbot, opened a new era in the history of image taking and set-up photography. Although slightly more complicated to produce than the daguerreotype, the calotype allowed a great deal of post-photographic manipulation and, unlike the daguerreotype, enabled an infinite number of reproductions to be made from a single negative. Manipulation of the negative permitted the photographer a number of corrections and “enhancements” that would not be noticeable in the final print.

In order to advance the status of photography it became necessary to reinvent it as “art” and by the 1860s it was no longer enough that a photograph simply be well executed. One of the ways in which photographers transformed the medium was by creating pictorial allegories. Allegorical photographs can be traced back to 1843, when John Edwin Mayall of Philadelphia made a series of daguerreotypes to illustrate the Lord’s Prayer. Later, during the Victorian era, the allegorical genre grew to embrace theatrical fabrications and dramatic lighting, and photographers began to expand their control over printing effects and manipulated negatives.

Theater became the main subject for the most notable artists of this period, including Oscar G. Rejlander, whose highly elaborate photographs such as The Two Ways of Life often involved the assemblage of more than twenty negatives depicting epic moral tales. Henry Peach Robinson, a contemporary of Rejlander, illustrated Shelley’s poem, Fading Away, using a constructed image of a frail young land on her deathbed (actually a healthy girl of about fourteen). Robinson’s photograph profoundly shocked the Victorian public, who felt it in poor taste to represent a scene so painful to look at. However, paintings depicting far more painful subjects were commonly accepted at the time.

Photography’s power to disturb and move public opinion was soon put to use in the coverage of the American Civil War. Fierce competition led photographers to enhance the shock value of their photographs. Even the dead were made to perform for the camera. Timothy O’ Sullivan, for example, physically re-grouped scattered corpses to achieve the horrific atmosphere of A Harvest of Death. In Alexander Gardner’s Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, the same dead soldier’s body appears in several different settings. In a similar way, although for a different purpose, Edward S. Curtis would later photograph the same Native American in a variety of costumes as part of his survey on different Indian tribes.

The work of pictorialists F. Holland Day, Guido Rey and Richard Pollock propelled allegorical photography in the twentieth century. Day, a friend of Oscar Wilde’s, gained notoriety through his dramatic re-enactment of the crucifixion (posing himself as Christ) in Study for the Crucifixion; Pollock and Rey devoted themselves to recreating scenes from famous Renaissance paintings.

By the turn of the century allegorical photography had gradually shifted its focus away from such complex fabrications and had begun to feature more mundane settings and scenes. But in the early 1900s the work of Photo-Secessionists such as Alfred Stieglitz marked a renewed emphasis on post-photographic techniques; for these practitioners the effects obtained by toning, diffusing and texturing became as important as the subject.

With the emergence of photographers such as Paul Strand and Edward Weston in the 1920s “straight” photography became the new artistic criteria. One outcome of its practice was the rise of a new puritanical attitude that effectively banned fabricated photography as the subject of serious artistic discourse until well into the 1930s.

One of the reasons behind the change of attitude toward photographic embellishment was the popularization of the halftone press, which finally enabled newspapers and magazines to illustrate their articles with photographs. Photography and text seemed to validate one another, fostering a subconscious belief in the veracity of the photographed event.

Paradoxically, while the lineage of straight photography can be traced back to the introduction of the halftone, the halftone also precipitated the birth of commercial photography; this in turn created a ready market for the manipulated images used to promote the new post-war consumer goods. As art historian Naomi Rosenblum notes, the idealized images commercial photography demanded “conflicted with the ÔNew Objectively,’ a philosophy that emphasized Ôthe thing itself.'” In fact, most trickery used to produce commercial images aimed at the crafting of “perfect moments” that seemed natural and spontaneous. At the same time, Rosenblum observes, Bauhaus and Constructivist artists and photographers, in a utopian effort to make excellence available to all, proposed to wipe out distinctions between fine and applied art.

Many outstanding photographers in the 1920’s responded by ignoring the division between self-expression and commercial work that the pictorialists had been at such pains to erect around the turn of the century. Artists such as Cecil Beaton, Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy and Paul Outerbridge graced the early days of advertising with their work. Borrowing the glittery glow of cinema, fashion and celebrity photography flourished through the lenses of Baron Adolph de Meyer, Horst P. Horst, Edward Steichen and Martin Munkacsi. Advertisers were willing to be influenced by what artists had to say about design, type and composition, even allowing Surrealism to enter the structure of commercial publications. Some of these early influences remain unchanged to this day.

This successful liaison between art and commerce marks perhaps the apotheosis of set-up photography. But as the world of commercial photography grew in complexity it required more specialization on the part of its player. Artists could no longer control the entire process: art directors, stylists, photo editors and over-demanding clients reduced the job of the photographer to that of an uncreative technician. The love story between fine and commercial photography came abruptly to an end.

Meanwhile, government programs such as the Farm Security Administration and photo-based weeklies such as Life, Look, Paris Match, and Picture Post, offered documentary photographers a wide array of employment possibilities. In America, the Depression was combated with inspiring photographic images, many depicting the nobility (as well as suffering) of working-class Americans. Lewis Hine, Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott wrote extensively on the importance of truth in photography and its social implications. Nevertheless, photographers were not opposed to “enhancing” composition and treatment of light in their “documentary” photographs. Margaret Bourke-White, for example, rearranged a line of flood victims standing under a billboard (At the Time of the Louisville Flood, 1937) which exalted “the American way,” to create a more “aesthetic” image.

In the climate of conformity and economic complacency of the 1950’s photographers turned from the social and political, and focused instead on more intimate and personal interpretations of the world. And to some extent, just as the invention of photography freed painters from documenting reality, so the new medium of television, with its ability to present images “live,” seemed more immediately “real” and so prompted photography to develop in other directions. Inspired by abstract art, many photographers sought to expose pure form, while photo-journals such as Life began to feature aerial, microscopic and astronomic photography.

During the 1960s and early 1970s artistic photography was predominantly documentary in nature; nevertheless, many photographers did begin to question the photograph’s documentary validity. This trend continued in the work of numerous artists in the 1980s, who often borrowed, and subverted, the manipulative strategies of the mass media.

With the introduction of digital photography in the 1990s, renewed interest in the mechanics of representation has developed. As a result there has been a resurrection of a low-tech, labor-intensive approach to depicting objects and images. Many photographers have abandoned sophisticated equipment to experiment with alternative cameras, many homemade. Others have downsized the apparatus of media fabrication to the intimacy of their studios by making toy scenarios, theatrical allegories, and “portraits” of handmade subjects.

The computer bit has leveled the hierarchical relationship of reality over representation, giving the image an unconditional autonomy. This autonomy is the ultimate achievement as well as the ultimate failure of the digital image. The more the digital facsimile astonishes us with its capacity to transform, the more it erodes our faith in all images. The photographers in this exhibition acknowledge this state of affairs, and through telling details enlist the viewer in the discovery and exposure of the mechanics of their illusions.


The Bad Actor

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Once during a third-rate performance of Othello, I had the chance to experience the beneficial shortcomings of perfectionism in representation. Joey Grimaldi, the actor responsible for incarnating the Moorish celebrity, conveyed, with heavy Brooklyn accent, hopeless stuttering and transparent amateurism, the image of a jester with his face painted black. During the entire play I observed no break in Joey’s embarrassing inability to persuade the public of the metamorphosis of his identity. As a result of this mediocre performance, the character alternated between Joey, (married, two kids, a plumber from Astoria who took theater lessons on weekends), and the jealous Moorish general in constant search of bad advice. The reality that leaked from the character of Othello made it possible for the whole dynamics of theater to become transparent and comprehensible. This frenetic negotiation, even though unable to bring to mind either the character of Othello, or that of Joey, illustrated with great clarity the essence of representation.

The difference between a chemical and a digital photograph is like the difference between a shadow and a ghost: While digital images (like ghosts) have lost their bond with the material world they continue to borrow its forms, whereas chemical photographs (like shadows) must rely on the material world to achieve their form. For the artists in Making it Real, the importance of “doing it chemically” comes from their innermost desire to preserve a link between fact and fiction. Yet just as the photo-chemical bond between reality and image will always exist, so too will the invisible differences that separate the chemical from the digital image continue to exist as hidden lies. As Lewis Hine once remarked, “While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.”

Set-up photography has consistently evolved synchronically with commercial demands for an idealized subject, and for this reason it reveals a great deal more about the photographer’s intentions than it does about the subject portrayed. As we start to unveil the patterns in the relatively short history of photography, we may be able to look at pictures with the same concern for their artifice and formal rhetoric that, for example, we bring to the appreciation of theater.

By choosing to play with the permeable borders between fiction and illusion, the artists in this exhibition convey a concern with out decaying belief in reality as something that can be impartially defined and objectively recorded by a neutral witness. In practice, fictional fiction is perhaps as close as we can get to reality. As theater director Constantin Stanislavsky once pointed out, the hardest role an actor will ever play is that of an actor, especially a bad one, for there is nothing within an actor’s memory that he can use to portray such a character. He will have to depend entirely on his imagination; he will have to act twice as much in order to make it real.

The point I wish to make is not that we have lost a grasp on “reality” we once maintained, but that the emergence of digital imaging is opening up new ways of thinking about the photographic image. As Fred Ritchin writes: “We have before us a chance to explore a new beginning, or at least an exhilarating turn. One hopes that the discussion will not simply blame or applaud the technology for all that is and will be happening to photographic imagery. The discussion should question the nature of photography and is potential role in our evolving society.”


What’s Wrong with This Picture?

When I worked for an advertising agency in 1979, my boss, a certain Mr. Souza, spent most of his time terrorizing us young trainees with a litany of techniques on how to make things look “more real” .He would always allow certain imperfections to remain in the last draft of photo ads: a speck of dust, a scratch on the products package, some lint in the model’s sweater “touches of truth,” as he described them. However, our “touches of truth” never seems to be the same as his. When we confronted him, he explained that the essence of hyperreality wasn’t simply about making mistakes, it was about being able to communicate them. Anything believable that happens in media, he said, does so because it carries a feeling that it should not have happened in the first place; that goes for selling deodorant or for reporting a plane crash.


I never forgot those words. I left the agency shortly after Mr. Souza got fired for sloppy work and decided to become a sports writer.

When the capacity for industrial production surpassed the social capacity for consumption, competition among manufacturers of goods forced them to invest the product increasingly with an alter image, a brand, an identity — something that would make their products seem different from the others. The advent of mass production also thought about a wholesale organization of the system of objects into large, generalized classes of things. Cups would be cups, regardless of their shape and ultimate use. In the universe of mass produced things the need for an idealized representation triggered a process in which the things themselves became less important than their images. Consumer culture faced the task of systematically minimizing the organic complexities of material things by divesting them of symbolic volume, by flattening their substance into the unassuming transparency of signs, by narrowing the gap that separates the object from its archetype. Making it universal in its perceived form and yet unique in its character and relationship to the user. By transforming food and other essential goods into objects of culture, man continuously reinvent the order that binds objects to their images; a young kid will call an LP record a bid “CD,” while a Frenchman will call a pickle a small cornichon.

There is a great little cheese shop down on First Avenue, and I go there often enough to notice that the person behind the counter never displays a cheese without first cutting off one eighth of it. When I asked why he did that, he answered with absolute conviction, “It’s obvious….otherwise it won’t look like cheese.”

The organization of the things according to their respective archetypes seems entirely logical in view of our approach to the development of interpretative tools. In much the same way that young birds are able to distinguish among shadows hovering over their heads, recognizing immediately the presence of their parents or the specter of a predator, humans are born with a basic set of semantic templates designed to ensure survival. The function of a logo is to explore linguistic patterns at this primary level of perception.

Photography came to symbolize families of objects not by virtue of its simplicity but because of its presumed transparency. With rarefied syntax, the photographic image crosses the threshold of visual judgment, transforming itself into pure subjectivity once it is stored in the viewer’s memory. If you are asked to recall the photograph of the Challenger explosion, for instance, you are likely to imagine the swirling trace of smoke in the sky as if it were above your own head but never the paper object in which this image was first encountered. If photographs have such a powerful effect at the personal level, what impact does the photographic image have upon collective perception of things and how, consequently, does it affect language itself?

Through the image, the object transcends its own life span, its perishable self. We know from experience that everything decays and changes, yet we fail to recognize this in images. Their fading or tarnishing does not seem to affect the subjects they portray. The damage is often perceived as simply superficial. In a brownish, decayed and cracked still life by Roger Fenton the fruit is always fresh, edible and undeniably delicious.

I remember seeing the fabulous Greek sculpture the Kritios Boy at the Metropolitan Museum and wondering about the time that had passed between its carving, its mutilation, the long period of burial beneath the sand like an amorphous stone and the triumph of its discovery, restoration and display in that museum. Shortly after seeing the actual piece, I ran across an anonymous photograph of the same sculpture taken immediately after its exhumation from the Acropolis in 1865. Unlike the real thing, the object in the picture produced in my mind no feelings about time, memory or oblivion; no history emanated from the picture, only a sense of form, youthful form, perfect in detail and texture. Although photographs are capable of revealing information about the form and substance of the object portrayed, I was bound to see the stone surface of the young body as the skin and flesh of a live object. The sculpture no longer looked fragmented (it lacks a head and forearms) in the photograph. It looked whole and integrated into the context of its original environment.

Perhaps the photograph of the Kritios Boy was better than its prototype, because it could be perceived in a way more appropriate to its origin in Pericle’s Greece, where the factual was often disregarded in face of the ideal. However, while the photograph narrows the spatial perception of the object, it paradoxically enhances its potential to stimulate wonder. It creates a side of the object that will always remain impenetrable to the human gaze; what lies behind the object, its occult aspect, will be forever hidden from the viewer’s eyes.

The photograph does not stand for the object itself but only for a particular perspective view of it, and the best possible view is often the one that comes closest to the archetype.

During my stay in Florence in 1993 I had finally a chance to see Lorenzo Ghibeti’s Gates of Paradise. The Renaissance masterpiece had a lasting effect on me. Here we find an exquisite command of three-point perspective combined with high relief; two anachronistic modes of representation, one numerically designed to operate within two-dimensional space and the other sculptural and analogous to the three dimensional vision. Ghiberti achieved a scale for compensation enabling one mode of representation to blend gracefully into another, creating form over a totally uncharted space.
The hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born.

The moment of the meeting of media is a moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them on our senses.


Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media.

To photograph a drawing is to forge a link between parallel forms of representation, to contextualize its synthetic message within the complexities of time and space.
To photograph an object is to transform it into mental substance, to map its regress into a state that predates its own existence, its return to an archetypal stage.
To photograph an archetype is to reverse the order of symbolic exchange, to retrace the trajectory of its interpretation from the image phase to the point at which it became an object.


Vik Muniz text Originally published in Das Mass der Dinge (exhibition catalogue), Ursula Blicke Stiftung, Kraichtal, Germany, July 1998