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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.

The photographer Vik Muniz operates with impunity in the Bermuda Triangle bordered by commercial, popular and fine art, which can drive the art world a bit nuts. (He resembles David Hockney in this regard.) But he almost always puts on a good show in terms of sheer showmanship, and his current one is even better than usual. It reminds us that part of the razzledazzle of his art stems from physical texture, which almost no photographer has exploited with such optical richness.

Mr. Muniz’s particular fusion of the two main strands of postmodern photography — appropriation and setup — is aggressively material based and consequently uncannily tactile, if also sometimes rather hokey. Over the years he has remade, and then photographed, Corot landscapes from thread, Marilyn Monroe from diamonds, various Process Art pieces from dust and, perhaps most famously, sugar cane child laborers from sugar. Other works have employed luncheon meat,chocolate, coins, wire, spices, junk, tiny toys, dominoes and dry pigment.

Mr. Muniz’s latest efforts continue his long-term obsession with remaking famous paintings, this time using scraps torn from glossy magazines. A Degas bather, a Courbet nude, Caspar David Friedrich’s jaunty “Wanderer Above the Sea” and Gustave Caillebotte’s floor scrapers are among the canvases that he has carefully reproduced in collage, then photographed and enlarged to as much as 10 feet high. The effect is startling. All because of the vagaries of enlargement, it seems, the images almost appear to be pieced together from tiny pieces of fluttery, slightly fuzzy frayed cloth, like some kind of rag picker’s folk art.

There is of course a wild assortment of details to be gleaned from the elaborate foliage of the images, including small faces, figures, bits of words and text, and more art. The white ground surrounding Thomas Eakins’s 1880 “Crucifixion” is dotted with fragments of weeping Madonnas from various Northern Renaissance paintings, while an onlooker from George de La Tour’s “Fortune-Teller” directs her sidelong gaze at Jesus’ pelvis. But it is the larger impression — of quavering, fluttering surfaces, of the surfeit of detail, of painting actively overtaken by collage — that holds the eye. This crazed fusion of matter, hand and lens is always at play in Mr. Muniz’s photographs, but until now it has never been achieved in quite such adamant terms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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