At MIT, artist Vik Muniz has pursued his interests in image production and visual literacy, working with researchers in biology, optics and engineering.


In collaboration with Marcelo Coelho, a PhD candidate in the Fluid Interfaces Group, and Rehmi Post, a Visiting Scientist at the Center for Bits and Atoms, Muniz developed a process to machine microscopic images onto millimeter-wide grains of sand. The images were later transformed into large, high-resolution prints.


With Tal Danino, a Postdoctoral Associate in Dr. Sangeeta Bhatia’s lab at the Koch Institute for Integrated Cancer Research, Muniz used bacteria, cancer and liver cells as the medium for a series of patterns and portraits. They used the bacteria as “paint” in much the same way that stencils or silk-screens are made. Muniz and Danino hope these images will increase awareness of the importance of microscopic organisms, which are vital to life and also can be designed to diagnose and treat disease.


Presented by MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) and the MIT Media Lab.


To learn more about Vik’s residency at MIT, click here.

Vik Muniz repurposes everyday materials, such as chocolate, ash, dirt, peanut butter, and jelly, to create intricate and heavily layered trompe l’oeil renderings, often of iconic artworks. Muniz’s highly-constructed works are not only “legible” on various levels but also call attention to their own legibility, conveying an image without concealing the language — or rather, the linguistics — of the image conveyed. In 2008, he undertook a large-scale project in Brazil, photographing trash-pickers as figures from emblematic paintings, such as Jacques-Louis David’s Neoclassical Death of Marat, and then recreating the photographs in large-scale arrangements of trash. The project was documented in the 2010 film Waste Land in an attempt to raise awareness for urban poverty.

Muniz’s distinctive practice explores and revels in the instability that exists between craft and mechanical reproduction, between high art and popular culture, between the ephemeral and the perdurable, the coded and the recognizable. Muniz has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions at museums including Art Museum of Banco de la República (Bogotá), Beyeler Foundation, MoMA P.S. 1 (NYC), the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (São Paulo), MACRO (Rome), the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin), and the Menil Collection (Houston), and his work is included in major private and public collections around the world.
With support from the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) and Institute for the Humanities.

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.

“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.

After the success of the first edition published in 2009, Capyvara Publishers in partnership with BNP Paribas Foundation, launched the new edition of Vik Muniz’ new works from 1987-2015. This bilingual (English / Portuguese) new edition includes all of the series done in the last six years in a luxury edition in two volumes inside one box.

This important publication includes over 1400 works reproduced in over 1900 high quality images in color, giving the viewer the opportunity to closely examine the material used, which are so relevant when experiencing Vik’s artworks.

The publication is already available in Brazil, and will be available in the US in 2016.

http://www.editoracapivara.com.br/produto/vik-muniz/

At the very beginning, indeed within the first few lines, Dante’s narrator ‘finds himself’-mi ritrovai-in a ‘dark wood,’ in an allegory conventionally taken as ‘error’ or ‘sin,’ though it may also refer to that ‘ancient forest, deep dwelling of beasts’ near the mouth of Hades found in the Aeneid(1). It is also quite likely that there is reference to the Platonic idea of matter, silva in the Latin translation of the Timaeus, and even possibly to the forest of Arthurian romance. There is, too, a perhaps not so distant relation to Augustine of Hippo, who writes in his Confessions that “it is one thing, from a wooded mountain top to see the land of peace and quite another to reach it, when one’s way is beset by the lion and the dragon.” Poliphilo, too, comes readily to mind, lost in the dark forest of the Hypnerotomachia, searching for his lover Polia, for harmony, order, and sense, in a vast maze of ruined antiquities-caverns, pyramids, theaters, temples-all described with fanatic erudition and unreserved desire, spoken as if within the economies of a dream. These phrases are compelling depictions: they present an image, figure, or representation, a graphic and visual portrayal in and through language. A thicket, a mesh of branches, a tangled skein, a field of lines, marks, impediments, in so many words, a dark, dusky, darksome, gloomy image. Before such images one finds oneself in the dark, lost, for a moment, in a tangle of references, arrested, transfixed in a moment of apprehension, without a thread in the labyrinth of interpretations, casting about for marks of passage, wegmarken.(3) Whether such images are of a textual or visual nature, they possess a remarkable potency, operating across multiple registers of sense and meaning, with various forms of address, and multiple significations.

The legible and the visible have common spaces and borders; they overlap in part, and each is embedded in the other to an uncertain degree.
-Louis Marin

Artworks engender a complex mediation between public and private, tradition and innovation, spectator and reference. They do so with a range of liminal devices and conventions, both within and outside the work, that form these mediations. Prominent among such devices are what we might call, after Genette, paratexts-in our case the title of a work, annotations which may appear interior or exterior to the frame of the work, signatures, evaluations, even critical accounts, or records of ownership and sale. Less concrete, and perhaps more persuasive, is the register of tradition, the narratological inscription of images/artifacts into discursive patterns: history, theme, school, movement, oeuvre, anomaly. In a sense images become the depictions they are by their traversal of a public sphere, a community of signs and recognitions. And yet, while the visual and the textual may be permeable and co-extensive, images are irreducible to description, and descriptions may provide but a mere suggestion of acceptable grounds for the visual.

At the core of depiction is the recognition of its subject, and this remains so even when the subject is radically transformed and recognition becomes correspondingly extended.
-Michael Podro

Artworks address us, and they do so in part by creating uncertainty; our engagement with them involves a continuous adjustment as we scan for signs, clues, suggestions on how to proceed and for a confirmation or disconfirmation of our response.(2) It is within the framework of such discursive fields that artworks take place as such, and we, as spectators, come into a discourse ready-made(3). That is to say that a tradition of recognition and exegesis proceeds us, and the given community within which we find ourselves forms a culturally-mediated perceptual horizon, or boundary in our consumption of images. Still, this is a malleable field, accommodating many differences, and we are capable of acting with our own volition, posing our own questions. How, we might ask, is it that a medium, having it’s own rhythms and textures, seems both distinct from the represented subject and yet at the same time to embody it? It is less a matter of how depictions are made, than it is an issue of recognition, a basic relation we have to the world, a capacity that functions in a distinctive way with works of art, and even with technically reproducible copies, or variants of works.
stains, blots, noise:

visibility and legibility in the given and the artificial

If you look upon an old wall covered with dirt, or the odd appearance of some streaked stones, you may discover several things like landscapes, battles, clouds, uncommon attitudes, humorous faces, draperies, And c. Out of this confused mass of objects, the mind will be furnished with abundance of designs and subjects perfectly new.
-Leonardo da Vinci

In his treatise of 1785, entitled New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape, Alexander Cozens makes an intentional reference to this well-known passage in the Treatise on Painting in order to set forth the idea that an improvement has been rendered upon Leonardo’s suggestion of “a new method of assisting the invention.” Cozens proposes a refinement of the faculty of recognition, which for Leonardo was tempered by chance discovery and fortuity, by developing a method of (visual) invention through the production of artifice. One no longer had to depend upon the aleatory, on random occurrences sought in crumbling architecture or the fleeting impressions inspired by infelicities in light or shadow, but one might produce such “rude forms” artificially, with a minimal degree of conscious design. The system introduced in the New Method involved procedures for the composition of landscapes based on the use of randomly produced artificial ink-blots, allowing for a complex interplay between imitation and invention, method, chance and design. Cozens considered that the greater part of attention requisite to the act of drawing must be applied to the whole, that is, to the general design of the composition, and to this alone, so that the subordinate parts-the material marks and happy accidents-are left to the casual and unthinking motion of the hand or brush.(4) The distinction between the marks, stains or blots which one might chance upon, and those that one might indifferently render, is therefore negligible to the process of recognition. This early method implies an almost syntactic compiling of lines, blots, stains, splashes carried out in a variety of media -ink or carbon, pigment, dust, sugar, cotton, thread- which prefigures modern disputations on abstraction, materiality and invention in contemporary aesthetic practices from impressionism to surréalism to the postmodern and transmedial.

James Elkins, in a sustained critique of the semiotic approach to visual signs(5) points out that what are presumed to be stable and irreducible elements of images-marks, lines, traces, edges, outlines, surfaces, textures, fields, or even relations of figure and ground, tonality and illumination-give way upon close examination to a much more unruly series of historically specific practices and discourses, which are themselves irreducible to a re-translation into signs or narratives. The graphic mark remains both mysterious (since it is infinitely variable and replete with meaning) and secondary (since it is incapable of becoming a legible sign so long as its meaning depends so intimately on its form). While such “rude” marks may be invested with meaning in and of themselves, and recast as elemental pictures or figures, these are determinations which occur almost entirely in language. Rorschach’s set of diagnostic designs are an interesting, if extreme, example of this.(6) Rorschach’s aggregate collection of stains is a legislated and overdetermined sign-system, whose use is rigorously controlled, and restricted to psychiatric and psychoanalytical professionals. There are, in fact, some rather strict legal sanctions for misuse. At the same time it is remarkable in its normative anxieties about the proper containment of representation. A discrete set of images, composed by Rorschach, in all likelihood by a method at least congenial to that proposed by Cozens, is fixed and arrested, sustained by and constrained to very precise hermeneutic and exegetical rules. While these “blots” may remain “random,” the recognitions performed by test subjects certainly are not. Similar sorts of investments in the materiality of the mark as an aesthetic signifier are made in certain forms of abstraction or material reflexivity, such as occurs in the painting of Jackson Pollock or Cy Twombly, or the systematic deployment of marks that one finds in works by Hanne Darboven, Sol Lewitt, Richard Long or Jonathan Borofsky. There are many other examples of the reflective insistence on the material conditions and constituents of the art work that take place within the modernist framework, and persist in sometimes exotic forms in contemporary, postmodern, mediated practices. Another register of materiality and insistence takes place in artworks which appropriate, simulate, cite or mimic other works and things. Different types of paratextual formulations operate to secure an image as a specific type of depiction. The relation of contingency between (para)text and image is irregular, unstable, provisional, and plural, and extends even to the implications of the unsaid. Certain works, in fact, operate by strategically leaving the obvious unsaid, by saying something else, or by deferral to the linguistic/textual ‘outside’ of the work, as is the case with certain performative or site-specific works and processes which engage the unconscious reflexes or interaction of a given audience in the completion of the work. Some works are made or unmade in language, as has been the case with the determination of forgeries, where, as attribution (signature) changes, the status of a work, which had been a particular thing for a certain duration, is radically altered. Consider too, the difficulties that arise with technical reproducibility, where even in the simplest photographic recording of events or situations, it is impossible to make a clear determination of, for example, identity, originality, truth, culpability, causality or consequence.

the intercession of the camera

. . . the camera does not see . . .
-Walter Benjamin

In an essay which is perhaps read too often, and too quickly, Walter Benjamin(7) marks a distinction between the camera’s optics and human perception, noting the camera’s intervention into the sphere of human visuality, via the substitution of a nonconscious instrumentality in the place of our own regard. That is, at a remove, in a deferral which institutes an aporia in perception via certain intercessionary technologies-photography, cinema, digital media-which is difficult to discern or to avoid. For all of its increasing sophistication, the camera remains an instrument of citation, a ‘writing in/of light’ which secures only the most minute trace, or movement, as it flashes by (aufblitzendes), caught, inscribed in the particulate grain of photo-chemical materiality. Still, when we see what the camera has recorded it nonetheless engages a reflex within us, that perceives light and shadow, movement, and even reflection, as substance, and, in the case of photographically recorded images of people, which compels in us a recognition and response to a presumed other, the presence of some person or thing seen as having actually appeared within the frame of the image, or operating at its presumed point of origin. Facial recognition it is one of our earliest unconscious accomplishments, hardwired in us even as infants; the camera intervenes in that, and presents a technically reproducible shadow, an apparition of presence, one which operates at the same time as an index of loss. This also happens with the photographic reproduction of drawings, prints or painting, where the presumption of the presence of the ‘eye’ of the artist is also linked to the chain of presumed presences. For Benjamin, it is through the instrumentality of the camera that “an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored,” where the naturalization of prosthetic perception via the camera “introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.(8)” That is, at a remove, outside the image or scene, with a compulsion to repetition and the promise of recuperation, so that there is an uncanny doubling of the camera’s unconscious optics with our own impulses, a technico-philosophical sleight of hand that purports to secure the whole of the real. It is the very definition of the phantasm. Cinematic perception is folded back into experience, an artificial memory, naturalized and subsumed, which presents the proleptic promise of recall, even as it circumscribes a doubled site of loss. What we thought were sensations have become ghosts(9), transfixed in a flash, mere afterimages; we are haunted by images, traces of an elsewhere that we have made our own, domesticated fragments which we have compelled to enter into other relations, different economies of sense. Presence deferred to an impossible proximity, but not lost entirely. The patterns of deferred presences may be considered a species of allusion, and it is within the space of allusion that a complex interplay of simulation and dissimulation occurs, through which we recognize, engage with, and consume images. Our presumption of the verisimilitude of the camera-of its ‘objectivity’ and it’s tacit claim to the truth of human presence, of the eye, or of the hand-is related, and has persisted as an index to the photographic apparatus since its origins.

Thomas Y. Levin(10) has argued persuasively that “the epistemology of the “realism” of the ‘effect of the real’ produced by classical continuity editing in film is fundamentally based on the referential surplus value of photo-chemical indexicality.” The history of our apprehension of the material basis of the photographic artifact as depicting an image of something has secured for the photograph-and for all subsequent photographic media- a powerful, if indeed problematic, signifying presence. There was a certain era in the reception of photography where such artifacts could be unproblematically introduced as, for example, evidence of culpability or innocence in a court of law, or convincing proof of political events or natural phenomena. Today no such claim to evidentiary verisimilitude can be presumed, as the consequences of an increasingly widespread recognition of the photographic surface as a complex and hybrid construct become increasingly salient in the contemporary digital milieu, and we find ourselves tracing the hitherto hidden contours of a constantly renegotiated and “generalized pedagogy of verisimilitude” wherein our perceptual regard and consumption of images is shaped and constrained by a register of habits(11). There is a commutability in the materiality of signs, a system of equivalences constructed between a blot, an incision, a mark, the grain of reactive photo-chemical deposition, a pattern of pixels or the disparate charges of electrons. And while there may be an assumed equivalence on the material axis between the profoundly unintentional tracings in light which are mechanically produced, and those markings which have come about through the intercession of the hand and the eye, using technologies of rendering or etching, we still find ourselves arrested, silent, alone before the image, a moment before a flicker of recognition sets in.

Many riddles might be solved by mere image, but redeemed only through the word.
-Walter Benjamin

Accretion

Things look like things, they are embodied in the transience of each other’s meaning; a thing looks like a thing, which looks like another thing, or another.
-Vik Muniz

One recognizes representations based on the resemblance of the depicted image to something, or to something like, something that one has already seen. The mediation between novel experience and previously apprehended sensory stimuli occurs by reflex, through a mimetic faculty that ‘retrieves’ significant data from the chaotic external sensorium almost before one knows it. In a sense, raw data is abstract at the outset, and when one’s semantic memory fails to locate a precise equivalent to a given stimulus, it reflexively forces that equivalence. In such a manner are faces found in clouds, and figures in stones, or meadows in the accretion of blots. A compelling pictoriality may be found even within the depths of etymology, as any careful reader of Francis Ponge discovers. Le Parti Pris des Choses wrests the images of the simplest things from the palimpsest of language, inducing the apparition of familiarity to “give up it’s ghosts,” revealing, reveling in, the strange spectrality which is common to both language and images. A similar spectrality haunts the etymologies of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, languages which are both indeterminate and determining, within which sense moves, darkly, as if covered by an obscuring skein, as beneath the surface, the play of words at making pictures produces striking resonances(12) . Roger Caillois writes, on and on, an entire book of descriptions of depictions(13), of images found in the unthinking accretions of stones and minerals, fractures and erosions, images retrieved from mute stones, finding themselves in an idiotic-that is, solitary and singular-poetics. Silent images wrought from stone into language, a mesh or network of associations, this looks like that, memory and resemblance.

invention and phantasm

Many years ago when I was looking over Piranesi’s “Antiquities of Rome,” Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist called his “Dreams,” and which record the scenery of his visions during the delirium of a fever. Some of them . . . represented vast Gothic halls, on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers catapults, And c., And c., expressive of enormous power put forth, and resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of the walls you perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself; follow the stairs a little further, and you perceive it comes to a sudden, abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who had reached the extremity, except into the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi? -you suppose, at least, that his labours must in some way terminate here. But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher, on which again Piranesi is perceived, by this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eyes, and a still more aërial flight of stairs is beheld; and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours : and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall. With the same power of endless growth and self-reproduction did my architecture proceed in my dreams.
-Thomas De Quincey

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who had a passionate interest in architecture, ruins and fragments, was once dismissed from an apprenticeship(14) on the grounds that he was “too much of a painter to be an engraver.” Piranesi’s work exhibited a quality characterized by a freer and more strongly contrastive manipulation of the effects of the acid used to etch plates, a use which diverged from the traditional referential techniques, replacing the etcher’s fine line with a more expressive and unruly assortment of blots, bleeds, cuts and incisions. Piranesi developed this technique, and an examination of the first editions of the Opere Varie, for example, show a lighter, clearer quality of etching, while in later editions the plates have been reworked so that there is a considerable amount of ‘rebiting’ and darkening of shadows. The initial purity and restfulness of tone in etching which is discernible in Piranesi’s early editions of the Carceri, was soon to be reworked by a darker and more energetic technique of rebiting, a technical accretion of marking and evacuating spaces that opened onto a more whimsical, phantasmatic space. By employing the splashes, blots, volumes, and fields that are an unconscious, or minimally conscious, effect of the techné of reproduction Piranesi’s images, especially in the case of the Carceri, or Imaginary Prisons, diverge from the traditional mimetic correspondences between representation and representamen. The reworking/rebiting of plates produces an uncanny psychological effect, an irruption within the familiar forms of representation of an unfamiliar intensity, a delirium within the familiar, where all sorts of things may take shape. Imaginary prisons look like other, actual architectures, inventions constructed of the elements of drawing/etching their dark forcefulness induced by the materialities of the mark, the tangled lines etched in vision.

De Quincy, in a waking dream of his own, recognizes Piranesi, doubled many times over, within the mesh and tangle of lines forming the Carceri. “Poor Piranesi . . . lost in the upper gloom of the hall,” irrecuperable at precisely that moment, and that proximity, where a figure cannot be wrested from the tangle of lines, where the materiality of the stain holds at the outer limit of recognition. It is a strange space, within which base medium admits to allegory, and things change, language and image transform each other, and poor Piranesi, in De Quincy’s vision, finds himself “standing on the very brink of the abyss.”

allegory and mimesis

“. . . 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, no monster or monument, no event or site in Nature, History, Fable or Dream whose images the predisposed eye cannot read in the markings, patterns and outlines found in stones.”
-Roger Caillois

Caillois finds in the Tuscan paesinas, also called “ruin marbles,” the depiction in detail of the debris of classical cities and the fragments of antiquities.(15) Nonetheless, the mimetic gives way to the allegorical as these figures remain, after all, unthinking accretions in stone, which only appear to mime something, and which have but momentarily engaged our very human reflex of making sense of them in our own terms. They are imaginary, and there is some of the sense of invention by which Piranesi’s imaginary carceral spaces and architectures were so close to the ruins and fragments he himself haunted, that we recognize in them real, or at least possible places.

There is a constant and agonistic tension between mimesis and allegory, between patterns of identity and difference in the recognition, apprehension and consumption of texts and images. The mimetic simulates the real, while allegory, reflecting upon the material disposition of words and images, dissimulates. Moreover there is an ambiguous territory which mediates between allegory and mimesis, so that certain things, narratives, images may, according to specific interests or tactics, be assigned to either register. That is to say, that there is something tacitly allegorical in the mimetic recognition that something ‘looks like’ something else, while allegory, in its turn, depends upon such similarities in order to render its differences. Between mimesis and allegory therefore lies a complex field of complicities and resistances. The interplay between the mimetic and the allegorical is perhaps nowhere more clearly figured and examined than in the para-photographic works of Vik Muniz. Muniz is perhaps one of our finest contemporary ironists, and his endeavors are not constrained to the visual alone, but seep into the language and textuality which enframe his artwork. It is no small achievement, and Muniz masterfully interweaves the two tendencies. Through works such as the early series Individuals (1992-93), where common everyday objects are rendered out of cotton, or Equivalents (1994), wherein artificial clouds take on an increasingly unlikely array of shapes. The object/images are constructed and photographed, a kind of precessionary composition of the image before its instantiation through the intercession of the camera (what has happened to all of those cotton balls after all?). Muniz understands that a mimicry which reveals itself as such may fairly be considered a minimal sort of allegory, and he uses certain forms of pretense to present an apparently simple (but in fact complex and profound) occlusion of references where the limit points of mimicry and deferral play out. This is true in works where a certain technique, such as mimicking etchings or line drawings in string or wire, is conveyed through the vehicle of photography, so that it simultaneously completes the illusion of similitude, and punctures the illusion of identity. Random anomalous material marks which had hitherto traced lines or contours, tone or volume, in the manufacture of an image have been translated into other, anomalous, substances such as chocolate, dust, sugar or marinara sauce. The simulation of an image-with whatever proper name it might bear as signature: Warhol, or Turner, Constable or Muniz-appears, more or less intact, as a dissimulation. This comes about through the intercession of the camera. The camera is a device which intervenes in our reflexes in the most subtle fashion, a vehicle which enables the presumption of presence-the presumption that something was in front of the lens at some time-through the material trace of its absence.

The works of Vik Muniz are allegorical in precisely this sense: that they reflectively position the camera as an instrument of differentiation within that moment where the spectator’s habitual reflex is towards a recognition of identity or similitude. The photographic process foregrounds the materiality of the image as representation while leaving it intact as an image. It is a process where, as Germano Celant remarks, the “photographic hardening” renders the reproduced image transparent, and the reproduction concrete.(16)

In the very simplest terms, allegory says one thing and means another; in so doing, it destroys the normal expectation that one has of language, that words ‘mean what they say.’ At the same time, allegory is both a structural principle and a fundamental process of encoding speech, and it appears in an extraordinary and complex variety of forms. Allegory often calls attention to or indicates its own material armature as representation or conveyance of (absent/present) meanings. Allegory derives from allos + agoreuein (other + speak openly, in public community, i.e., in the marketplace or agora: “To speak otherwise”). Agoreuein has the connotation of public, open, declarative speech, a sense which is inverted by the prefix allos, giving something like ‘other than open, public, speech,’ so that allegory is often understood as an inversion wherein there is couched something different than can be seen in the literal sense. The term inversio in its original sense meant translation, while translatio simply ‘translates’ (is the Latin equivalent of) the Greek term metaphor. Allegory is traditionally defined as an extended metaphor, when, for example, the events of a narrative obviously and continuously refer to another simultaneous structure of events or ideas or phenomena. It is important to point out the political overtones of the verb agoreuein which are reflected in a long history of situations which have demanded and produced indirect, devious, and ironical ways of speaking or depicting. It is also appropriate to emphasize the public nature of allegory, in the sense that when allegory occurs, as it does in parables or in painting, in utopian or dystopian tracts or fictions, it does so (from) within the public sphere, that is, within the community of common tradition and reference.(17)

At the same time, allegory is excessive. It often exceeds the bounds of the visual and the verbal, as in the case of dreams, where, since Freud,(18) there is a recognition of unconscious or latent drives or conflicts residing within or hidden beneath texts and images, rendering them tacit psychological allegories. Allegory calls attention to the materialities and pluralities of signification and often involves pretense, as for example when one pretends to talk about one series of events when actually talking about another. More complex allegories tend to develop a strongly ironic tone, which may involve the recognition, implication or enunciation that one is reflexively performing an allegory. The pretense to simplicity, or stupidity, a tongue-in-cheek reliance on something obviously wrong or blatantly ignorant masks the seriousness of critique or indignity. This sort of critical/theoretical stance is closely related to allegory, and is called allogoresis.

There is an unruliness to allegory, an impossibility to set to rest it’s references, tempered only perhaps by unlikelihood, or the excessiveness of labor invested in making sense. The endlessness of representation, the impossibility to contain reference where an apparent sense refers to an other sense, perhaps even another, casts one into a regressive abyss of signs and portents, a mise-en abyme. Allegory operates by revealing that the mimetic covers a kind of ‘hole,’ a negative space (mise-en-abyme) around which various discourses and desires are organized and articulated. Mise-en-scene (literally ‘casting into place’) is symmetrically bonded and contradistinct to this invisible mise-en-abyme (a ‘casting into the abyss’ of signs and representations). It is only via the arrestment of the (absent, phantasmatic) image in the stains of the photo-chemical trace by the engaged presence of a spectator that photography exists.(19) Photography is an art of memory, a prosthesis to our own recall. Paradoxically, it induces recognition in us of things which we cannot remember, which have preceded us, or taken place elsewhere, which we know only through reflections or reproductions, or which we might suppose or imagine to have existed.

Artworks purporting to express, or indicate the impossibility of the ‘inexpressible’ may in certain senses be considered to be allegorical, as are verbal and textual definitions of the sublime. At one point Muniz asked a diverse group of people to ‘imagine a non-existent object,’ and to form, shape and nurture this non-thing in their mind so that they might simulate the grasp necessary to hold this probabilistic artifact. These postures were then photographed, in a secondary pretense to a certain phenomenological seriousness, where the spectator is both seduced by, and let in on, the joke. In a sense the allegorical difference nascent in Cozens’s notion of the materiality of unintentional blots in their relation to the composition of images, is shown by Muniz not to have required matter at all, but that a reflexive character or object, might need only the intercession of another material instrument (a pencil, a camera, pixels and light) to perform an introspective or auto-deconstructive examination of the materialities of mediation. When one considers the materialities of mediation, especially of time-based media such as radio, cinema, television or digital recording/transmission, the question of the situatedness of allegory becomes more pronounced. Within a critical tradition of reflexivity and phenomenological introspection, even minimally time-based practices, such as photography, underscore their deictic (spatio-temporal) parameters by reference to an absence. It is a rhetorical sleight of hand which preserves the presumption of the fidelity of the eye of the artist as commensurate with that of the spectator, in inscribing onto some surface or another, something of some originary scene, a generalized human presence which is recuperable to our own position, that is real. It is just such incommensurabilities in the relations between texts and images that have grounded and informed the work of Vik Muniz.
the absent armature

. . . . reproducibility has always reproduced itself, but never in an identical way

Note:

1.See: The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Volume 1, Inferno, Robert M. Durling, ed./trans., [New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press] 1996 (“I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost”). See also: The Vision or Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise of Dante Aligheri,Rev. Henry Francis Cary, trans., [London: George Bell and Sons] 1901, (“I found me in a gloomy wood, astray”); Dante, The Inferno, John Ciardi, trans., [New York: Mentor Books] 1954, (“Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray”); Dante The Divine Comedy 1: Inferno, John D. Sinclair, trans., [New York: Oxford University Press] 1939, (“In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.”);

2.See: “Reading a Picture from 1639 according to a Letter by Poussin,” p. 5, in Sublime Poussin, Louis Marin, Catherine Porter, trans., [Stanford: Stanford University Press] 1999. See also: On Representation, Louis Marin, Catherine Porter, trans., [Stanford: Stanford University Press] 2001.
3.See Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Off the Beaten Path (a translation of Holzwege), Julian Young, Kenneth Haynes, [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] 2002.

4.See: Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, “In Black and White,” in Calligram. Essays in New Art History from France, Norman Bryson, ed., [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] 1988, for a sustained discussion of Cozens and the implications of his work for contemporary aesthetic theory.

5.See: James Elkins, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them, [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] 1998.

6.The aggregate collection of Rorschach stains may be one of the most overdetermined sign-systems ever. See: The Rorschach: A Comprehensive System, 2nd ed., Volume I, II, John E. Exner, Jr., [New York: Wiley Interscience] 1991.

7.See: Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Section XII-XIII, in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed./intro.; Harry Zohn, trans., [New York: Harcourt, Brace and World] 1964.

8.Ibid.

9.The use of the notion of phantasm, spectrality and technology derive principally from the works of Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler, and Giorgio Agamben. For Derrida, see: Jacques Derrida, ‘La danse des fantômes: Entrevue avec Jacques Derrida’/’Ghost Dance: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,’ by Mark Lewis and Andrew Payne in Public 2, The Lunatic on One Idea, 1989; See also the following: Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, [New York: Routledge] 1994; Jacques Derrida, Mal d’Archive: une impression freudienne, [Paris: Éditions Galilée] 1995; Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression, [Chicago: University of Chicago Press] 1995-96, and Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Échographies de la télévision, [Paris: Éditions Galilée-INA] 1996. For Stiegler, see: Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, R. Beardsworth, G. Collins, trans., [Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press] 1998; Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps 1: La faute d’Epiméthée, [Paris: Éditions Galilée] 1994; Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps 2: La désorientation, [Paris: Éditions Galilée] 1996. For Agamben, see: Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas. Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press] 1993; Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content,trans., Georgia Albert, [Stanford: Stanford University Press] 1999; Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive, trans Daniel Heller-Roazen [New York: Zone Books] 1999.

10.See: Thomas Y. Levin, “Rhetoric of the Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of “Real Time”,” in CTRL SPACE Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, Peter Weibel, eds., [Karlsruhe/ Cambridge, Mass.: ZKM/Center for Art and Media/MIT Press] 2002. Levin’s argument is persuasive and brilliant, and he describes the rearticulation andre-appearance of the documenary ‘image’ as style, that is, as an index of the evidentiary, so that the surveillant look of the photo-chemical trace, hand-held or automatic camera movement, or technical glitches or infelicities trades its claim to verisimilitude for a rhetoric of spatio-temporal configurations in the service of narrative progress or closure. This also holds true in the consideration of the fragmentary nature of the
photographic image presumed as an excerpt or arrestment from either an event, or a recording of an event.

11.Ibid.

12.As Giorgio Agamben points out, the play between the lexical and syntactico-grammatical elements in the Hypnerotomachia ìPoliphili produces “an effect of immobility and almost pictorial rigidity.” It is also this very sort of material play that the work’s ìillustrations mirror and multiply. See: G. Agamben, “The Dream of Language.” in The End of the Poem. Studies in Poetics, Daniel ìHeller-Roazen, trans., [Stanford: Stanford University Press] 1999. See also, related discussions about the relations between ìmaterial elements of visual images and language in Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Jane E. Lewin, ìtrans., [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] 1997; Invisible Colors. A Visual History of Titles, John C. Welchman, [New ìHaven: Yale University Press] 1997; LucienDällenbach, Le récit spéculaire: Essai sur la mise en abyme, [Paris: Éditions de Seuil] ì1977; Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 2 vols., Giovanni Pozzi, Lucia A. Ciapponi, eds., [Padua: Editrice ìAntenore] 1968, rev. 1980; and for a very strange effect, see the translation into English of Francesco Colonna, ìHypnerotomachia Poliphili, Joscelyn Godwin, trans., [New York: Thames and Hudson] 1999.

13.See: Roger Caillois, L’Écriture des pierres, [Paris and Geneva: Flammarion/Skira] 1970. Description: ‘setting forth in words,’ ì’making a picture of,’ a ‘copy.’ ‘to register or portray,’ ‘a graphic account, a scene'; Depiction: ‘a representation or portrayal,’ ì’a figure,’ ‘to image,’ ‘to portray in words,’ ‘a picture or graphic description.’ These definitions come from The Compact Edition ìof the Oxford English Dictionary, Volume 1, A-O [Oxford: Oxford University Press] 1971. One might be only a bit more fanciful ìand suggest, with some latitude, that the prefix ‘de’ in both terms operates as a form of negation, so that to de-scribe has the ìsense of to un-write, so as to form a picture, and to de-pict, to un-picture, might suggest a recursion to language. In any case, ìas Louis Marin suggests, language and image are often coextensive, and deeply co-permeable, “embedded in each other to ìan uncertain degree.”

14.Cited in the “Introduction” to Piranesi: The Complete Etchings, Luigi Ficacci, ed., [Köln: Benedikt Taschen Verlag] 2000. The studio was that of the master engraver and printer Giuseppe Vasi. See also: Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Selected Essays, (1822), [New York: A.L. Burt and Company] undated.

15.Roger Caillois, L’Écriture des pierres, [Paris and Geneva: Flammarion/Skira] 1970.

16.See: Germano Celant, “Vik Muniz/Ernesto Neto,” in Vik Muniz/Ernesto Neto, G. Celant, XLIX Biennale de Venezia/BrasilConnects (exhibition catalogue) 2001. See also: Vik Muniz, Home Alone, [Torino: Claudio Bottello Arte] 1992; Vik Muniz, Seeing is Believing [Santa Fe: Arena Editions] 1998; Vik Muniz, Vik Muniz, [Paris: Gallerie Xippas] 1999.

17. Plutarch is the first to use the term allegory, rather than the older Greek term byponoia. Thucydides, in The Peloponnesian War provides one of the earliest discussions of the corruption of language by politics, where, in order to fit in with the change of events, words too had to change their meanings, where what had once been understood as ‘thoughtless aggression’ was now regarded as an appropriate form of ‘courage.’ From the ancients to George Orwell, via Lucian, and Swift, Alain de Lille, Boethius, Michaux, Yeats, Borges or Calvino, the allegorical impulse persists, in all of its complicities and resistances to mimesis, in partial, fragmentary or full manner, alone or within other texts, sentiments and images.

18.See: Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (I) (1900), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. IV, James Strachey, et al, eds., [London: The Hogarth Press] (1953).; The Interpretation of Dreams (II) and On Dreams (1900-10), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. V, James Strachey, et al, eds., [London: The Hogarth Press] (1953).; The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. VI, James Strachey, et al, eds., [London: The Hogarth Press] (1953).

19.See: Thomas Zummer, “Projection and Dis/embodiment: Genealogies of the Virtual,” in Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977, Chrissie Iles, [New York: Whitney Museum of American Art/Abrams] 2001.

20.See: The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms, Alex Preminger, Frank J. Warnke, O.B. Hardison, Jr., eds., [Princeton: Princeton University Press] 1965, 1974, 1986. See also: The New Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms, T.V.F. Brogan, ed., [Princeton: Princeton University Press] 1994.

21.Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Section XII-XIII, in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed./intro.; Harry Zohn, trans., [New York: Harcourt, Brace and World] 1964.

This article examines three  series of works by the artist  Vik Muniz— Pictures of Thread,  Piranesi Prisons and Pictures of  Wire. These works employ a string-like  material to convey pictorial  space. The “string” is utilized in  different ways: to create a type of  landscape tapestry, as a drawing  constructed through “string art”  techniques, and to make sculptural  drawings. The use of string  provides a three-dimensional  element to the work, yet this  apparent three-dimensionality jars  with the presentation of the work  as photographs of the original  drawings. This article proposes an  analysis of the work as reflexive  examinations of the photograph.  The structure of the article follows  the movement from the nomadic  quality of the string in Pictures of  Thread, through to the taut grid  construction of Piranesi Prisons  and, finally, to the tensile rigid  “string” oi  Pictures of Wire. The  first section considers Muniz’s   Pictures of Thread and Piranesi  Prisons series in relation to  pictorial space and the haptic.  The second section examines   Pictures of Wire as an example of  trompe t’oei! and simulacra. The  article concludes by considering  the flatness of the photograph in  relation to a Deleuzian account of  surface.

Sandra Plummer is an artist and writer. She is  a research sludent at the London Consorlium/  Birkbeck College, University ot London.  Her research focuses on the ontology of the  photograph in contemporary art.  Textile. Volume 5. Issue 2. pp. 230-243  DOl: 10.2752/175183507X219533  Reprints aiiailable direclly from the Publishers.  Photocopying permitted bv licence only.  © 2007 Berg. Printed in the United Kingdom.

String, Space and Surface in the Photography of Vik Muniz

Introduction

String is my foible. My pockets get  full of little hanks of it, picked up  and twisted together, ready for uses  that never come. I am seriously  annoyed if anyone cuts the string  of a parcel instead of patiently and  faithfully undoing it fold by fold.  (Elizabeth Gaskell)’

In her discussion of Cornelia  Parker’s use of string in an earlier  issue of this journal, Claire  Pajaczkowska conceives of it as  “the loose reverie of thinking”  (2005: 245). Pajaczkowska’s  conception of string removes  it from its categorization as  ubiquitous multi-purpose stuff.  String transcends the everyday and  becomes a metaphor for thought.  This association, between thinking  and string, is one that I wish to  draw out through an examination  of the work of the artist Vik Muniz.  I propose that Muniz takes the  string for a walk, in a way that is  analogous to Paul Klee’s aphorism  on drawing—the string becomes  an active line on a walk.^ The  active quality of the line becomes  like Ariadne’s thread, tugging the  viewer through the labyrinthine  surfaces of the work. ForGilles  Deleuze, the philosophical concept  of surface engenders a redirection  of thought. In Deleuze’s terms,  surface “provokes a reorientation  of thought and of what it means  to think: there is no longer depth  and height” (Deleuze 2004:148).  The encounter between string and  surface that occurs in Pictures  of Thread, Piranesi Prisons  and  Pictures of Wire creates a  complexity that disrupts the  linearity of thought in the viewer.  We move from the singularity of the  image to a multiplicity of surfaces.     

Pictures of Thread 

Vik Muniz was born in Sao Paulo,  Brazil and is currently based in  New York. Muniz’s art consists of  photographs, but Muniz is not a  conventional photographer. “Vik  Muniz does not take photographs,”  insists Germano Celant, “he  materializes them” (Celant 2003:  13). Muniz creates images to be  photographed. Often recreating  famous artworks or iconic  photographs, Muniz presents us  not with this recreation but with  its photographic reproduction. In  the essay “An Ethics of Illusion,”  Moacir dos Anjos highlights the  difference between the creation of  the originals and the photograph;  while the former “is done slowly,  with a craftsman’s art, calling  attention to the way it was made”  the taking of the photograph is  “instantaneous” (dos Anjos 2004:  47). Something happens in the  transformation from crafted image  to its photographic double. The  substitution of Muniz’s original by  the photograph adds another layer  to the artwork; it opens up a new  kind of perceptual space and calls  attention to representation itself.  Muniz’s work is predominantly  concerned with the act of  effects. Much of Muniz’s work  demonstrates his wish to challenge  the perception of the viewer. There  is an undeniable magic in the work  of Muniz, yet it is a magic that  always seeks to reveal its artifice.  Muniz aims to present what he  calls the “worst possible illusion  that will still fool the eyes” (Muniz  1998: i6). Muniz’s subject matter  often resonates with his choice of  material, a fact that is particularly  evident in a series such as The  Sugar Children (portraits of the  children of sugar cane plantation  workers rendered in sugar), or in  his reworking of The Last Supper  in chocolate syrup. Muniz’s works  in string may not seem to offer  the same resonance between the  subject matter and material. Yet  these works employ string in a  manner that affirms its physicality.  String is not used here as a mere  tool to represent something else;  string represents itself, string  becomes the subject.

Muniz describes his early  works as “hybrids” between image  and object (Muniz 2005: 22).  Tug of War from 1989 is a good  example of such a hybrid. Tug of  War consists of two photographs  placed a few feet apart, each  depicting a person pulling on one  end of a rope. The rope they are  pulling on is represented by an  actual rope suspended between  the photographs. Muniz says that  his work is not made to confuse,  “but to destabilize the viewer’s  notion of what a photograph is”  (Muniz 1998:17). What Muniz’s  work materializes is not images so  much as their act of reproduction;  his photographs manifest the  photograph as photograph.

For Muniz, photography is “the  ultimate evolution of painting,” but  it is a medium where you do not  see the marks of its construction.  Muniz is intent on making these  marks visible (Muniz 2003: 41).

“Cicero put it very well when  he said that the passage of time  is similar to the unravelling ofa  thread” (Deleuze 2004:164).    Vik Muniz’s  Pictures of Thread  are copies of famous landscape  paintings created with cotton  thread. However, the thread is not  used in the conventional way—it  is neither stitched nor attached to  the canvas but used as a threedimensional  drawing material.

These works are line drawings in  thread rather than embroidery or  tapestry. There is a performative  element in the creation of these  works; Muniz states that he took  the idea of the “accidental” to  these landscapes (Muniz 2005:  51). Although there is an original  motif, it serves as an inspiration  rather than dictatinga pattern.  Muniz chose complex pictures or  paintings that seemed to define  the development of the genre.  The picture is created by Muniz  unspoolingyards of thread on  top ofa light box—the amount  of thread used subsequently  becomes the title of the piece.  The actual  Pictures of Thread exist  only to be photographed; they  function like the mythic shroud of  Penelope^—the thread constantly  unravelled and reused.

20,000 Yards (The Castle  at Bentheim, after Jacob van  Ruisdael) (Figure 1) is a copy of The  Castle at Bentheim by the Dutch  seventeenth-century landscape  painter Jacob van Ruisdael.  Ruisdael made a series of paintings  of Bentheim Castle but this  particular painting was completed  in 1651. There is an obvious  similarity between the original  image and Muniz’s rendering of  it—we can make out the trees on  the left, foliage in the foreground  and a central meandering path  which winds its way towards the  horizon where a castle is perched  on a hill. 20,000 Yards looks like  a tangled embroidery—a mass of  threads, but individual lengths  have been skilfully teased out to  form details such as the branches  of trees, the roof of a house, the  outline ofa turret. Yet 20,000 Yards  is a monochrome drawing rendered  in burnt umber thread and provides  no indication of the color, light  or space of the original painting.  There are two figures on horseback  in the Ruisdael, the bright red tunic  of the figure on the right contrasts  vividly with the ochre background;  these figures do not appear in the  Muniz rendition. The fallen beech  tree in the immediate foreground  that serves to exaggerate the depth  in the Ruisdael landscape does not  appear in 20,000 Yards.

The thread in 20,000 Yards  appears to project from the  ground, demonstrating that this  is not a flat depiction but a type  of three-dimensional relief. The  picture seems to expand outwards  drawing the viewer closer to the  snaking thread and to its tangled  depths. Looking at the loops of  the thread, we are reminded of  Derrida’s analysis of Van Gogh’s  painting of peasant shoes—where  the loop of the undone lace  functioned as a trap, “a leash.” For  Derrida, “the picture is caught in  the lace” and here we get caught  in the spider’s web of thread (Derrida 1987: 277, 331). Yet our  desire to touch the silken texture of  the thread is indefinitely deferred  since this is a photograph. The  apparent depth belongs to the  absent original picture rather than  to the photograph we see. The  photograph of the work transforms  the depth of the actual thread to  the status of a representation of  depth. Our focus moves across  the picture from form to ground,  from thread to void, from depth to  shallowness. The string leads us  through a multitude of surfaces  rather than an abyss of depths.

Landscape paintings rely on  pictorial conventions to represent  space. Since paintings offer the  viewer no sense of haptic space,  the painter will often exaggerate  spatial distance. In addition to the  use of scale to describe space, the  painter may distinguish between  distinct spatial planes by level  of detail, contrast and color. The  foreground has greatest detail  and contrast, the middle distance  less so and the background is  often rendered as most distant  through the use of atmospheric  perspective. Thus, far-off hills  String, Space and Surface in the Photography of Vik Muniz 235  may appear misty and rendered  in a lighter tone—in pale blues or  purples. As a genre, landscape  paintings tend towards larger  scale, and function as a panorama;  we need to stand back to see them  properly. Our bodies project Into  the painting, roaming amongst the  different planes.

20,000 Yards does not  conform to the conventions of  landscape painting. There is  little differentiation between the  treatment of far distance and  foreground; both are rendered  in the same color and tone and  with the same level of detail. This  picture is reduced to a single plane.  In contrast to the original Ruisdael,  20,000 Yards lacks a sense of  space and distance. The visual  clues for the eye are provided only  by scale, by the diminished size  of the castle in the distance or the  thinning pathway as it meanders  through the landscape. In 20.000  Yards, depth exists only in terms  of the thickness of the thread, but  even this depth is flattened by the  presentation of the photograph in  place of the original image.

In The Life of Forms in Art,  Henri Focillon notes that “man …  does not measure space with his  eyes but with his hands and feet”  (1989:162-3). A representation  of space, however, must provide  optical clues. Muniz reverses the  convention and presents us with  a landscape that prioritizes the  sense of touch. 20,000 Yards  transforms a genre dominated  by the optic into a space that  pertains to the haptic. The  illusionistic space of landscape  is replaced by an appeal to the  viewer’s tactile and haptic sense.  As Mark Paterson explains, the  haptic is not restricted to touch in  the sense of actual skin contact  but also extends to a notion of  “haptic space.”” Laura U. Marks  has formulated a concept of  “haptic visuality” that also extends  beyond the literal sense of touch.  For Marks, “haptic visuality” is “a  kind of seeing that uses the eye  like an organ of touch.”^ 20,000  Yards seems to incite a haptic gaze  where the viewer ranges over the  texture and surface of the image  rather than delving into illusionistic  space. For Marks, “a haptic  composition appeals to tactile  connections on the surface plane of  the image” while the optical image  invites the viewer to perceive depth  (Marks 2000:162).

Most landscapes demand  viewing from a distance; 20,000  Yards, however, can only be  understood from close range; we  range over the surface, becoming  lost among the forest of threads.  It is interesting that the concept  of the haptic has its origins in the  analysis of the art historian and  curator of textiles, Alois Reigl.  Laura U. Marks asserts that it was  during his study of Persian carpets  that Riegl conceived his notion of  the haptic: “These carpets with  their endless, interleaved patterns  don’t allow the eye to rest in  one place; they invite the eye to  move along them, caressing their  surface” (Marks 2004). Pictures  of Thread perhaps share some of  the qualities that Riegl saw in his  research on textiles. In 20,000  Yards nothing recedes into the  distance; everything is close up  and demands close viewing.  Embroidery goes from point  to point, but 20,000 Yards runs  freely in lines traversing the  canvas, building up in clusters  here and there. Although we can  discern individual threads, they  do not appear rigidly connected  or knitted together to form a  cohesive pattern. Each thread is  not dependent on the existence of  another; the dropping of a stitch  would not weaken the structure.  Although some threads are teased  out into straight lines to define an  outline, most appear to freely roam  the landscape. The threads inhabit  the space nomadically without  fixed settlement, the intersection  occurs only at a surface level.  There is no interpenetration of  thread and no attachmentto the  support. 20,000 Yards is an image  of pure surface—there is nothing  underneath or behind it.

It is interesting to note that  Muniz approached Pictures  of Thread by thinking of the  landscape as “a sense of infinity”  where distance was “compressed  within a very thin surface.”  Thinking about distance, Muniz  remembered that metered thread  was used in Brazil to measure  land. Muniz’s inspiration for  using thread also arose from his  childhood recollection of using it  to make kites.  Pictures of Thread  resonate with this memory. For  Muniz, thread embodies “an  abstract way of conquering  distance and measurement”  (Muniz 2005: 51). The conquering  of distance is achieved in 20,000  Yards by the inversion of depth for  length and by the compression of  this length on to a pictorial surface.  In 20,000 Yards the extended  length of the thread suggests  an encompassed landscape, but  the spatial depth and distance  collapses. The transformation  236 Sandra Plummer  from picture to photograph further  erodes the remaining depth of the  thread and compresses distance  onto a flatter surface. The title  oi 20,000 Yards emphasizes the  length of the thread and perhaps  it is only this that persists in the  representation of space.

Piranesi Prisons 

How could Socrates recognise  himself in these caves that are no  longer his own? With what thread,  since the thread is lost? (Deleuze  1983:53}

Piranesi Prisons are drawings  after Piranesi’s Corcer/(or  prisons)^ etchings circa 1780.  At first glance. Prisons look  like architectural line-drawings  or etchings. However, closer  inspection reveals that the lines  and cross-hatchings consist of  thread. The method of construction  contrasts with the unwound  looseness of  Pictures of Thread.  In Prisons the picture is created  using string art techniques—the  thread is wound tight around  thousands of pins pressed into  a flat board. Muniz has spoken  of the shock of “two antagonistic  depth-perceptions” in the Prisons  series—the perspective and the  shallow relief of the thread that  exists on a raised surface above  the flat ground. The convergence  of media (the three-dimensional  relief of the raised thread with  the rendering of that thread  to suggest linear perspective)  provokes confusion in the viewer.  This confusion is exacerbated by  the presentation of the work as a  two-dimensional photograph (the  actual three-dimensional space  thus collapses into illusionistic  space). Muniz plays with the  paradoxical coexistence of media,  seeking to produce an affect  of both “expansiveness” and  “claustrophobia” in the viewer  (Muniz 2005: 55}. The ambiguity  in the image provokes fascination  and vacillation so that the viewer  becomes trapped in the picture.    

The Gothic Arch is an  impressive recreation of a Piranesi  “prison of the imagination.” The  picture shows multiple floors  of gothic halls, arches, and  passageways v\/ith labyrinthine  staircases. The stairways,  populated by anonymous dark  figures, are reminiscent of M.C.  Escher’s illusions of impossible  staircases. In The Gothic Arch,  however, there is a perspective of  a different order. The use of thread  as a three-dimensional drawing  material competes with the space  it seeks to convey. The actual  depth of the thread disrupts the  perspectival depth. This is most  apparent in those areas where  strands are wound together to  form the suspended chains that  hang from the protruding beams.  The texture of the chains of thread  operates as a relief against the  neat taut lines of perspective  that (in contrast) recede into the  background. The individualization  of single threads from the mass  undoes the three-dimensional  illusion of perspective and breaks  the “surface” of the picture.

String and Line 

In Vik Muniz’s  Pictures of Thread  and Piranesi Prisons, the string  operates as a substitute line for  that of a pencil or etching. Yet  the materiality of the string and  its use as a three-dimensional  line competes with its attempt  to convey depth. The notion of a  three-dimensional line in art may  seem paradoxical; tines function  to provide contour, describe an  outline or enclose a surface.  Muniz’s string, however, resists  this demand, transcending the  status of line and becoming  surface. The string returns us  instead to the original meaning  of “line.” As Hillis Miller reminds  us, “the word line comes from  a root lino meaning linen, flax”  (Hillis Miller 1992: 7). The clumped  lines in  Pictures of Thread and  Piranesi Prisons that reflect  the thread’s fibrous origin also  resonate with the origin of “line”  itself. The unspooling process of   Pictures of Thread produces an  apparently unstructured mesh  of unspun fibres, echoing the  beginning of thread manufacture.  In Piranesi Prisons, however,  the process of the work is more  advanced, as is the resulting  spatial representation. The  thread is unspooled in order to be  “woven” and the lines are fastened  and restrained. The grid-like  construction of the picture echoes  the loom and the interlacing of  lines mimics the interweaving of  warp and weft.  The loose string of mapped  landscapes in  Pictures of Thread  becomes the taut threads of linear  perspective in Piranesi Prisons.  The movement from landscape to  architectural interior also indicates  a shift from an expanse of open  space to a closed, contained one.  The haptic or tactile quality of the  string in Muniz’s work disrupts  the representation of space and  produces multiple surfaces.

James Elkins has reiterated  Muniz’s claim to make the “worst  possible illusion.” Writing on  6,200 Yards (Lighthouse), Elkins  states that “Despite Muniz’s skill  at traditional, academic drawing,  string just does not make good  waves, and if you look closely you  can see the threads looping back,  as if the water was full of eels. The  string painting demonstrates its  insufficiency, but reluctantly.”‘  The reinforced string in Pictures  of Wire, and the close focus on  domestic objects, takes us yet  further from the openness of   Pictures of Thread. It is in Pictures that the  string becomes  most comp/ex and knotted, losing  its linearity and becoming a threedimensional  surface.^     

Pictures of Wire: Trompe i’oeil  and Simulacra

Line is the thread of Ariadne, which  leads us through the labyrinth of  millions of natural objects. Without  line we would be lost.

Pictures of Wire are line-drawings  of everyday objects. Yet the line is  not so much drawn as sculpted.  As with the pictures created using  thread, the lines here consist  ofa string-like material that  exists in relief.  Pictures of Wire,  however, are three-dimensional  forms modelled in wire rather  than drawings. The wire forms  appear to project from the white  background—there is a discernable  shadow and advancing form.  Yet something is not quite right;  Pictures of Wire are photographs  of the wire sculptures. Our  attention switches between  the picture as image and the  picture as form: between two-dimensional  representation and  three-dimensional form. Pictures  of Wire hover between illusionistic  two-dimensional space and actual  three-dimensional depth. Vik  Muniz has said that Pictures of Wire arose as a response to seeing  Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Baptistery  Doors—Porfo del Paradiso.^° The  inspiration is not immediately  apparent; however, Muniz explains  that it is the meeting of two media,  the convergence of drawing and  three-dimensional relief that most  impressed him about the work. For  Muniz, this meeting of different  media results in an overwhelming  of the senses of the spectator so  that the confused eye “is arrested  in the surface of the picture”  (Muniz 2005: 46).

Fiat Lux is a drawing  ofa light bulb sculpted in wire.  The bulb appears to hang from an  invisible ceiling in an undefined  space with only a shadow behind  the hanging wire and behind the  suspended filament to suggest  space. The selection of such a  banal everyday object seems an  uninspiring choice for a picture,  yet Muniz is not interested in the  subject matter so much as the  form that it takes. The content  of  Pictures of Wire lies not in the  object of representation, but in  the operation of spatial illusion.   Pictures of Wire operate as  trompe /’oe;7—”tricking the eye”  of the viewer. It is interesting  to note Baudrillard’s assertion  that the objects of trompe I’oeil  are invariably banal—”Their  insignificance is offensive.””  Still-life paintings are the most  common form of trompe t’oeil  painting. The specific genre of  “quodlibet” paintings (literally  “what you please,” or “anything  at all”) particularly conform to  Baudrillard’s accusation of banality  in the trope l’oeil tradition.’^  Muniz’s selection of objects in   Pictures of Wire fit the trompe l’oeil  criteria: a light bulb, a suitcase, an  ashtray, objects that recede into  the everyday.

However, the operation of  trompe l’oeil in Fiat Lux is not to  be confused with the traditional  form of trompe l’oeil painting; it is  not the verisimilitude of Muniz’s  representation of the light bulb  that fools us. In Fiat lux the viewer  is not tricked by the artifice of  painted illusion or by the veracity  of the representation of the light  bulb. There are at least two distinct  moments of illusion that operate  in Fiat Lux. The first occurs with the  three-dimensional rendering of  an object in a material (wire) that  can be read as a two-dimensional  line drawing, thereby causing  a convergence of diverse forms  of representation and of their  respective spatial dimensions. The  second moment compounds the  first ambiguity; the presentation of  the work as a photograph causes  the collapse of these spatial  distinctions. It is the transparency  of photography that facilitates this  ambiguity between the photograph  and the original. The photograph  functions like a window that  opens on to the world but this  transparent medium becomes  invisible through the presentation  of its image.  Pictures of Wire force  this transparency to collapse  making the photograph visible as  photograph.

The trompe I’oeil in Pictures  of Wire operates through the  substitution of a two-dimensional  photographic representation for  its three-dimensional referent. The  resemblance of the photograph  to the actual sculptural drawing  operates on more than one level—it  is not simply that the photographic  representation resembles the  original, but that we become  unable to determine the difference  between the two. There is a short  circuit in the viewer’s perception,  a disruption of their assumed  perception of depth from the  confusing visual cues provided.  The uncertainty we experience in   Pictures of Wire is analogous to  that produced by optical illusions  (particularly in cases where the  ambiguity, like that in Pictures of  Wire, is facilitated by a simplistic  wire-frame drawing). In Pictures  of Wire we cannot see both the  “drawing” and the photograph  at the same time; the result is  that our perception flips between  the assumed three-dimensional  object and the actual photographic  surface.

In Pictures of Wire the viewer  experiences an overwhelming of  the senses, yet the experience is  also marked by a return to self,  a return to rationality and to the  capacity to distinguish between  appearances and reality. The  confusion gives way to reflection  and to a reassertion of the  physicality of the photograph.  The phenomenon that occurs in   Pictures of Wire is not unlike the  experience of the sublime. In the  case of  Pictures of Wire the affect  is induced by a representation,  rather than nature.  Pictures of Wire  embody the delineation of art as  semblance in Plato’s The Republic.  For Plato, the artist’s copy is  “something which resembles ‘what  is’ without being it” (Plato 1987:  362). Muniz’s work functions like  a simulacrum: the photograph  5/mu/afesthe appearance of the  actual.’J  Pictures of Wire are not  simply copies of reality but copies  of copies of reality whose effect is  contingent on the conflation of the  copy and the real.

Baudrillard draws an analogy  between simulacra and trompe  I’oeil, situating the latter as antirepresentation,  as “simulacra without perspective.” The objects  of trompe l’oeil are not real  objects; for Baudrillard, they do not  describe reality but “the void and  absence” of representation. There  is an additional void in Pictures of  Wire: not only are the objects not  real, but the shadows produced by  them are not real either. It is the  shadows in Fiat Lux that initially  reveal the three-dimensionality  of the wire drawing but, in the  transformation from actual object  to photograph, the shadows serve  to deceive the eye. The shadows in  the photographs cause distortion  in our depth perception causing us  to believe that the objects we see  are real. It is not that the shadows  are not real (they are the shadows  cast by the original object), but  the shadows that are presented  in Fiat Lux are photographs of  shadows. These shadows belong to  another space and time—they are  not shadows whose light source  we share. It is interesting to note  Baudrillard’s reflections on trompe  L’oeil again—”The sun that shines  upon them is very different …This  shadow does not move with the  sun.” The shadows we perceive in  Fiat Lux are simulacra: shadows of  internal depth that pre-exist the  viewer and belong to the realm of  representation. These shadows  belong to another world, not to  the one from which we view the  image.  Pictures of Wire emphasize  that the photograph belongs to the  past—to what has been, so that the  photograph always precedes us.  The “depth”of ffoftuxisone that  is, in Baudrillard’s terms, internal  fof/jewor/c (Baudrillard 1988:  Photography is often  characterized by its capacity to  produce an incomparable copy  of reality. Vik Muniz’s Pictures  of Thread, Piranesi Prisons  and  Pictures of Wire series,  however, transcend the notion  of the photograph as a copy and  demonstrate instead its potential  to operate as a simulacrum. In   Pictures of Thread, Piranesi Prisons  and Pictures ofWirethe actual  depth of the work is transformed  into a flattened representation by  the substitution ofa photograph  in place of the original object. This  occurs nnost notably in Pictures  of Wire, where the shadows that  “prove” the three-dimensionality  have become representation.   Pictures of Wire have a particular  relation with space; they do  not represent it, but envelop it.  The three-dimensional model  encapsulates space; the wire  outline delineates the space it  encompasses. The representation  of space occurs only through  the movement from object to  photograph. The string in Pictures  of Wire is not the string on the  surface of  Pictures of Thread, nor  the string on a raised surface of  Piranesi Prisons. The rigid string  in  Pictures of Wire has become  separate from the surface;  it generates its own surface  pushing its way through to the  photographic surface.

For Deleuze, there is a relation  between simulacra and surface;  simulacra may take us in two  directions at once but they are  always ascending to the surface.  Surface is conceived as the space  where meaning exists. Deleuze  attributes the origin of this concept  to the ancient philosophy of  Stoicism.”‘ The concept of surface  has important philosophical  implications because, in Deleuze’s  terms, it provokes a reorientation  of thought. The Deleuzian concept  of surface is of a space where  events occur—”Everything that  happens and everything that is  said happens or is said at the  surface” (Deleuze 2004:150). This  conception of surface, however,  is not to be read in opposition to  depth, or as a ground on which  events unfold.’^ Rather, surface is  a place of continuous unfolding  and becoming that enters into  composition with the effects that  cause it.

Surfaces are what are visible to  the eye; photographs, however,  deny their surfaces for the images  they depict. Yet the photograph  always signifies on the surface.  The operation of the photograph  is an endless movement of depth  becoming surface, of surface  becoming depth. We can draw a  parallel between the experience  of being photographed and Alice’s  String, Space and Surface in the Photography of Vik Muniz  entry through the Looking-Glass:  Deleuze remarks that Alice releases  her “incorporeal double” and that  it is “by skirting the surface, that  one passes from bodies to the  incorporeal” (Deleuze 2004:12).  Vik Muniz’s  Pictures of Thread,  Piranesi Prisons and Pictures of  Wire reveal the movement from  embodiment to the incorporeal.  The “string” is made into an  “image” then to be photographed;  there is a double transition from  object to image. The string that  skirts the surface in Muniz’s art  loses its actual physicality in the  transformation from original object  to photograph. The substitution of  a photographic image in the place  of the object is not immediately  apparent, the manipulation of  string (as a three-dimensional  drawing material) enables the  perceptual ambiguity to take place.  However, this uncertainty also  provokes a counter movement  from image to object—the initial  invisibility of the photograph  gives way to a renewed visibility of  the photographic surface. As the  illusion becomes clear, the threedimensional  dravi/ing is revealed  as a depthless image and the  dematerialized object gives way  to a re-materialized photograph.  The dematerialization of string is  exchanged for a materialization  of the photograph as such and  for an affirmation of the string as  representation. The transparency  of photography, that which made  the illusion possible, is rendered  opaque. The interaction between  string and surface reinstates the  photograph; the photograph  becomes an ob/ecf rather than the  image it depicts.

String is ubiquitous and  multi-purpose; it ties, secures,  tightens, attaches, loops, lassoes.  It is cord, filament, thread, fibres,  sinews, skein, and twine. String  is a liminal material that operates  on the threshold between stuff  and equipment. Vik Muniz’s   Pictures of Thread, Piranesi  Prisons and  Pictures of Wire  employ string in ways that both  reveal and transcend its everyday  use. In Pictures ofThreadthe  string becomes a visual medium  that acquires a form through  its unspooling. The string art  techniques of Piranesi Prisons  employ string in a manner that  is closer to its everyday use: it is  the wrapping and securing of the  thread that creates the picture.  The rigid string of P/cfureso/lV/re  recalls the use of string to define  or to enclose. Muniz’s string  measures, encompasses and  envelops space; it becomes more  than outline, corresponding to  what Riegl describes as “relief.”‘^  String can be used to restrain  us—to impede our progress, but  it can also be used to help us find  our way. The string in Muniz’s  work demonstrates the qualities  of tension and resistance; but  the tines also suggest direction.  It is by following the string that  we discover the surface. String  eschews the role of pure line in  Muniz’s art, resists delineation,  and is always disrupting the  surface and creating new ones—it  in this capacity that it renders the  photographic surface visible.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Parveen  Adams and Steven Connor from  the London Consortium for their  comments on earlier drafts of  this article. My thanks also go  to Diarmuid Costello and to the  reviewers of this article for their  comments. Finally, I would like to  thank the artist Vik Muniz for  providing the images and copyright.

Notes

1. See the “Old Letters” section  of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford  (1993) originally published in  1853, pp. 75-6.1 am grateful  to J. Hillis Miller (1992) for his  citation of this quote in his  Ariadne’s Thread.


2. Klee’s quote generally appears  as “taking a line for a walk” and  his drawing is also referred to  as a “walking-line.” Frank Gehry  (2004) quotes Klee: “an active  line on a walk, moving freely. A  walk for a walk’s sake” (p. 13).

3. Penelope, the faithful wife of  Odysseus, wove her design for  a shroud for her father-in-law  Laertes by day (but unravelled  it again at night) to keep her  suitors from claiming her during  the years while Odysseus was  away.

4. See Mark Paterson’s website,  particularly “The relation  between touch and space” for  an introduction to his research  and his concept of “haptic  spaces.” <http://www.ggy.bris.  ac.uk/postgraduates/ggmp>,  accessed August 2006.

5. See Laura U. Marks. (2004).  “Haptic Visuality: Touching  with the Eyes.” Frameworii: the  Finnish Art Review 2 <http://  www.framework.fi/2_2OO4/  visitor/artikkelit/marks.htm>,  accessed August 2006. See  also Mark’s (2000) The Skin  of the Film: intercultural  242 Sandra Plummer  Cinema. Embodiment, and the  Senses.

6. In the accompanying text  for their Piranesi exhibition.  the National Academies  note that Piranesi changed  the title from the original  “Invenzioni Capric[ci} di Carceri  or ‘imaginary inventions  of prisons’ to Carceri  d’invenzione, or’prisons of the  imagination.'” <http://www7.  nationalacademies.org/arts/  Piranesi_Muniz.html> accessed  August 2006.

7. James Elklns”‘The Most  InterestingThingthatcan be  done with Representation”  is available from Vik Muniz’s  website <http://www.vikmuniz.  net/main.html), accessed  August 2006.

8. I am paraphrasing Hillis Miller \i^.  (1992) here when he notes  that the linear may become  “complex” (thus losing its  linearity), “knotted, repetitive,  doubled, broken, phantasmal.”  p. 17.

9. j . Hillis Miller’s >lr/odne’s  Thread (1992) opens with this  quote by George Grosz on page  1 in a section on “line.” 

10. Muniz (2005) refers to  Ghiberti’s Doors of Paradise  (1403) in Florence as  inspiration p. 46.  u. See Baudrillard (1988)—  “objects without referents,  out of context… like old 15.  newspapers, these old books,  these old nails” pp. 154-5.

12. 1 am grateful to OlafKoester  (2000) for these translations of  “quod libet” p. 25.

13. See Plato’s The Republic (1987)  Book Ten—”Theory of Art”  for an account of “imitation”  and the work of the artist (the  artist produces an appearance  or apparition of what they  represent, “something  which resembles ‘what is’  without being it.” Deleuze’s  account of “simulacra”  (1983) draws on the last  sections of Plato’s Sophist,  where Plato distinguishes  between “likeness-making”  and “appearance-making”  (a distinction which can be  simplified as “good copy”  and “bad copy” respectively).  Taking issue with Plato’s  inherent hierarchical  distinction, Deleuze  construes the terms as “iconic  copies (likenesses)” and  “phantasmatic simulacra  (semblances).”  Deleuze (2004) attributes  the origin of “surface” to the  Stoics, “The autonomy of the  surface, independent of, and  against depth and height… are  the important Stoic discoveries  against the pre-Socratics and  Plato” p. 150. According to  Deleuze, Stoic philosophy  was the first philosophy to  overturn Platonism. However,  in his discussion of Plato  and the Simulacrum (1983),  he claims that Plato was the  first to overturn Platonism  (with regard to his concept of  simulacra).  I am grateful here for Jean-Clet  Martin’s (1996) formulation  of “surface” in his essay “The  Eye of the Outside”—see  particularly pp. 18-19.  Alois Riegl (2004) views art as  either pertaining to form or to  surface-sculpture belongs to  the former and painting to the  String, Space and Surtace in the Photography of Vik Muniz 243  latter. The relief however “aims  to create a tactile surface  while breaking away from the  three-dimensional extension of  space,” p. 411.  References  Dos Anjos, M. (2004), “An Ethics of  Illusion,” in Vii< Muniz: Incomplete  Works, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil:  Ministerio da Cultura, Fundagao  Biblioteca Nacional.  Baudrillard,). (1988), Selected  Writings, Mark Poster (ed.),  Cambridge: Polity Press.  Celant, G. (2003), “Mimesis of  Mimesis: Vik Muniz,” in Vik Muniz,  Milan: Mondadorio Electa.  Deleuze, G. (1983), “Plato and the  Simulacrum,” tr. Rosalind Krauss  October 27 (Winter) 45-56.  — (2004), The Logic of Sense, tr.  Mark Lester, London: Continuum.  Derrida, J. (1987), The Truth in  Painting, tr. Geoff Bennington.  Chicago: University of Chicago  Press.  Elkins, J. (2004), “The Most  InterestingThingthatcan be done  with Representation,” in VikMuniz:  Incomplete Works, Rio de Janeiro,  Brazil: Ministerio da Cuttura,  Fundagao  Biblioteca Nacional, <http://www.  vikmuniz.net/main.html) accessed  August 2006.  Focillon, H. (1989), The Life of  Forms in Art, tr. C.B. Hogan and G.  Kubler, London: Zone Books.  Gaskell, E. (1993), Cranford,  Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions  Ltd.  Gehry, F. (2004), Gehry Draws,  Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT  Press.  Hillis Miller, J. (1992), Ariadne’s  Thread, New Haven/London: Yale  University Press.  Koester, 0. (2000), Painted  Illusions: The Art of Cornelius  Gijsbrechts, London: National  Gallery.  Marks, L.U. (2000J, The Skin of  the Film: Intercultural Cinema,  Embodiment, and the Senses,  Durham/London: Duke University  Press.  — (2004), “Haptic Visuality:  Touching with the Eyes,” in  Framework: the Finnish Art Review  2 <http://www.framework. fi/2_  2oo4/visitor/artikkelit/marks.htm>  accessed August 2006.  Martin, J. (1996), “The Eye of the  Outside,” in Deleuze: A Critical  Reader, Paul Patton (ed.), Oxford:  Blackwell, pp. 18-28.  Muniz, V. (1998), “Vik Muniz and  Charles Ashley Stainback:  A Dialogue,” in VikMuniz:  Seeing Is Believing, Charles  Ashley Stainback and Mark Alice  Durant (eds), Santa Fe: Arena  Editions.  — (2003), “The Cunning Artificer,”  an interview with Vik Muniz by  Vincent Katz, in VikMuniz. Milan:  Mondadorio Electa.  — (2005), Reflex: A Vik Muniz  Primer, New York: Aperture.  Pajaczkowska, C. (2005), “On  Stuff and Nonsense: the  Complexity of Cloth,” in Textile:  The Iournal of Cloth and Culture 3  (3): 220-49.  Paterson, M. “The relation  between touch and space,”  <http://www.ggy.bris.ac.uk/  postgraduates/ggmp> accessed  August 2006.  Plato (1987), The Republic, tr.  Desmond Lee, London: Penguin.  Plato (1993), Sophist, tr. Nicholas P.  White, Indianapolis: Hackett.  Riegl, A. (2004), Historical  Grammar of the Visual Arts, tr. J.  Jung, New York: Zone Books. 

Inutile de le nier : lorsque l’on entre dans la salle d’exposition où sont accrochées les Ïuvres de la série Erotica (2001), aussi averti que l’on soit, on en prend plein la figure. Cibachromes et C-prints d’un mètre soixante à plus de deux mètres cinquante de côté présentent en gros plan des fesses, des seins ainsi que des verges pénétrant des vulves selon à peu près tous les angles de vue. On supporte le choc, d’abord, justement, à cause de la dimension de ces images que Vik Muniz est allé glaner sur les sites pornographiques d’Internet et qu’il reproduit à une échelle qui, au sens propre, nous oblige à prendre une distance par rapport à elles.


Les points de vue sont parfois si rapprochés qu’on a du mal à comprendre de quelle façon se raccordent les différentes parties de corps, et il arrive que dans un premier temps on ne distingue qu’une image vaguement abstraite. Il faut alors prendre du recul pour comprendre la scène. Par ailleurs, les surfaces sont lisses, propres, et même si on se rend compte que la matière photographiée est souple, avec des creux et des bosses, des zones d’ombre et des zones delumière, bien plus sensuelle, en fait, qu’une image pixélisée apparaissant sur l’écran de l’ordinateur, le glaçage photographique met comme un voile pudique sur ces chairs quelque peu, il faut le dire, cellulitiques. Les choses se gâtent (presque au sens propre) lorsque l’on s’attarde devant ces Ïuvres Ñcomme c’est normal de le faire devant toute Ïuvre d’artÑ et qu’on les examine plus en détail. La qualité de la reproduction permet de distinguer des sillons, très agrandis, d’empreintes digitales, des griffures donnant l’illusion des poils ou le piquetage des testicules, ou encore le rendu du relief là où les lèvres de la vulve se retroussent au passage de la verge, etc. Le regardeur est pris au piège ; il est comme un lilliputien, le nez entre les cuisses de géants. La matière reprend ses droits sur la distance photographique, la chair sur son image. Voici pourquoi. Comme à son habitude, Muniz ne s’est pas contenté d’agrandir une image trouvée.


Avec un soin inégalable, il l’a d’abord copiée, sur une surface de quelques centimètres, en utilisant une substance bien concrète et , ici de la pâte à modeler, d’où la simulation de la chair et, qui plus est, d’une chair malaxée. C’est parce qu’il a appuyé avec ses doigts, étalé la pâte, que les peaux ont cet aspect granuleux de cellulite. C’est un peu dégoûtant. On ne se sent pas très fier de contempler comme ça du vulgaire porno (toute la série est sous-titréeSilly Putty). Si bien que l’on reconsidère le tout en retournant quelques pas en arrière. Ces allers et venues entre le caractère tactile d’une matière, par lequel le spectateur aime se laisser prendre (et dans lequel l’artiste manque toujours de s’empêtrer ; Muniz avoue de nombreux ratages…), et le pouvoir d’abstraction de la photographie, le communiqué de presse de l’exposition à la Galerie Renos Xippas les évoquait de façon on ne peut plus elliptique, Ñ et paradoxale : « le contact presque physique avec l’empreinte des doigts de l’artiste (oh là là ! [c’est moi qui commente]) permet d’inscrire une distance (…) et de découvrir d’autres images (…), comme des paysages ou une cartographie… » (Personnellement, je n’y aurais pas pensé, mais chacun s’échappe comme il peut de l’emprise…) Ceci n’est pas sans rapport avec ce que déclare l’artiste sur le choix de son médium. D’abord attiré par la sculpture, il découvre finalement que : « La photographie charrie le code des objets tridimensionnels sans le bagage du poids et du volume (1). » Devant ces Ïuvres, je n’ai pas, moi, imaginé un paysage, non, j’ai pensé à… Barnett Newman ! (Chacun sa libido…) Newman, dont Muniz se moque gentiment dans l’entretien que je viens de citer. Les tableaux de Newman ont la faculté de convertir leur puissante présence en une sensation d’évanescence. Spectateur, ou bien vous sombrez dans des mètres carrés de toile peinte, ou bien vous vous laissez transporter, alléger par eux. Vik Muniz vous place face à ce genre d’alternative. Bien sûr, la série Erotica appartient à une autre tradition, celle de la peinture « tartinée », des nus de Picabia, composés d’après les photographies des revues de charme au début des années quarante, et dont la touche est souvent bien visible, un peu grossière, et celle des provocantes Women de De Kooning. De Kooning qui expliquait parfaitement le pourquoi de la chose en prétendant que « la chair avait été la raison d’être de la peinture à l’huile ». Et la pâte à modeler donc!


Mais on a vu que simultanément la technique photographique permettait à l’artiste de lisser cette pâte et donc de modérer sa relation mimétique avec ce qu’elle désigne. En ce sens, Muniz se rapproche plutôt d’un autre peintre qu’il aime beaucoup, Salvador Dalí, dont d’ailleurs le club de fans va aujourd’hui s’élargissant, ce qui est heureux. Dalí ne s’est-il pas appliqué à rendre des corps flasques, des matières en décomposition, voire excrémentielles, au travers de tableaux dont le fini est quasi « photographique »? Parodiant Breton, et cultivant le paradoxe, Dalí n’hésita pas également à proclamer : « La beauté sera comestible ou ne sera pas. ». On suppose que Vik Muniz, qui a réalisé des images à l’aide de sucre, de poivre, de Ketchup, de beurre de cacahuète, de sirop de chocolat…, avant d’utiliser la pâte à modeler (et toutes les mamans savent que les enfants ont la furieuse manie de porter la pâte à modeler à la bouche) a pu être sensible à cette définition. Dalí, Muniz nous mettent ainsi en face de nos responsabilités. Si l’art se consomme, à nous, amateurs, de choisir si cette consommation se convertit en beauté, ou en déjection… Pour lui-même, Muniz a choisi. Les compositions en sucre ou en chocolat sont dispersées, ou détruites, après que la photo a été prise. De toute façon, certaines sont extrêmement fragiles et précaires. Dans l’exposition de la série Erotica, on pouvait voir une boule pas très grosse, beigeasse, trônant de façon un peu ridicule, dérisoire, dans l’espace qui lui avait été réservé, à l’écart. Elle me fit penser à une urne.


Renseignements pris, il s’agissait du bloc de pâte à modeler qui, façonné, réagglutiné et refaçonné, avait été nécessaire pour la confection de toutes les images. Matière première qui reste première, endue définitivement à son état d’agrégat confus, de déchet, matière évacuée de l’image qui, elle, triomphe dans son impalpable pérennité…


Toujours dans la même interview, Muniz parle encore de son admiration pour les portes du baptistère de la cathédrale de Florence, dues à Ghiberti. Ce qui retient son attention, c’est que le bas-relief exploite simultanément une subtile illusion de perspective et la précision bien physique des détails du relief. Autrement dit, face aux scènes représentées, la perception oscille entre la séduction toute mentale exercée par une enfilade d’arches vue en perspective, etl’attraction « haptique » du bronze. La question se pose de façon comparable devant les Ïuvres de la série Erotica. Admirons-nous le travail habile de quelques grammes de pâte à modeler, ou bien contemplons-nous de saisissantes, suffocantes, photographies? Nous attachons-nous à la propriété qu’a ce modeste matériau, la pâte à modeler, de se confondre avec la substance-même de l’être humain, ou bien trouvons-nous là l’occasion de réviser, de transcender nos opinions toutes faites sur la photo porno? Ces Ïuvres sont des propositions indécidables, et elles nous font prendre conscience que c’est peut-être tout notre rapport au monde qui se situe ainsi dans un flottement : habitons-nous le monde des choses concrètes ou bien lemonde des images des choses? Même lorsque nous faisons l’amour et que notre corps se confond avec un autre corps, n’est-ce bien que ce corps que nous étreignons, n’est-ce pas aussi la construction imaginaire, fantasmatique, dont nous l’habillons? Il n’est pas interdit de penser que les images crues de Vik Muniz, obtenues à partir d’une matière crue, nous éclairent sur un point fondamental de théologie. Dieu créa l’homme en le façonnant dans un peu de glaise. À son instar, l’artiste modèle des corps avec un peu de pâte. Mais cette pâte, il l’écrase, l’étale sur un plan, renonce à ce point à lui donner du volume qu’il finit par la photographier pour la ramener parfaitement dans la bidimensionnalité de l’image. D’où cette conclusion : est-ce bien le Dieu incarné qui a sauvé le monde? Ne seraient-ce pas plutôt les images du Dieu incarné? Les images, c’est-à-dire l’art. N’est-ce pas l’art qui chaque jour renouvèle le sauvetage du monde?

(1) Les citations de Vik Muniz sont extraites d’un entretien avec Charles Ashley Stainback, catalogue Seeing is Believing, International Center of Photography, New York, Arena Editions, Santa Fé, 1998.