In an email interview with Maria Zagala on 22 January 2007, Vik Muniz expanded on his interest in Piranesi’s Imaginary prisons and his working method.

MZ: Over the past decade you have made a number of series based on the art of past masters including Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Monet, Redon, Matisse and, of course, Piranesi. You reconstruct their works by using radically different media such as chocolate, dust gathered from the Whitney’s offices and galleries, cuttings of reproductions of paintings by Van Gogh and Monet taken from magazines and, more recently, by recreating Delacroix and Cranach’s paintings with industrial rubbish. After making elaborate ‘models’ (if this is the right word) based on their works, you photograph them and the photograph becomes the final form. I wonder if we could explore your process, in particular in relation to the Prisons, after Piranesi series in more depth?
First, how do you decide on the artist or artwork you choose to recreate and what determines the media and techniques you employ when recreating these works?

VM:I usually try not to establish a definite modus operandi when it comes to managing creativity. Every source or input appears to be merely pieces of a much larger game and sometimes pieces that do not fit a particular puzzle will be saved for a future one. I sometimes start working from an image that has stayed in my mind for a while, or bump into a new technique and go after themes to apply it to. And since a lot of it has to do with recognising and remembering, either images or processes are usually chosen because of the ambiguity of their roles seen from the scope of today’s media and technology.

MZ: What attracted you to Piranesi’s Prisons series?

VM:The precariousness and yet the bravura in the description of depth. Depth constitutes a great paradigm in the predominantly ethereal media of today because while we have improved the ways to describe it, the descriptions themselves have become increasingly uni-dimensional. I wanted to produce work that would make the viewer reconsider the importance of these great works from the perspective of this fascinating ambiguity.

MZ: Did this evolve from a question you posed yourself about Piranesi’s series?


VM:I believe Piranesi conceived and produced Imaginary prisons as something very personal, but why would he make prints out of it? This only adds to the equation of superficiality and depth that I was talking about. Every artwork questions a mute and reluctant past, and shouts answers to a future that has not made up its mind of what to ask yet. I hope artists will do this to my work in the future.

MZ: How did you approach making the model for the Prisons? Seven of the eight works in your series are after the second, darker edition. Why did you prefer these prints to the lighter first edition?

VM:I had worked with thread and pins before, but despite my interest in architecture, I had never approached the subject before. It was only when I saw two girls in Panama playing cat’s cradle with a ring of thread that the idea came up. The choice between the dark and lighter originals was based on my capacity to render the dark ones with a little more detail than the light ones.

MZ: Your method of working has been described as a hybrid of drawing and photography. This seems to be an apt description for this series in particular in which you re-draw Piranesi’s lines with a needle and thread. This process suggests the Renaissance pedagogical model of learning by copying the work of a previous master. Is this of interest to you?

VM:This is what Gombrich calls ‘schemata’ and it is what first enabled image-making techniques to be passed from one generation to other. This has worked not only to create a larger public for great works in a time of predominantly manual reproduction but also to foster a deeper understanding of them, because there isn’t really a better way to know an artwork from the past than trying to reproduce it yourself.

MZ: One of the most striking characteristics of the Prisons etchings is Piranesi’s freedom of line. This is quite an achievement given that etching is such laborious and complicated technical process. His prints look as dashed-off as his preparatory pen-and-wash drawings. I think there is a certain parallel between your work and Piranesi’s in this regard. The construction of your models is time consuming, yet you exhibit the photograph, which is made in a fraction of the time.

VM:The immediacy and freshness of the photograph generally evokes spontaneity, a quality equally esteemed by anyone who is evaluating a drawing. This comes from the arbitrary consent from the part of the photographer or draftsman to allow accidents or mistakes to become intrinsic and functioning parts of their pictures. The accident is some sort of instinctive and genuine signature that endorses the artist’s link to the rest of humanity. This is one aspect of media that has endured, despite the pace of technological development, for centuries and it is still applied across the entire spectrum of disciplines today. When copying an existing artwork, a mistake is the only thing that makes that artwork yours.

MZ: I am also interested in the question of scale, as your method of working allows you to play with scale very effectively. It is impossible to know what size your original model is? From the large size of your photographs, it gives the impression of being vast. In fact, what was the size of your models?

VM:Scale has always something to do with cognition and technology. It is a great tool and should be reconsidered every time new work is conceived. I have worked on every possible scale (from etching grains of sand to making drawings of thousands of feet with the aid of heavy machinery), on my models as well as my final prints. While scale shifts generate abstract thinking about an image, photos that maintain the scale of the model work as optical illusions. In any case, a particular scale of work should never determine the style of an artist. By the way, the Piranesi models were about seventy-five by one hundred centimetres.

MZ Finally, did your work in the theatre many years ago influence your choice of Piranesi?

VM:Now that you mentioned it, yes, I really think so. They have an aura of set design to them. Something that makes them quite artificial and that might be what really attracted my attention in the first place.

Charles Stainback: When did you start using photography? Let me rephrase that. When did you realize the power the photographic image could have in your work?

Vik Muniz: Even though I have always been involved with photographic images, for a long time I was reluctant to make photographs myself. I guess I made a decision to stop producing images and concentrate on making real things right after I gave up a career in advertising. I became a sculptor so that I could work on the more material aspects of things. Those objects were somewhat successful and a gallery showed them in New York. The gallery also documented the work with slides and black-and-white reproductions. When I first saw those photographs, I liked them so much that I didn’t care if the objects themselves were all set on fire. The photograph carried the code of the objects’ tridimensionality without the baggage of weight and volume. The photograph also conveyed material information (a photograph of sandpaper, for example, “looks” coarse), but it was somehow bonded more firmly with the form of the objects portrayed. Ultimately, the photographs captured more of what the objects were as they first appeared in my mind, as an idea. I wanted to be involved with craft to the extent that it becomes invisible. This way the creative process goes full circle: you start with an idea and end up with something that resembles one.

cs: So your first use of the camera is similar to the intentions of artists in the 1960s who simply began making photographs to document happenings, earthworks, or performances?

vm: That’s pretty accurate. I have always admired that kind of art for all the wrong reasons. My first reaction to finding Spiral Jetty in a book was, “Wow, what a great photograph!” I could not believe someone had gone to so much trouble just to end up with a picture. I find quite paradoxical the fact that most of the art of the ’60s has a “what you see is what you get” attitude, and because so much emphasis was placed on the physicality and evanescence of a work, most of what we’re left with is documentation. Well, documentation can be art. Pictures of Mont Blanc taken by the Bisson Frères in the nineteenth century were records of a performance, but the performance was executed entirely with the record in mind. I am pretty sure artists like Smithson or Matta-Clark felt that a piece was complete only after a photograph had been taken of it. As for happenings, I have been to a few performances and I confess that I get very embarrassed and rarely enjoy them. Photographs of such events, however, are always fascinating. I am very interested in the ways a performance gets recorded and the way in which the record affects the performance. Japanese wood prints, for example, advertised Kabuki actors who embodied their own masked characters. Julia Margaret Cameron would title a male portrait Iago after the villainous character in Othello, ignoring the identity of the model. Jerry Seinfeld plays himself on his sitcom. How can a person play himself? These are things that interest me when I document my little private happenings.

cs: In a way, you are like a magician who reveals the workings of a trick to the audience you want them to see how the illusion is created. Was that your intent when you started using photography as a part of your artwork?

vm: The magician as well as the artist makes a living by manipulating stuff people generally take for granted. The universe of knowledge has lots of black holes: the miraculous, the funny, the grotesque, the amazing, and even the truly beautiful are merely situations that occur in the gaps between mundane knowledge. I’ve always had an interest in this in-betweenness, these places where logic and common sense collapse, creating room for new experiences. Augustine once said that miracles exist not in relation to nature but in relation to what we know of nature. The difference is that with optical illusions, the magic is indelible. The optical cortex is truly a sucker of a mechanism.

No matter what people say, art–directly or indirectly–has always had to deal with illusion. The Paleolithic artist had to deal with it and so did Mondrian. Something happens when you experience an optical illusion that exchanges the experience of an object for the experience of vision itself. You don’t simply see, you feel vision. I have neither the interest nor the means to produce illusions that expand the concept of what an illusion is George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are doing that for us. My area of interest is in the opposite end of the spectrum of illusion: I want to make the worst possible illusion that will still fool the eyes of the average person. Something so rudimentary and simple that the viewer will think, “I don’t believe what I’m seeing, I can’t be seeing this, my mind is too sophisticated to fall for something as silly as this.” Illusions as bad as mine make people aware of the fallacies of visual information and the pleasure to be derived from such fallacies. These illusions are made to reveal the architecture of our concept of truth. They are meta-illusions.

cs: Do people ever get confused by your work? Perhaps misinterpret your intentions? Or take your work too seriously? I assume you don’t, by the way.

vm: No, I’ve never had the problem or the pleasure of being taken too seriously. My work is made not to confuse but to destabilize the viewer’s notion of what a photograph is. In that respect, the viewer does get confusedÑand this is a good thing. The logical blur that one experiences in front of an illusionistic picture is similar to what one experiences after hearing a joke. Suddenly there is an enormous vacuum in your mind that the cognitive apparatus registers as pleasurable because that’s what the mind likes to do: to fill these places with wild and abstract thoughts. The notion that separates entertainment and wonder from artistic merit was probably invented by some really sad people who could only measure the importance of the artwork against the fabric of history and society, forgetting entirely the role of the individual. The even sadder thing is that this notion endures, polluting the criteria of artistic appreciation at the level of art production: artists become serious and systematic, trying to make sense out of things. And if an artist creates illusions or makes “funny things,” he is certainly bound to be taken lightly. I have elaborate opinions about race, gender, ecology, censorship, and economic distribution. I am just not confident enough to market these opinions as an artistic commodity. The subject of art is the study of the mechanisms responsible for conveying reality, and not the idea of reality itself. Only after you have emptied art of this responsibility can you actually make art that is “about” something.

Human knowledge relies on dualities and antagonisms in order to exist, making every notion entirely dependent on its negation to assert a significant meaning. In this respect, illusion becomes a way to improve our understanding of what reality is and humor becomes a subject for serious investigation.

cs: Your fakery, if I may use this description, has been taken seriously, more than once. For instance, the Principia series, in which you use stereoviews: works in which the line between fact and fiction is so blurred, there are no guide wires showing, no visible clues to your hoax.

vm: Well, there are actually two distinct bodies of work: one is about representation and the other is about interpretation. The Pictures of Wire series or the Sugar Children, for instance, are pretty much about whatever causes something to represent something else. Other series like The Best of Life, Personal Articles, and Principia are less about causes than they are about the effects of representation. They are ideas that developed from looking at mass-produced imagery and exploring how that imagery had affected me. The Best of Life fooled the viewer because the viewer thought he knew everything about the picture before he saw it. Personal Articles played with what people could not know about the pictures. And Principia tested how people would respond to very silly pseudo-scientific photos seen through an apparatus. In all these works, there is a process of digestion or perhaps I should say indigestion and regurgitation of media images. Their basic formal aspect is the stuff that is already part of our collective unconscious. More than 50 percent of the world comes to us in the form of halftones, electromagnetic waves, and distorted light.

cs: After hearing you talk about your work, I must admit that Gerhard Richter comes to mind. Not so much because your work is similar, but more for the coalescing of extremes in the entire body of artwork. Besides the connection of the extreme from “realism to abstraction,” have you ever thought about the similarities?

vm: What is very interesting in Gerhard Richter’s work is that he is not trying to push the limits of realism or abstraction away from each other. His photo-based landscapes, still lives, and portraits have the odd immateriality of an abstract painting, and his abstract works (in a way similar to Matta’s) seem to create a notion of space within the brushstrokes. I have always been drawn to his work. The series of famous men at the Ludwig Museum and the Bader Meinhof paintings had an enormous impact on me. When I stop to think of what contemporary artists I am most likely to absorb ideas from, I can only think of painters who use photography in their work. Vija Celmins and Chuck Close, for example, are also people whose work I am constantly studying. The only sculptors that come to mind when I think of what has always interested me are Robert Irwin and Charles Ray. I had a similar discussion with someone else recently, and she was a bit disappointed that I am not influenced by younger artists. She even used a funny termÑ”more contemporary.” I told her that I am sure I will love the art of today in about twenty years.

cs: You mention Vija Celmins and Chuck Close and their use of photography. However, what seems even more pronounced as an influence is the tremendous wealth of trompe l’oeil in art history. Since more than twenty years have passed for many of art history’s great illusions of trompe l’oeil, I assume a few might spark your interest?

vm: There is a kind of trompe l’oeil that does a bit more than trompe the oeil. I like illusions that say something about reality or, at least, our ability to cope with it. Illusions of this kind are usually very understated and quiet. A painting by Peto, for example, is a nice and entertaining trick, but a landscape by Bierstadt or Church is a lesson in perception. For me, Ansel Adams is a more interesting illusionist than Jerry Ueslman.

cs: Your photographs are a hybrid of intellect, humor, and illusion. Can you explain your working method and the process of bringing these often incongruous ingredients together in one work or series?

vm: I have never been very good at organizing or classifying things, separating and filing them in specific places. On my bookshelves you will find Milton next to Little Lulu. I try to keep my mind and my environment as open as possible so that all kinds of unlikely alliances may form in a natural and organic way. Combining photography and drawing is no big deal because the two things were once the same and the need for a distinction came much later. My father once won an Encyclopaedia Britannica in a pool game. It was a very old edition and you could not tell if the illustrations were very good drawings or badly printed photographs. I remember, as a child, enjoying this fact. Some things never really change.

As for working method, I haven’t worked long enough to develop one and I sincerely hope I never do. What I have is a repertoire of attitudes toward imagemaking that I explore aimlessly until I bump into something interesting. I try to leave the process as much as possible to intuition. If you work in an intuitive way, you generally discover afterward the reasons behind your decisions. My very first efforts in photography were a kind of transition between the object and the image. I wanted the image to be as light and penetrating as an idea. Again, I was reluctant to make images because of my previous experience in advertising. The work of advertising is to fabricate identities for everything from talcum powder to nations and their armies, to give form to the shapeless and a timeless image to the transitory.

This sounds very philosophical, I know, and I still think advertising is a very important part of our culture. But I wasn’t interested in fabricating identities before I could find out for myself what identity is. How are we able to recognize objects in a picture, how are we able to recognize objects, period? Advertising made me aware of the dichotomy between an object and its images. This sort of tension has consistently been part of my work. Today I look at older works such as Two Nails, Tug of War, and Cogito Ergo Sum and see clearly this dilemma unfolding in my mind. Reality or representation? As soon as I discovered how similar these two notions are once they become visual information, I began to feel more comfortable using this polarity to my advantage.

cs: After seeing the diversity of your work, I assume that you have a fascination with images embedded in objects or things, everything from topiary to silhouettes of ducks on the side of a dog to shapes in a cloud.

vm: A miracle is a phenomenon of interpretation. From Leonardo’s stained walls to Mr. Ripley’s horses to grafitti, we are bound to encounter “accidental representations” everywhere. It is as if meaning ricocheted throughout the elemental like oxygen atoms. That’s somehow linked to the basic functions of perception, the stuff designed to keep us alive when we still were hunting the hairy mammoth. To really understand art, one must return to these simple things. There was probably a time when early man couldn’t represent anything, but certainly found the shapes that were linked to his life in stone formations, cracks, tree trunks, and pebbles. We tend to think that art began with cave paintings, but I believe art started with the ability to recognize the form of one thing in something else. Some artists in nineteenth-century China did not produce any art of their own but simply looked for stones that conveyed a certain mood in their form. They were called dream stones and they predate the readymade by at least fifty years. What Duchamp made was an already-made.

I have always been intrigued with these things because they are the basic stuff of knowledge. The moment you recognize the similarities between two things, you have created a symbol, you have learned how to use language. When Noam Chomsky took on Piaget’s theory and the nature-nurture controversy about language acquisition, he was onto something important about the nature of knowledge. The problem with the natural language theory is that it assigns an exclusively active role to our cognitive abilities. Cognition has its tidal movements. I believe that language is an innate thing, but its basic configuration is passive and contemplative and it was designed by evolution to function at the level of form recognition, a basic tool for survival. Some early man threw his spear at a bison only to discover that it wasn’t a bison but a termite mound that carried an uncanny resemblance to a bison. He was “fooled” by nature. He went back to the tribe and told the other hunters about the bison. Soon they were throwing their spears at the termite mound while he crouched behind the bushes laughing. That man was the first artist.

cs: For some individuals working with photographic imagery, the label “photographer” is less than desirable. They almost always prefer the label “artist.” You, however, embrace the title of photographer and the photographic medium itself with great fervor, yet the work appears on first glance more closely aligned to our traditional notion of fine art. Do you see yourself as a photographic heretic or a shaman with a camera?

vm: I attended art school in São Paulo for a few years. None of the instructors there knew the work of Joseph Beuys or Bruce Nauman. We would sit for three hours at a time drawing and modeling geometric solids and nudes, and occasionally chat about Bernini or Tiepolo. The seeming mindlessness of those exercises taught me almost everything about artmaking that I use today. It taught me how to organize visual information in a hierarchical way, giving me a more detailed understanding of the mechanisms of representation. It also inspired in me a respect for craft and technique that I have many times tried to rid myself of, but obviously have failed. One can learn how to be a draftsman, a photographer, or a sculptor in school, but there is no way to teach someone how to become an artist. It would be like teaching someone to be sick or happy, or to be a good dice player. I am a photographer when I photograph, and a draftsman when I draw, but an artist is what I am always becoming.

Ovid begins his account of Genesis in Metamorphoses with this: “My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms.” What a perfect way to start a work of art! A child picks up a piece of chalk and draws a circle on the sidewalk, then straight lines radiating from the circle. Any observer would immediately recognize in this doodle the image of the sun, an immense ball of fire 150 million kilometers from Earth. It takes less than a second for the meaning “sun” to embody that trace of chalk, while it takes eight minutes for the actual light of the sun to illuminate it. We have become so sophisticated in our visual habits that we often overlook the magic behind representation. It is said that when Renaissance artists started to employ three-point perspective in their paintings and frescoes, they were accused of witchcraft. Because we no longer experience fainting spells in front of a Giotto painting, all the perceptual impact of that work becomes history, but it is somehow satisfying to think of the confused viewers trying to figure out how those earthy pigments were organized so to produce a perfect likeness of tridimensional space. I try to focus my attention on this dynamic theater of visual forms, where powders and binders play the part of flying angels, charcoal traces act the role of Arcadian landscapes, and molten metal becomes the perfect likeness of animals. I try to pinpoint the moment where the change occurs, the moment a circle becomes the sun, and a triangle the tomb of a long-dead pharaoh. That is magic, in its most evocational, shamanic, and spiritual transformation that was once so distinct in art.

cs: I think that in most instances you do get that sense from your work. And that “moment” is what people find intriguing when viewing it. Nevertheless, you assume that even in today’s fast-paced, hyperactive, gigabite, morphed, and virtual world that the average man or woman on the street is aware of that “magic” associated with human creativity. Don’t you think that all too often we lose sight of the wonder of human creativity and the ability of the eye, the hand, and the mind to produce amazing illusions?

vm: Images are produced at such staggering speed that we grow conditioned to retain only a fraction of what we see. The funny thing is that as we become more proficient in making images, we become increasingly unable to understand their form and semantic structure. The faster we can produce them, the less time we have to really see what they are. The power of an image lays precisely in its potential for being underestimated. In developing defenses against this noxious visual environment, one becomes numb to all kinds of images. Sometimes I try to imagine the world before anyone had a camera. A drawing of a rhinoceros like the one by Dürer must have been a wondrous thing for the sixteenth-century viewer. Today, not even a real rhinoceros will inspire that kind of awe. We need dinosaurs.

cs: But in a way, we have that kind of illusion–even dinosaurs–in many
of today’s high-tech/high-budget Hollywood movies. Don’t these count?

vm: Isn’t this a funny paradox, that the ultimate use of the latest technology is to make prehistoric creatures? I am usually more impressed by well-executed card tricks than by this computer stuff. After five minutes of Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs only scare you by sudden appearances: a hand puppet could appear suddenly on the screen and people would be just as shocked. Films by Ray Harryhausen, for example, are far scarier because they have very little to do with reality. They look more like nightmares.

cs: Like many artists of your generation, your work is informed by media–print and television–and popular culture. In The Best of Life series, was your intention to critique our mediated culture like so many other artists had done in the 1980s?

vm:If you come to consider what one generally does every day, almost everything that is novel and that adds to one’s life comes in the form of mediated information. If you tally up everything you’ve learned through direct experience–in other words, by trying something yourself–it does not account for much compared to what you know by listening to other people, reading the newspaper, or watching television. The largest part of our memory, therefore, is allocated to events we were not directly part of. When it comes to photographic media, this phenomenon gets even more interesting: in all the photographs that have ever been taken, only the film was exposed to the recorded image, no human eye shares the precise moment and position of any photograph. That makes the history of photographed events the history of events removed from human experience. We can only share memories of images that in reality no one ever saw. If no one ever saw what everyone remembers, what exactly are these memories made of?

When I arrived in the United States in 1983, I spoke very little English and so initially did not make many new acquaintances. Reading the paper and watching TV were comforting because they were a way to participate in my new environment. I bought The Best of Life in a garage sale outside of Chicago. This book somehow made me feel safer. It made me feel more a part of the place where I was living. That “family of man” thing really works. I lost the book in the summer of ’88 on a beach in Long Island and felt really sad. Immediately, it occurred to me that people do not keep picture books like The Best of Life solely for the written content. They also keep them to check their memory of events against the photographs, just as they would peruse a family album.

During that summer, I began to check how much I retained from the experience of those photographs. At first, it was a pastime. I would wake up and work on a few every day, and each day I would remember a bit more. When I could no longer remember anything, I began to call people (who didn’t have the images in front of them either) and ask specific questions. I discovered that people store images in radically different ways: their descriptions had a completely different structure than mine. The visual world is like a crossword puzzle: we all have the same puzzle but each of us solves it differently. I had developed from memory a few of the images quite well when Stux Gallery offered to show them as drawings. Once I’d transformed the image-memories into drawings, I thought they should be returned to their photo state. So I photographed the drawings. When they were ready, I printed the photos with the same halftone screen the original pictures were printed on. People thought they were seeing bad reproductions of photographs of famous events, but in fact they were only looking at pictures of thoughts. They were convinced by the photographs because they have the same syntax as the real photos. It worked.

cs: So your intention was to play with our collective visual syntax while testing the limitations of your own memory?

vm: Being aware of your memory limitations generally means being aware of your potential for underestimating what you see. We have been conditioned to formulate important opinions based on images we see, but the same mechanisms responsible for bringing us these images have also conditioned us not to ask many questions about the way they are produced. Photography, especially after World War II, has become increasingly transparent in this regard. If I describe to you a photograph consisting of a girl running naked on the street sprayed with napalm, you think of the girl and not the piece of paper where you originally saw the image. Documentary photography before the warÑthe Farm Security Administration pictures, for example–is a lot more sophisticated in terms of light and composition. Consequently, you imagine the relationship between the artist and the subject, and formulate opinions based on this negotiation. What I did with The Best of Life series was to make these very subjective, transparent images more objective and opaque by adding more interpretive layers. At that point, I had started to make objects that were very thin, so I decided to make photographs that were very thick. I guess that’s been my working principle in photography ever since. When these images are reinserted in the media world, they act like a vaccine, creating more antibodies against similar images. These are suspect images that make all other images look suspicious.

cs: I want to shift gears and ask a direct question about a specific image in The Best of Life series, the one of the student in Tiananmen Square. Interestingly, seeing the real–or should I say, the original–image/photograph next to yours, one is most immediately struck by the limitations of visual memory. I wonder if this photo presented special issues in that, unlike the others, it has not attained the longevity within our collective memory and therefore might be more difficult to remember and render.

vm: When it comes to photojournalism, there is a certain law of compensation that maintains the intensity of images, new or old, always at a similar level. A relatively recent image is remembered because it was seen not so long ago, an old image is remembered because it’s been seen multiple times. To my surprise, the difficulties that I encountered in rendering these images had more to do with form than time. Facial expressions, for example, were very hard to draw from memory because the huge repertoire of templates for facial expressions that we have stored in our brain is designed to work by deduction but is fairly inept when it comes to performing inductive operations. Specific details of clothing and architecture are also easier to remember than correct body positions. One thing that in almost all pictures (except the Tiananmen Square photo) remained consistent with the original photograph was the point of view from which the photograph was originally taken. This seemed to be the most remembered aspect.

cs: You mentioned technology earlier in reference to illusion and our conflicting notions of photographic veracity. Since you play with the issue of a photograph’s believability in your work, I wonder why you don’t use computers to help you generate the illusions.

vm: As I said before, illusion informs my work, making illusions is not what my work aims to achieve. The kind of illusion produced by a computer will reveal a lot about the competence of the person who produces the illusion. I am more interested in making the viewer confront his own incompetence in resisting an illusion by making them without the use of such effects. Illusions have developed in sync with basic evolutionary patterns of perception. In other words, it is natural that you believe certain images because whatever makes you fall for certain tricks also helps you to survive others. Perceptual short-circuits will ultimately inform you in a very effective way of the manner in which you perceive things, and that can be something very personal as well.

cs: Earlier you discussed the importance of photography and made a comment about the photograph of sandpaper looking coarse. This made me think of the image of Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered cup and saucer that I had seen in art textbooks. When I finally saw the object itself at an exhibition, I can’t say I was impressed, but I do remember thinking that I liked the photograph better. Which do you prefer: fiction or reality?

vm: Reality is hard to like because it does not have a definite form, size, or color. We tend to like things with certain formal or narrative distinctions, things that convey specific meanings. The origin of fiction is closely connected to the origin of language itself. Exaggeration, emphasis, all modal elements of language, seem to be always secretly conspiring against reality. Ernst Cassirer brilliantly illustrated the effects of nonrational thought in the makeup of our culture. Photographs of objects, especially surrealistic ones, place the object into the context of their own time, while the display of the object itself is bound to be out of context. I don’t see a need to walk around sculptures: if an object is made to be looked at, there is always a best side from which you can do it. A photograph is just simplifying this process. It is telling you a story about the object (perhaps a lie), subtracting one particular view of the object from the infinite number of views that one can have by simply positioning one’s head in front of something. This ultimately effects the object’s causality: the object in the photo will not fade or rust, it will always remain the same, only the photograph will change. To ask me if I prefer reality to fiction is the same as asking if I prefer the ocean to swimming.

cs: Sure, then I would have to ask if you can swim, or do you wear a bathing suit just for the sake of appearance?

vm: The ocean of reality is pretty much of a diluvial scale and doesn’t leave you much choice between swimming or not. You either stay afloat in whatever style you can or you sink. There is nothing to hold on to. I am not much of a swimmer anyway. I prefer wading.

cs: Here comes a $100 question. Would you say that your Individuals series fits into a Dadaist or Fluxus notion of art production that rebels against the so-called bourgeois treatment of art objects as commodities?

vm: Funny you should mention that amount of money. When I made the Individuals series, I had just come back from Europe with about $100 to my name. I had a piece of plasticene, a camera, and some film and no other materials for making art. I made a sculpture and liked it, in a kind of “art therapy” style, but I used all the plasticene and couldn’t buy anymore. So I took a picture of the sculpture, destroyed it, and made another. Pretty soon I had sixty pictures of the same lump of plasticene conveying completely different moods. Kim Caputo, a friend, offered to print them for me so I could jump-start my career, and we printed all sixty of them slightly diffused (like pictures of Barbara Streisand). I then exhibited them with pedestals of different sizes on the floor. People told me the photos evoked death, memory, and loss. I thought about my mood swings and how many crazy things the same lump of plasticene can become.

Now, to answer your question, Fluxus and Dada are a constant intellectual source for my work, and yes, Man Ray and Max Ernst are like gods to me. But when I made the Individuals, I was too poor to think about the bourgeoisie and the commodification of objects. Although they are ambiguous enough to contain a lot of ideas, that series is more personal than it might appear: I was dealing with a separation from my son and trying to survive as an artist. Well … do I still get the hundred dollars?

cs: Intuition seems to play a significant role in your work. Would you talk specifically about the moment you realized that drawing or painting and representations of the three-dimensional world did not have to be rendered solely by the pencil or the paintbrush. Were the Cord pieces, for instance, Cogito Ergo Sum, your first venture into the land of limitless materials for mark making?

vm: If I make an exceptionally good pencil drawing of you, a viewer will look for veracity, expression, fluidity, etc., but the basic fact that a trace of carbon becomes processed as not only the form and texture of your face but also your personality at this very moment rarely occurs to someone looking at a drawing. Now, if I make the same drawing with molasses and have a trail of ants walking on it, people will find it “miraculous”–or at least strange. When I visited Florence, I saw Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Baptistery gates, and no work of Renaissance art has had a more profound impact on me. Here you have an exquisite mastery of perspective which is basically intellectual and illusionistic, combined with detailed relief work which is highly physical and realistic. The two forms of rendering combined seemed to be simultaneously enhancing and canceling each other. The haute relief combined with three-point perspective was definitely overkill, but it made my mind go beyond what I was looking at. It made me think about vision as a process and not as a result. All of a sudden, I became aware of this incredible dichotomy, of real things and things that are images of things. That was when I started to play with ideas of reality and representation within a single narrative. Cogito Ergo Sum, Historical Photo, and Cozy Couple are pieces from this time.

cs: In thinking about the subversive nature of some of your images, it’s curious to remember that you worked in advertising, a business known for such tactics as hiding suggestive or seductive images. Did your advertising experience influence any particular series or ideas about images?

vm: I think my own ideas about images had more to do with my decision to study advertising than advertising influenced the development of these ideas. Advertising helped me organize these ideas a little better though. When I was a kid, I would follow the progress of a humidity stain on the ceiling above my bed by drawing it and writing reports about it. It started as a swan, then turned into a gorilla, then an old car named Gordini. As far back as I can remember, I liked to give forms to things. I would make sequential drawings trying to find the exact moment when a monkey turned into a helicopter. The idea that I could airbrush people frolicking inside ice cubes to sell more whiskey definitely had an effect on my decision to study media. But I wanted to sell ice cubes more than I wanted to sell whiskey, so I gave it up.

cs: In working with various drawing media–dirt, Bosco, sugar, pinholes, whatever–how much significance do you attach to the thing renderedÑbinoculars, eggs, Freud–and the material used to create the image? Is there a material or substance that’s offlimits? I’m thinking of Serrano here, as well as Warhol’s Oxidation paintings.

vm: Jean-Luc Godard once famously quipped, “C’est ne pas du sang, c’est du rouge,” which means, “It’s not blood, it’s red.” That demonstrates a lot of lucidity about the stuff of representation. Serrano’s photographs were not piss, they were yellow. Conservative Republicans are the ones who get pissed when they see yellow. Warhol, on the other hand, showed the real thing and made an abstraction out of it. I always thought it was great that he chose to call them Oxidation paintings. In my work, I am not that interested in the nature of the material that I photograph as much as in the way the viewer recognizes the material in the photograph. Serrano’s work relies on the viewer’s awareness of information about the subject; Warhol, on information about the process. I want to work with both notions simultaneously without relying too much on outside explanations. The choice of subject is often very intuitive and it often comes after the choice of the process. They are linked in a strange way that I am not sure I can explain, but I think it is exactly this doubt that gives me satisfaction when I make things.

cs: You’ve described your photographs as “low-tech” illusions. Yet like certain conceptual artists–for instance, Jan Dibbets and John Pfahl, or more mainstream artists such as M. C. Escher–your photographs do toy with a viewer’s perception in a way that merges high-art concepts. Can you explain how your “illusions” fit into the larger picture of art and perception?

vm: I remember realism being a dirty word in New York for a long time. I often visited a photorealist gallery in Soho and I am almost ashamed to admit that I got more inspiration from that place than most of the other idea factories I visited. Some mysterious iconoclastic conspiracy has forced people to separate illusion from serious art. But I can’t help myself–I have always been a sucker for figurative art. During my first visit to New York, the only thing that remained in my head was a huge Chuck Close portrait in the Whitney. I guess I am old enough now to become shameless and confess that I always liked Salvador Dali and grew up collecting Frank Frazetta and Roger Dean posters. I am definitely over my airbrush envy complex, but still I can’t help but respect anyone who has tried to make a faithful representation of something, even if just to learn that it’s hard and invariably enlightening. In the 1960s and ’70s, a few artists started to get back at it via Neo-Platonism. Dibbets and Pfahl got away with what they were doing because their work was inserted into the discourses of minimalism that were predominant at that time. But even those with no understanding of minimalism would find their work interesting. Come to think of it, in a very unconscious way I am always trying to do the wrong thing. I have always felt that fear of illusion and wonder was making the art world a place for cultured hypocrisy where the sole pleasure of the viewer was to share this deprivation honorably. I had a funny dream about that once: I was with Barnet Newman at his deathbed. Unable to talk, he gestured for a pencil and paper, then nervously scribbled something and died almost immediately after with a smile on his face. It was a drawing of Mickey Mouse.

cs: I wonder what Freud would say about that. What if Mickey Mouse were on his deathbed and he drew a Barnet Newman painting? Would he die laughing?

vm: With his academic sense of humor, Freud would probably fail to see that a vertical line crossing a piece of paper is a good thing for a moribund cartoon character to do before he dies. I bet if Mickey Mouse made any art, it would definitely be monochromatic painting. But don’t get me wrong. I love abstract art. A lot of what happened in both abstract and representational art in the second half of this century was too hung up on the dualism between the two. What created the chasm between abstract and representational art is that people began to assign too much importance to the way art is produced and not enough to the way it gets interpreted. Again, I am not fit to work on the extremities, I try to squeeze myself between the two, trying to find out what makes something an abstraction and something else an octopus. I love people like deKooning and Arshile Gorky because they operate between language and perception without ignoring facts pertinent to one or another. I also feel very close to minimalism because it brought simple perceptual ideas back to art in a dynamic way. Artists like Serra, LeWitt, and Robert Morris are very important to me.

cs: Because of the minimal aspect of your work, or because Serra, LeWitt, and Morris broke with conventions of representational art?

vm: I think because their work was a disguised comeback of formal and structural ideas.

cs: How much exposure to contemporary art did you have prior to coming to the United States in 1983? Did any particular artists/artworks stand out?

vm: In the 1970s, because of the military government in Brazil, intellectuals lived in constant fear of being persecuted. Most of the music and art of that time is either camouflaged activism or corrupted by patriotism. There was always this lingering climate of a semiotic black market where hidden messages seemed encoded in every phrase: everything meant something else. People who carried books in their bags were considered a different kind of criminal by the semiliterate authoritarian police state, so reading books and hanging out with intellectuals was a way of being rebellious. That atmosphere gave me a chronic allergy to slogans and a clear vision of how information can be manipulated to serve certain ends. For obvious reasons, in those days I thought political art to be a government thing and abstract art to be for people who never walked the streets. I liked drawing the old paintings at the museum and didn’t give much thought to contemporary art. The first contemporary artist I met was Leonilson. In 1979 we were both helping the experimental theater group Asdrubal Trouxe o Trombone during their stint in São Paulo. I worked with him designing a poster and I told him that the boat he drew was crooked. He told me that the boat was crooked because that boat was his own. Leonilson made things that were infused with fragility and ambiguity, one of the very first Brazilian artists to show that side of an art object. He was an extraordinary artist and a great person. I miss him a lot.

cs: Would you say that in some way your works pay homage to artists of the late ’60s or early ’70s like William Wegman, Robert Cumming, even Douglas Huebler? I’m thinking in particular of the dry, often banal humor and the low-tech illusions associated with much of their conceptually based photo works.

vm: There is something about the art of the ’70s that I can’t seem to escape. Maybe it’s a generational thing. There is a certain homemade feeling behind the works of these artists that makes me think of itinerant circus troupes and high school science fairs. I have always liked Dada and Fluxus, which probably influenced their work, and tried to cultivate that attitude toward artmaking. It’s like conceptual art without a frown.

cs: Do you consider yourself a conceptual artist? Loosely defined, of course, since we know that the true conceptual artist never really produces anything.

vm: It is hard not to be conceptual. The term “conceptual art” always bothered me because it’s impossible for me to imagine an art form without a concept. I think art becomes “political,” “conceptual,” or “spiritual” only by subtraction. Basically what the so-called conceptual artist is saying is that he does not dance, sing, carve wood, draw nudes, or practice easel painting: he thinks ideas without form. If you find an idea without form, please let me know because I would love to take a picture of it. “Conceptual art” only emphasizes the concept of an art object by the systematic impoverishing of its aesthetic value. I am an artist, and I think a real artist could not stand the sacrifice of beauty for the sake of smartness. You don’t have to do that! Take people like Courbet or Manet, for example. You can’t get more conceptual than that. You don’t need a neon sign to proclaim your intellectual intentions, all you need is a good story to give them form. Leonardo is always quoted for saying that art is a mental thing. I think what he really meant is that art is mental without exception. Marcel Broodthaers is a conceptual artist. So is Grandma Moses. On this subject, deKooning had the final word when he said that in art, one idea is just as good as another.

cs: Chuck Close was quoted as saying to deKooning that “he was glad to meet someone that had painted more deKoonings than he had.” Close was referring to his own early work, which was quite derivative of deKooning. Is there a deKooning out there for you?

vm: If I met the guy who photographs Chuck’s paintings for documentation, I would probably say, “I am glad to meet someone who has photographed more Chuck Close paintings than I have.”

cs: Have you ever considered doing theater or performance art? I have to say that it would suit your personality. Are you always “on”?

vm: I worked in theater in Brazil, basically experimental amateur groups. One of my thoughts behind moving to New York was to study theater. I like reading plays, but now I rarely go see one. Theater is perhaps the most important component of my work today. For example, if I see a performance of King Lear, say, with Anthony Hopkins in the main role, the excellent actor with his body and voice alone will be able to temporarily convince you that he is indeed a king. It is a great illusion that you only learn to appreciate when you get a chance to watch the same piece performed by a bad actor. Now, here is the beauty of the whole thing: the good actor, Sir Anthony Hopkins, seems to disappear as himself once he embodies the old king. You forget about him and you only see what he represents. The bad actor, on the other hand, keeps shifting back and forth from his royal character to his incompetent self. The good actor lets you experience the play while the bad actor allows you to experience theater itself. I think of my photographs as very short plays, sometimes a fraction of a second long, in which a bad actor, say, soil, thread, or chocolate, performs the role of an object, a person, or a landscape only for the lens of the camera. I cast bad actors in my pieces because I don’t want people to simply see a representation of something. I want them to feel how it happens. The moment of that embodiment is what I consider a spiritual experience.

cs: You seem to draw many of your ideas, or at least your inspiration, from art history, in particular those artists and works that have seemingly been of little significance, or at least overlooked by much of the contemporary art world. Where would you place your work in today’s art world, an arena that puts such a huge premium on theoretical discourse?

vm: I’d rather say that I sometimes make work based on “old pictures” than on art history, which in general implies that there are some things to be considered before a certain work is perceived by the eye. I am more inclined to work with anonymous pieces because they are less polluted by historical information than masterworks. I’ve never taken a class in art history and sometimes think I’m very fortunate to have learned art by responding to pictures at a very personal level. The work of art that changed my life and prompted me to become an artist was a painting of a slightly cross-eyed girl whose facial asymmetry made the painting look alive. Her name was Clara Serena and it was just a coincidence that her father, the painter who executed the portrait, was Peter Paul Rubens.

I tend to like works from periods when new media emerge, forcing the existing ones to change. Early nineteenth-century painting, sculpture, and photography; Impressionism; photography and painting between the wars–these are works that I am always scrutinizing. One day I was looking at a book by Sister Wendy and saw this very sweet portrait of Saint John the Baptist and a lamb done by Murillo. I have no idea why, but the silly little picture brought tears to my eyes. If I had studied art history and learned how corny Murillo was, I would have been deprived of that poignant experience. I have done some pictures after better known works, but tried to play down their iconographic value by emphasizing their perceptual output. I did Leonardo’s Last Supper, for example, but I wasn’t thinking of Leonardo. I was thinking of perspective and the idea of the Eucharist as an early form of broadcasting. As for theory, I think that the only bad thing about art criticism is that it makes possible art about criticism. I like reading philosophy and history books. I even have an interest in neurology, psychology, and physics. But when I want to read something that will ultimately influence my work, I pick up a novel or book of poetry.

cs: Do you ever write poetry or fiction yourself?

vm: Yes, but most of it is still garbage. I say this because I just saw the Drawings of Victor Hugo at the Drawing Center. These drawings are the most incredible things I’ve ever seen, and they were done by a writer. I can’t even draw like Victor Hugo, much less expect to be a writer.

cs: Could you talk a little about the actual process of making an image, one of the Thread pieces, for example.

vm: These developed out of my inability to do a landscape with wire. I tried but they were really sad. I wanted to try different subjects, but I discovered by changing the material in which I was drawing that each material could only render certain things well. I needed something more fluid, so I began to work with sewing thread. The process is very similar to the wire objects except that it allows me to build up the material and create volume. In one hand you have a drawing and in the other you have the photograph of the “actor” responsible for the enacting of that landscape. When you perceive one, you loose the other. It works like a visual puzzle, like the Necker cube or the Rubin vase.

cs: Did you intend to mock the pompous seriousness of Alfred Stieglitz’s cloud images, Equivalents, when you made your cloud pictures?

vm: No. Stieglitz may not have been America’s greatest artist, but he was definitely its most influential one. He spread himself thin but covered a lot of territory. He worked on many fronts and used many devices to help shape the artistic milieu of his time. He singlehandedly introduced modern art to the American public. I usually use images from people I admire or find important in the context of general culture. I wouldn’t want to mock anyone, especially someone with Stieglitz’s mind and reputation. If you look at one of his Equivalents, you will get a glimpse of the ungraspable nature of sensations and the artificial ways in which meaning is fabricated. If you look at one of my Equivalents, you will see–depending on the way you choose to interpret it–either a cloud, a lump of cotton, or Dürer’s Praying Hands. The title “equivalents” was chosen because these “clouds” had something to do with what Stieglitz was trying to say: that the objective of a photograph is not merely portrayal of a subject but the range of symbolic and emotional associations the formal treatment of a subject will bring to the viewer. He treated the question by pushing it toward ambiguity. I decided to push it toward specificity.

cs: Thinking about the need to solve the riddle, I imagine that you might be interested in mysteries: murder mysteries. Yes? Have you ever had an opportunity to closely examine crime scene photographs?

vm: The problem with mysteries is that in the end they cease to be a mystery. There is a great murder-mystery writer in France named Daniel Pennac. His main character, Benjamin Malaussene, is a guy who takes care of eleven siblings and gets blamed for every single death in the city. The book always starts with his mother returning home with another baby and ends with her leaving with another man. The killer is always an old lady. There is very little mystery, and as I have said, I don’t care for the mystery itself, but the way he constructs the plot and illustrates the scenes is absolutely brilliant. It’s like Bulgakov meets Conan Doyle. I like the Columbo films too because you know the identity of the killer from the beginning, and you spend the rest of the film trying to understand how that half-witted cop is going to solve it. That’s the real mystery. Well, there is certainly something about crime and medical photography that gets to you. I have seen a lot of police pictures, but they don’t do much for me. I guess I have seen too many police movies where those scenes are abundant and the only difference between the real and the fake ones is a caption, something outside the photo. I think medical photography has a more potent effect on me.

cs: In many of your works, text, language, or the caption are integral aspects of the viewer’s understanding of the work. In a way, your captions–especially with the Displacements series, where there are no images–totally subvert the notion of photographic veracity and toy with the notion that we should believe everything we read. Do these little white lies ever get you into trouble?

vm: The newspaper clippings that I make up are partly inspired by the wacky abstract pictures I find in the science section of the New York Times every Tuesday. There, what looks like a wine stain is identified in a caption as a field of antimatter in the middle of a galaxy several light years away. I made a bunch of drawings that look like wine stains while talking on the phone and decided to start writing little stories for them. Like the one about a virus that makes people unable to read, or the photographer from National Geographic who was indicted for photographing his girlfriend’s underwear in such a way that it looked like a rare mushroom. I wrote a silly story about the guards at Yosemite not letting people take pictures with small-format cameras and faxed it to a friend, who faxed it to a friend, who faxed it to a million other people. When I showed these images to a group of people in San Francisco, an old lady approached me and said that I was lying about having fabricated these stories because that particular story was true–she had heard it on the radio. There I was being called a liar by claiming authorship of a lie that had become a truth by convention. It’s hard to own a lie when everybody owns the truth. The Displacements series also comes straight from the stuff I did while working with the Life magazine images. I was trying to gauge the power of a caption over the image.

cs: You’ve moved away from the three-dimensional aspect of your earlier work, but do you have any interest in going back to sculpture or even installations?

vm: It’s hard to forecast what I will do next. I don’t have much of a plan and neither am I bound to a specific style or technique. Photography has allowed me to pack drawing, sculpture, painting, and theater into one tight bundle. I have been developing series of drawings and sculpture for years; it just happens that the photographic work has matured at a faster pace. I am also working with film now, but so far have created very short loops with not much going on–they look more like a photograph than a film. As for installation, I’ve never felt the need to walk around sculpture and I don’t see a point to being inside one. I am very claustrophobic.

cs: Is there a way of making marks that you’ve always wanted to do, but could never get it to work?

vm:The things that work are few compared to the ones that don’t. Once I thought I could duplicate the dot pattern of a billboard with M&Ms. I almost died of nervous exhaustion. Live ants, rubber bands, black beans, chains, electric sparks, magnets, oil and milk–you name it, I’ve tried a lot of things but only succeed with a few.

cs: One might say that the Soil pieces are small-scale earthworks. Have you ever thought of doing something larger like a real earthwork or the ancient land drawings photographed by Marilyn Bridges?

vm: Yes, I would love to make land drawings, but they would be portraits of TV personalities, old cars, or marsupials. I would use half of Patagonia to draw the RCA dog, and the gramophone would have lines as large as the Suez Canal. However, the final result of this work would be a 4×5 platinum print.

cs: What is particularly intriguing is that your illusions are becoming more and more about flatness. The Soil and Sugar Children series seem to have a similar methodology. Were they done at around the same time?

vm:The early pieces took ideas from drawing. I was replacing the drawn line with physical things like thread or wire. The sugar and soil pieces have a lot more to do with photography itself: the idea that the image is composed by a certain logical arrangement of tiny dots that we can’t really perceive individually. Well, I just made the dots bigger and gave them identity. The Sugar Children also developed out of a very personal circumstance. Marion and I spent a few days in St. Kitts and swam every day with a group of local children who were very sweet and unspoiled by Nike commercials. We got to know their names and a few things about them. They were very happy kids. Later on we had a chance to visit the place where most of their parents worked on the sugar plantations. The hard labor in the scorching sun had certainly taken a toll on their outlook. They were very sad and bitter. I took photographs of the children and brought them back to New York, and one morning as I was drinking my coffee and looking at the pictures, I remembered this poem by the Brazilian poet Ferreira Gullar in which he is drinking coffee and begins to wonder about the origin of the sugar. He ends with a seminal phrase: “It is with the bitter lives of bitter people that I sweeten my coffee on this beautiful morning in Ipanema.” The radiant childhood of those children will inevitably be transformed by sugar. Children who become sugar. It hit me like a brick. I went to Canal Street and bought black paper and tried to copy the snapshots by sprinkling sugar over its surface. I was very surprised when it worked. The Soil pieces are the opposite of The Sugar Children. The potting soil is dispersed over a lightbox and then systematically cleaned with the aid of miniature vacuum cleaners, straws, moistened Q-tips, and other improvised tools.

cs: One of my least favorite bodies of work is the X-ray series, I assume because they seem too easy. They don’t have the rigor–intellectual or otherwise–of the other series. Now, I guess I’ll have to pay you that $100 after saying that?

vm: The X-rays are very hard to do because you can try only so many times. They are about those theater ideas that I mentioned earlier. I was talking to a friend about mimes and how we hated them. I think that has something to do with the X-rays, but I am not sure what. I was trying to photograph shadows and have them X-rayed. I was also frustrated trying to make photograms of hand shadows. Well, all of these things came together at one point. I thought it would be funny to provide an illusion and the wrong explanation for it at the same time.

cs: In the Pictures of Chocolate series, you use chocolate syrup. Maybe I’m stretching the point, but in photography and film chocolate syrup is often associated with death. In old black-and-white B-movies, chocolate syrup is substituted for blood. And to take one example from photography, Les Krims used chocolate syrup for a series of photographs in the early ’70s entitled The Incredible Case of the Stack-o-Wheats Murders.

vm:Alfred Hitchcock used Bosco for the famous shower scene in Psycho. Apparently, real blood does not look bloody enough on screen. There is a major difference between the “real” and the “realistic,” and sometimes the real thing does not make a persuasive representation of itself. I chose to work with chocolate because it had something to do with the feeling of painting. Chocolate inspires a multitude of psychological phenomena: it has to do with scatology, desire, sex, addiction, luxury, romance, etc. I have never met anyone who doesn’t like chocolate. Freud could probably explain why everybody loves chocolate. That’s why he was my first subject. I also wanted to make a drawing that challenged me in time. It usually takes an hour before the chocolate starts to dry and only a few minutes for it to melt under the hot lamps. I have to run a lot and the studio can get messy at times.

cs: Besides cleaning up all the messes you make, you also teach. Photography? Drawing and painting? It must be a great class and I would love to see the supply list you pass out at the beginning of the year.

vm: One of my greatest heroes is John Dewey, who always spoke of the individual’s responsibility to pass on one’s experience in the form of education. I teach photography, and drawing for photographers. (I do that more often than I clean up after myself.) Teaching, like writing and editing, is another way to pass on to others things that I consider important for everybody. I am always thinking of the responsibility–which we all have–to leave something for others. Recently, I began some research in the field of education concerning the development of programs for teaching visual literacy to children. There is very little being done in that area. It is important to teach kids the visual grammar behind the images they so readily consume. As images become increasingly more eloquent than the text that accompanies them, visual literacy becomes as important as reading itself. My classes have nothing to do with what I make. I don’t tell them to bring mustard, gunpowder, and maple syrup to class (although they do anyway). The school is where I vent those formless ideas and go wild about the immateriality of things. It saves me the trouble of having to cover that in my work. It also keeps me from making art that is didactic. I want these things to be beautiful, and I want this beauty to conceal the rhetoric behind them.

DE: The language of photography has assumed an important role in artistic pursuit in recent decades, from the more traditional level of documentation it has gradually asserted itself as a full bodied mechanism of expression, that’s to say it has demanded a direct protagonism without any necessary reference. Photography, sustained by radical technological innovation and a consequent freedom of expression, has effectively moved the centre of gravity of contemporary artistic language, rendering what is a narrative normal procedure much more direct and immediate. In the case of your own works, one is witness however to a new, and somewhat surprising, interpretive change of photographic language: a sort of ‘about-turn’ reproduction of the work, an interpretive filter that, if on one hand enhances the extraneousness of the work, on the other it emphasizes the spectacle of the photographic image. (What, for you, is the role of this photographic language?).

VM: The day Arago announced the invention of photography in 1839, painters started to ask themselves what would become of their trade. At that time painting had already reached the peak of its technological development but even though its popularization had multiplied its uses, the medium seemed to be dying at its core. Photography freed painting from the need to exploit the factual world and allowed the artist within the painter to ask some long forgotten questions: What is a painting? Why do people paint?

I am telling you this because I see a strange parallel within current history. Photographs are now ubiquitous and seem to have developed along with market needs only to serve as a parallel reality, which witnesses the quality of the goods and lifestyles they portray. However, not unlike painting in the 1830’s, the medium seems to have exhausted, through overuse, its philosophical meaning. The first century of photography was about making a decent picture, everything after that was about making something look decent or indecent with a picture.

Now that the ghost of painting has come back to haunt photography in the form of digital technology, that aura of factuality has suddenly abandoned the medium. Paradoxically, digitally enhanced photographs have become more eloquent and less convincing. As the technology of digital manipulation becomes more transparent and skepticism grows, we are experiencing for the first time in our history a total disenfranchisement between image and reality; it’s a rather chaotic situation that fills our heads with much deeper questions than the ones asked by painters in 1839. Questions such as: What is a picture, any type of picture? How can we be using pictures when they no longer have any link with reality?

My work seems to question these binding elements between image and reality without discrediting one or the other. Artists are never very good at answers. But the questions raised by artists always reflect the reality of the time in which they live. Unlike a lawyer, I don’t particularly want to get anywhere with this questioning. I do think, however, that if you ask the same question enough times, it will start sounding like an answer.

DE: The work appears to exhibit its own precariousness, suggesting the sharp attraction for an imbalance between the adherent surrender of the model and the inevitable photographic manipulation, deception for an uncertain truth. In these works there is a hint of emotion that seems to well up from a gelatinous boundary separating the fanatical virtuosity of the model’s performance and the photographic spell of a transfigured reality. (What function do you attribute to the photographed model?)

VM: Anything in front of a camera is a model. Even in photojournalism, the advent of framing distils overbearing amounts of visual information into a single perfect fragment of reality, which is by definition a good description of a model. By constructing something exclusively to be photographed, I am trying to explore the notion of the archetype in a very peculiar scale. As children, we learn about the world around us through toys, fables, and role-playing because we are not ready yet to function in real-life scale. When we grow up, the shift from playing to working is so dramatic that it leaves us longing for an eternal return. Photographed, the model loses part of its materiality and becomes as ephemeral as a memory itself. Models also work as a buffer between people and reality. When you work with second hand experience, you are less likely to raise the defense mechanisms in the viewer’s intellect and, in this way, create a deeper, more lasting effect.

DE: It is the same physical fragility, the same inconsistency of the model of reference, the same perishability and dissolving of chosen materials which generates a perceived discomfort in front of these works. The dismay of an evaporated truth, the uncertain knowledge of a truth that can only be reached on a linguistic plane, having since dissolved its physical being. Then there is the use of chocolate, dust, clouds, threads of wool, materials that don’t want to, nor can they, clamour for any staged presence, if not that of the memory of themselves. (What determines the choice of a specific material?).

VM: I choose materials for their specific relation to the subject and for their power to short-circuit the meaning of that same subject. In other words, the material should complete and antagonize the subject simultaneously. I got this idea from observing, at a distance, how people position themselves in front of paintings in a museum; they approach the picture and position themselves so that it comfortably fills up their visual field, but is always close enough so they can sense the texture of the paint itself. The moment when the image dissolves back into matter is as revealing as the moment dabs of paint become the likeness of an angel or a fish. These are the moments that contain in their transcendence, the very nature of representation.

On principle, I don’t try to attract any attention to the mundane aspect of the materials I use. I just don’t discriminate. All materials are good for something in a picture, be it oil paint or elephant excrement. It’s interesting how people become amused by a shift in medium. If I draw somebody’s portrait with a pencil, it’s just a drawing and nothing else. But if I do the same drawing with molasses and have a trail of ants marching on it, all of a sudden it becomes miraculous. All media used by academic artists involves a color (pigment, dye, sometimes remains of mummified people) and a medium (milk, oil, egg, gelatin, saliva, anything transparent or viscous). Photography simply re-arranges the relationship between color and medium in a confusing way, a way that leaves to the viewer the task of finding out what he or she is looking at.

DE: The relationship between the inability to repeat work that vanishes and its own photographic conception is a theme that abundantly marked many artistic quests in the Sixties and Seventies, being works realized with snow and ice, with water and rocks, with desert sand and lightning, works that could not be conserved or repeated, but only remembered in their intellectual risk. Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim or Walter De Maria underlined the importance of art in using reality rather then describing it, to escape from a cage of method that didn’t consider the subjective irrationality of nature. They were the years of a contraposition between a systematic and positive objectivity on one hand and a natural and uninhibited individuality on the other. In your works however, this entire ideological mantle seems to have vanished, revealing a lighter and more detached approach, in some cases even ironic on the pleasing beauty the of precariousness. (What affinity with these experiences do you find in your works?)

VM: My grandfather never believed that a man had set foot on the moon. He thought the entire thing was cooked up in some sound studio in Queens. I never really endorsed his skepticism entirely, but while most people thought he was a bit crazy, I found something fascinating in the way he assimilated media. (He also had two television sets, a color one to watch the soap operas and a black and white to watch the news). While most people involved in the arts know what Spiral Jetty is, very few of them have actually travelled to Oregon to see the work. I recently visited Anghor Wat in Canboja and felt that while getting to finally see the ruin with my own eyes, I was also forced to erase an enormous amount of false but fantastic information that my imagination had used to construct the site in my head by piecing together all that I had found in the media about the fabled place. I always thought that the Earthworks movement was an exercise in media. When I first saw a picture of Spiral Jetty, the first thing that came to my mind was the amount of work that the artist had to go through to end up with that photo (which was actually taken by Nancy Holt). Smithson did not just build a swirly mound of soil in the middle of nowhere. By disseminating its awry presence through photographs, plans, drawings, and writings, he built a monument in our imagination, as strange and magical as Anghor Wat before being visited. In my work, I am always trying to work in the gap between image and subject. The gap that exists between an environmental work and the images we see in the galleries representing these works is so great, it seemed like a perfect subject for me. First I thought it would be interesting to build models of the known sites in my studio and photograph them leaving parts of the set-up showing (I even thought of reproducing the moon landing in a Queens sound studio for my grandfather). That generated a series from 1998 that I called “Brooklyn NY.” About two years ago I decided to revisit the subject by exploring something that emerged as I was working on the 1998 models: the relationship between the model and the work itself. So I built several Earthworks in grand scale, some a few hundred meters each in an iron mine in Brazil, and then I built models a few inches long on the same site, with the same materials. Then I photographed both the models and the Earthworks under the same light quality, enlarged the photos the same way, and exhibited them mixed together in a show in New York. With a bit of attention one could discern the models from the large works, but most people generally preferred to discard the possibility that there were any large-scale works at all (like my grandfather); others believed all the pictures were of large-scale works. Too confusing, some said. It really worked.

DE: Also on another front, more existential and intimate, like that of Joseph Beuys or the Fluxus artists, as well as the Viennese Aktionismus and, more generally, nearly all the performers, the practice of photography re-dresses a role that is almost reliquary, a type of liturgical journey that, often accompanied by real material Ôrelics’, restores a spiritual atmosphere to the performance. None of that seems to influence your work, even though one recognises performance-like passages in your journey, like the trail of an aeroplane above the skies of New York, which doesn’t seem central to the real action but instead releases a sort of ironic dissonance that in some way shifts the centre of one’s focus on the action itself into iconic surrender. Here, as well, like for the models, the formal and linguistic approach shakes up a more classic and expected reading. (How much weight does the performance element have in your work?).

VM: Considering the Fine Arts as a career was something that came up very late in my life and became an obvious choice once I figured out that it would be a great way to aggregate all my other academic interests into one single activity. Theater was one of the activities that I was always very involved in. Actually, I moved to New York to study theater direction and set design.

All of the arts are somehow theatrical, but photography, in a sinister fashion, encourages performance not only from the part of the artist but also from the part of the subject. The simple fact that we smile for pictures (even the blind do it) makes us performers in a very short play with only the film as spectator. I produced a series commissioned by The Frick Art Museum in Pittsburgh, in which I used the employees of the institution acting in the roles of the inhabitants of the mansion that had been turned into a museum; a lot of people thought that was strange. I have directed a bottle of chocolate syrup into the role of Jackson Pollock; what’s wrong with turning a curator of education into a maid peeling potatoes? In my work, there’s always something attempting to become something else, trying to voice the image’s eternal longing for transcendence. You are right to mention Beuys and Fluxus. In Beuys’ work the process takes the main stage and in the case of Fluxus, process is distilled to its essential. Any artist interested in process has to consider the performance aspects of it. The challenge in my work is to map out a layered and detailed version of the process that can be followed in the frozen format of the record. The airplane drawing clouds over New York was an attempt to transform the very personal act of drawing into a broadcasting spectacle. Millions of people watched someone making a drawing of a cloud. Bob Watts would have loved it.

DE: In the series of works dedicated to Piranesian architecture there emerges, with some force, a sharp perspective analysis, reconstructed with the finest threads of wool, which isn’t just about an exhibition of sophisticated craftsmanship, but rather about the individualism of a new fracture in the composite plan, an articulate game of thought that highlights the theme of temporal ambiguity. And it’s the sense of the expansion of time, almost the necessity of a patient dilation of thought that clots and coagulates in the instant the photo is taken. (What consideration do you give to the time taken to execute a work?).

VM: In an allusion to cooking, every ingredient takes its time to cook. I try to work on two or three things at a time. Usually I choose projects that complement each other in some sort of way so I can swing from the challenging to the amusing. I would work on the Piranesi series, for example, which was very time consuming (almost a month for each picture) and then take breaks to make small drawings or take on projects such as the Earthworks or portraits, projects that took me out of the studio. It’s the diversity of projects that keeps the work alive and fresh. It’s just like with exercise machines; if you only use one, you’ll become a monster. Sometimes a great picture takes just a few seconds to make; sometimes the reward of seeing some insane enterprise you took on for a year finally make its way to an exhibition and do exactly as you expected in front of the viewers can be exhilarating. There’s stone carving and there’s ping-pong playing where years of training amounts to what can be done in a fraction of a second. Patience and spontaneity can be cultivated by different kinds of activities.

DE: In other works as well it is possible to trace more complex interpretative keys; for example from the big chocolate Ôpaintings’ emerge two contrasting elements: on one hand the Ôblasphemous’ choice of a material irreverent for its inherent greedy playfulness, on the other, a cultured iconical reference that inflames the curiosity for an ambiguous method of reference. As if in a perverse weaving of high and low culture, the continuous Ôplay of sides’ seems to represent a singular constant in this art. And so, in the suspended atmospheres of the dust particles or in the ethereal apparitions of the clouds, the enchanting evocations of visionary narrative mix themselves up and confuse themselves with the imperceptible game of chance nature, of unexpected amazement, of stylish surprise. (What balance do you look for in the thematic weaving of play and research?).

VM: André Serrano gained notoriety in the 1980’s by showing a picture of a crucifix immersed in a liquid he described as being urine. As Goddard would put it: Ces’t pas du sang, Ces’t du rouge. Not really. I rendered the last supper in chocolate and nobody thought of it as blasphemous. Leonardo saw armies fighting fiercely in the cracks of his wall, and Cozens taught landscape painting by starting every drawing from a randomly executed doodle. The permeability of meaning within the domain of images appears to us as a faint but fascinating reminder of our primordial penchant for metamorphic phenomena. Who hasn’t, as a child, lost a full night’s sleep under the covers terrified by a shadowy specter that by morning turned out to be a hanging coat or a broom? Our vision itself has developed from a hunting tool into a more interpretative device that still fancies the shape of the pray in everything it focuses on. As a visual artist, in the most retinal sense, my job is to understand and demonstrate how the visual world manifests itself through its many guises. Like Constable, I am trying to understand how pure light breaks up into the myriad of informative textures that make up our landscape by trying to reproduce it, by playing with it in a physical way as if creating a new kind of science. Unlike Constable, my landscape appears to me as a holographic labyrinth of pre-digested visual experience. To navigate through this mirror maze, I must first learn to drop every prejudice and learn not to differentiate play from research. An Artist’s research is primarily physical. Acting and reasoning must be unified when making art. No one learns to swim by watching the Olympics.

DE: After more than a century of supremacy of the idea of the work it seems that the thought is somewhat blurred and tends to confuse itself with the Ôbrainwave’, the stupefying intuition, the banal surprise and the uncertainty that all create classification but that, as Paul Ricoult suggests, can reveal a fragile metaphor, just a linguistic beauty treatment, which fades as soon as the surprising effect has softened. That is to say that there is a place of silence, a no-man’s land that seems today to condition artistic debate, relegating it to a strategic variable and imposing prefixed schemes and pre-defined outlets. In the case of your art, the nimbleness of the amazement seems to inch forward on tip-toe, discreetly and softly, it is work that insinuates curiosity rather than overwhelms, that loves a hesitant tale rather than the jolts of improvisation, which exists within a deep thought rather than in the bubbles of intuition. (How do you consider the dimensions of surprise and of emotion in your work?).

VM: Emotion is a proprioceptive engagement. It is motivated by a deep realization of our being in relation to our temporal environment. I remember as a child, running through bed sheets hung out to dry, the exhilarating feeling of moving in space with my entire body. I needed the bed sheets not only as a surface of contact but also as a cognitive instrument that revealed systematically the successiveness of surfaces. Like the peek-a-boo game that teaches a child the parent will always be there, revelation is a tool to generate the emotions that punctuate the secret clock of our lives. We remember the past through these moments when something was revealed, and surprised, we became full of emotion. These two things, surprise and emotion, go hand in hand in such a way that we sometimes don’t even notice them. To be able to draw attention to the importance of these things, we must understand the mechanics of surprise and subvert it, positioning the audience at the same time as a victim and analyst of the experience. There is the old Buster Keaton trick of letting the spectators think that the locomotive won’t destroy the pre-fabricated house stuck in the tracks, but just a second later, another train coming from the opposite direction turns the building into shreds. Then, there was Witggenstein saying that he was expecting a surprise party for his birthday, and as nobody threw the party, he was very surprised. In the same way that we only get a chance to figure out how the mind works when something goes wrong, we seem to only get in touch with our emotions when the revealing mechanisms responsible for triggering them betray us in some creative fashion. We sometimes call this phenomenon a spectacle.

It is interesting to notice, how technology is intrinsically related to emotions. In the Romantic period, revelation was counter-posed by the impermeable darkness of nature manifested in the primordial night or the black forest. Today, things are revealed by their tangibility within a world of transparencies. Reality shows, ubiquitous surveillance, and the media’s interconnectedness have allowed experience to permeate through everything, changing the rules of the revealing process. One is just as blind when he can see through everything. We went from suffering from lack of knowledge to agonizing over the scarcity of wonder. The question is how do we play peek-a-boo when our hands are transparent, and what lesson of continuity and survival would we learn from this game?

DE: In the last few years dedicated to the portrait, one witnesses a fascinating oscillation between the dissolution of the image and its photographic reconstruction. These are popular faces that bring their own character and atmosphere, their own recognisable truth, well known personalities and those less known, who testify a transparent and calm familiarity. At the same time, their narration takes place across a linguistic fade-out, achieved by the composition of tesseras, which you highlighted in recalling the work of Chuck Close, a fade-out that increases the narrative complexity, enriching it with new details and new realities. (Why did you choose the theme of portraits and how did you choose the characters?).

VM: In Brazil, I have been witnessing an increasing number of celebrity magazines. There’s too much space and not so many notorious people so the magazines are forced to fabricate some celebrities of their own. These people become well known because they appear in the magazine, and vice versa, for no particular reason at all. I am fascinated by the naiveté of broadcasted identity. There’s a beautiful episode in Brazilian media when the late diva singer Elis Regina delivers a monologue before a song. She’s in tears as she describes how she felt after working so hard to become famous. Her tears are transformed into tiny points of light glittering in millions of TV sets across the country. She mocks the tragedy of her fragmentation into these points of light by saying, ironically: Now, I am a star. When I became involved with portraiture, I was more fascinated by the fact that we can recognize one face from millions of others than anything else. After working for so long with recognition, I decided to explore the subject in which this phenomenon is exercised with the greatest skill by our brains. How do we recognize a face? First, there’s the eye’s natural inability to see everything in focus; Foveal vision amounts to less than two degrees of our visual field and allows us to understand what we see only through movements called saccades. The eye wanders through a face, scanning for familiarity. It goes from point to point, making every face a narrative. Every face is a story. Then there is the face we see through the media, equally fragmented through edition and association. In the end physiognomy, especially when mediatized, is a far more complex bricollage than we assume. What I’ve been doing in this latest series of portraits is mimicking the mental inability to piece together those bits of information that make us know someone through the media, by literally composing portraits of “celebrities” at different levels from confetti-sized bits of paper punched out from magazines. My own failure in making a seamless likeness of the subject somehow reflects the chimeric aspect of familiarity in physiognomy. The subjects were chosen to try to create a full spectrum for the meaning of being famous. There are movie stars, popular singers, literature laureates, presidents, sport legends, flower sellers, manicurists, and waiters; they are all people who became well known by using different media–from television to the street to word of mouth.

DE: An ever increasing number of artists choose to live in other parts of the world, leaving their cultural backgrounds, or, on the contrary, exacerbating the theme of their original culture. Recently artists of Asian background have established themselves in Europe or North America, but this is only the latest episode in a process that hasn’t spared any country. The results are contrasting: frequently their own cultural origins dilute themselves in a more Ôglobal’ climate, which, in a certain sense tends to uniform artistic practices and a common critical sense which, for example in architecture, has produced an Ôinternational style’. One can witness however a radicalisation of the artist’s own cultural origin, taking to extremes a memory or an atmosphere that often doesn’t have any current relevance to reality but represents simply a faded memory of it. Until a few years ago to speak of Latin American or Chinese or African art responded to relatively reliable rules, now perhaps it no longer has any coherence or, worse, it risks sinking into the ethnographic play-pen. (As a Brazilian, living in New York how do you consider this phenomenon and how do you view the young art coming out of Latin America?).

VM: My case is actually an inversion of the trend of regionalist exhibitions established in some kind of parallelism with the raise of a global economical environment. I was trained as an artist along the traditions of the European academy in Brazil, and as my entire career as an artist took place after I moved to New York, I actually had a much harder time finding a place for myself within the context of Brazilian art than I had in the U.S. or in Europe. Only recently have I been able to patch together my ignorance about the art of my country of birth. When I lived in Brazil, I thought the main trends in visual arts, Concretism for example, with a few exceptions, were already too detached from their own political environment; they made a very poor case for authentic regionalism. Although my main influences are American and European art from the 60’s and 70’s, it was by my awkward revision of these ideas that the Brazilian artist started to transpire in me. My training, received through the controlled media of an oppressive political regime in which there were only half-truths and all safe communications, happened only through the use of metaphors. I learned to question media from living in a dictatorship; that makes me feel more Brazilian than wearing a fruit hat. In the summer of 91, I found guavas for the first time in a deli in New York. Shortly thereafter a number of equally packaged curiosities started to flood the contemporary art scene in New York: Young Africa, Young China, Young Russia, Five Women from Borneo, Albino Eunuch Midgets from Easter Island, and so on. I wrote an article that I never published on the phenomenon called “The Summer the Guavas Came” so annoyed was I by these shows. The Euro-American cultural cannon needs the exotic, the outsider, the regional, and the traditional to assert its own identity in the magma of contemporaneity. It’s up to the artists coming from more secular cultures to surmise if what they are producing is an intrinsic part of what they are or simply a product designed to satisfy the identity of a market.

Latin American artists profit from the rich cultural environment in which they live and the high degree of information the artists are exposed to. From my point of view, the most interesting art coming out of South America is actually focusing on a sort of negotiation between their culture and the culture of the countries in which they are exhibiting.
]]> http://vikmuniz.net/library/interview-with-vik-muniz-and-danilo-eccher-director-of-the-museum-of-contemporary-art-rome-august-2003/feed 0 http://vikmuniz.net/library/vik-muniz-by-mark-magill http://vikmuniz.net/library/vik-muniz-by-mark-magill#comments Fri, 13 Jan 2012 16:24:24 +0000 http://localhost/wordpress/?p=1866 Interview in Bomb Magazine n.73, Fall 2000

Vik Muniz might be billed as a photographer, and photographs are generally the end product of his work. But in another age he might have been an alchemist, transforming base lead into refined gold. In Vik’s case, lead has been replaced by light. He is clearly a visual artist who tinkers equally with light and the mechanisms of perception that decipher the messages light conveys. He tricks the eye to reveal the tricks the eye itself can play and how that trickery has been used by “shamans, priests, artists, and con men” throughout history to evoke both power and belief. Vik works with the most rudimentary materials- sugar, soil, string, wire, chocolate syrup- to reconstruct images that we carry in a vast collective reservoir of visual memory. The quality of his draftsmanship with these rude materials displays a gift for bringing brilliance and humor to the commonplace Ð not unlike the physical genius of Charlie Chaplin, or Buster Keaton. Vik photographs these images, and then discards the originals, so that we are left with a tantalizing representation of the illusion he has created.

I met Vik Muniz for breakfast in his pristine Brooklyn studio during a torrential rain shower this spring. The day was gloomy and Vik freely admitted his dislike of the dark, the result of a waterskiing prank where he wound up drifting for four hours in the dark, during a rainstorm, before a search party found him. This may go some way toward explaining his passion for light in all its forms. His studio contains an intriguing array of optical devices from the history of vision: stereopticons, pantographs with half-silvered mirrors, microscopes, prisms and lenses. The studio is dominated by an impressive camera stand holding an 8×10 camera, for which Vik designed the lenses. We began by speaking about his fascination with optics, gimmicks, and Buster Keaton.

VM: I’ve always been ashamed of this thing that I have about mechanics, because it seems like a macho statement. Buster Keaton once said that if he hadn’t become an artist he’d sure be a mechanical engineer. I can relate to that, especially since I’ve been studying mechanics and Keaton for years. There’s something about the mechanics of a gagÑthe more accidental it looks the better. Keaton goes through this whole big trouble to create something that looks as natural as if it could have happened anyway, to make it as close as it gets to life, a choreographed accident, because life has that sort of narrative quality.

MM: The quality of accident.

VM: Exactly. A lot of things I do look like they were found. Because that’s also what makes it interestingÑthat it could almost have happened by itself. At the same time, it has this whole structure. It’s a little like a dancer who makes jumping look easy, but what goes into it is tremendous physical intelligence.

MM: Like Shakespeare said, “There’s more than meets the eye.”

VM: It’s like the fur in Vermeer’s painting of “The Woman Reading a Letter” at the Frick. You get up close and you can’t see fur anymore, just a blur of brushstrokes. Then you go back and it’s fur again. Oscar Wilde used to say that the mystery of the world existed in the visible things, not the invisible. I think art without pretenses of being more than a visual exercise can indeed be powerful and complete. I am quite annoyed by the “aboutness” of contemporary art. They say art is supposed to be about something. I find that it’s not enough of a mission when art is supposed to be about one thing or another because to be art, to begin with, it should be about everything at once. It should present a kind of all-encompassing world. When you look at the portraits of Rembrandt, you see somebody looking at the whole worldÑeverything is there. I just saw a show in London of the self-portraits, and in every portrait you see an entire world. It’s simple and enormously ambitious at the same time. Rembrant makes me want to be an artist and makes me sometimes want to quit being one.

MM: Have you heard this theory about Rembrandt’s self portraits, he’s combining the movements of facial muscles in ways that you can’t make on your own. In other words, smiling and frowning at the same time, so when you look at it your eyes get caught between the two.

VM: That’s an art historical license, like the talk about Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Caravaggio’s use of the camera obscura. But it’s kind of hard to tell these things. Rembrandt probably just painted the thing without giving a damn about all those little details. There are things you do when you paint, that after you’re done you realize, God, I did this like this? A lot of things are automatic in vision. All this information is flowing through in ways that you don’t always understand or control. Vision is too complex for you to have a full grasp of what you’re doing.

An artist like Shakespeare is not looking at the world or showing you the world, he is the entire world. He is trying to become everything and permeate all the realms of subjectivity so that he can fully transport it to you. The subject is a mere conduit for any possible reading to flow through. You have that truth when you see a Rembrandt, and it’s true when you read Shakespeare. The vision of their art is so immense. When you look at these things you really want to make art. I think art starts by not being political or conceptual, it starts by being art. And whatever political or conceptual repercussions the art may evoke come later.

MM: We’ve had art for a long time, as long as we’ve had anything else, right?

VM: And how many times have we read it differently? There are different meanings for everybody who looks at it.

MM: Is there an art gene? One that provides a kind of pleasure that makes things go forward.

VM: Biology is a always a good metaphor. Maybe it’s a time when science and art have to look at each other, not as some illustration, but as a comparative understanding of their patterns.

MM: Like a scientist…

VM: I’m experimenting with these things as a student of media. We’re at the point that in order to perceive phenomenon, you have to change it, like particle collisions in physics. What else can you do without relying on the actual reality of things? Art is just as important as science because it completes it; one is about phenomenon while the other is about mind. One thing is totally dependent on the other, that’s why I am very drawn to cognitive science.

How many artists spend their entire lives making visual objects and never pick up a book to study how the eye works? They never studied the physics of light to see how light behaves. They never bought a prism, and held it against the sun or any of these really simple things. I’m a visual artist not a conceptualist. I make things that deal primarily with the eyes. In that, I’m totally old fashioned.

MM: The mind plays a big part in what the eye sees.

VM: Vision is a form of intelligence, even more than listening. Our human eyes is not nearly as good as birds’ eyes or many other animals.’ Instead, we have a huge visual cortex, devoted just to analyzing visual stimuli. That is our true eye. I have a theory that the intellect has evolved from our inability to see everything in focus, the eye has to move to see things and by doing so it introduces a concept of narrative and attention that is necessary for any complex idea to form.

MM: In the Middle Ages, they used to think that visual perception went both ways, actively projected by the eyes.

VM: What they called Platonic vision. Plato thought the eyes sent out a beam and sort of hit something. Platonic vision is interesting; it’s not the way it physically happens, but it’s the way it mentally happens. You see things the way you want to see them.
MM: Is there a little feeling of pleasure in that?

VM: Recognition is a kind of comfort. It confirms your capacity of looking at something and analyzing it, but it also reinforces your familiarity. What is good, however, is to be able to produce that warm feeling where you recognize something and at the same time you’re able to subvert that recognition. This brings us back to the joke and the gimmick, like Buster Keaton. I exaggerate the gimmick in my work because I want to engage the viewer with some kind of mechanical image that is almost inescapable, where they not only see the artist, but they feel the vision.

MM: The transformation of feeling seems important. You have images like the Hindenburg exploding or the Munich terrorist on the roof, the first time one encounters those images, they’re horrific. Now we encounter them in a gallery and that whole feeling has been transformed.

VM: Not really. It just has to be negotiated in a different light. That brings us to the idea of the copy. Art is primarily a copy. I don’t believe in originality as much as I believe in individuality. I see a straight line of visible imagery from cave painting to the present. We have improved our copying skills through technologies and it is through these developmental implements that we see how we have evolved, the subject in its aura of originality its just a mere excuse for copying. We can trace this development because the introduction of a new medium does not destroy the existing ones, it simply forces them to adapt to a new reality. I am a very traditional artist as a draftsman as well as a photographer but the unlikely encounter of these two media is what gives my work a contemporary character. The moment of the meeting of two media is a moment of truth when new forms are born. It’s nothing that’s very technical. On the whole I prefer to work on a very low-tech level. There’s something redeeming in using the barest mechanics to produce an image. I don’t want to amaze you with my powers to fool you. I want to make you aware of how much you want to believe in the imageÑto be conscious of the measure of your own belief, rather than of my capacity to fool you. You see it, but at the same time you see how it works. I have been called an illusionist, but I have always considered myself a twisted kind of realist.
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MM: When you bring two media together, in your case, photography and drawing, it’s almost like mating. Something new arises. It’s not just auto mechanics, where you’re repairing something, or maintaining something in the same form.

VM: Well, you haven’t seen creative auto repair, like the people do in Cuba. Fixing bikes with machine gun parts and that kind of thing. I saw a piece by Chris Burden in Europe. It was this enormous robotic structure, just to make paper airplanes. And people stayed there for hours, looking at the whole thing, going from one point to another.
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MM: Because of narratives again?

VM: Yeah , because we are all suckers for whatever will happen next. That’s the beauty of that Fischli and Weiss video “The Way Things Go”. The same goes for cooking or home improvement shows on public TV. There are many lines of narrative even in still images because the eyes never stop moving. One in particular people often fail to see when they’re just looking at photographs in a magazine. A photograph, the photograph is never the same the second time you look at it. I make photographs to be placed on a wall, because I want people to have a physical relationship to image that’s not limited by the length of their arms. I’m not an editorial type of artist. I would like people to walk toward a picture, to see how it changes as they walk. Pictures mean different things at different distances. There are always micro-narratives being played. In a film, it’s not just a story that goes from beginning to the end. There are a lot of little stories that make parts of it, little scenes within each image. To understand media, you have to go back to the most basic forms of the art. I think it started out as two kinds of art. Art that comes from embodiment, which is theatre, dance and music, and art that’s a graphical projection like drawing. These two arts were probably developed by primitive shamans. They understood they were exercising a kind of power. Because the shaman, like a mechanic, knew how to create something in which belief could be produced. Whereas a king or a chief has power and knows how to use it, but he doesn’t know how it’s produced. That’s the secret shamans, magicians, sales people, con men, and artists hold. In many ways I am still perpetuating the idea of somebody who studies the mechanics of power through representation. If there is power that comes from any other source, I don’t know about it. I think power comes from representation. And all kinds of actions that hold a certain continuity of narrative come from an understanding of representational mechanics. I try to slow down the perceptual input of the image in my photographs so that you actually look at them as a form of narrative.
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MM: You slow it down to expose the machine?

VM: Yeah. It’s the reason there’s all this fascination for things like the iMac computer. You can see the workings in the back of it. What I want to show you is that there is a machine, in the back of your head. I don’t want to show you exactly how it works; I want you to guess a little bit. I don’t know how that thing in the back of the iMac works. I can see it, I know it’s just not coming from some god. I can guess how it works, even though I don’t have a full understanding of it. That’s an important part of it.

MM: But what is that guessing, then? That sounds almost like what used to serve as theology in earlier times.

VM: Oh no, they didn’t guess. They believed it. There was no guessing. They knew the power of representation. There are two types of visible images. Things that are illuminated and things that are luminous where the image is shot right into the eye. The first time they did that was on stained glass windows. There is real beauty in this, because light is pure information. I’m almost religious about light. Everything is there. We divide it, we organize it so we can understand it a little better. We perceive it in a wave that is broken, so we understand shapes and forms and everything else we see, but it’s all in there. It’s the closest thing that you can think of to God itself, this pure light. But we always need somebody who is human to tell you the story. In African religions, there is only one god that can actually talk to humans. In Greek mythology there’s Hermes, who can come and mess around with you. There is always a trickster who carries the message of the gods. The saint is, in a way, a trickster of his own kind. He’s the one that’s beyond this pure light, and he can work the mechanics of it so you can understand it, you can be fooled by it, but you can believe. He’s a maker of belief. And in the stained glass of the cathedrals, we have pure light being shot through the image of a saint into the eyes of the person down below. Now you have television, which is one of the most recent forms of light that come through as an image of a person. In the case of newscasters, you have somebody is telling you everything that is happening in the world through this pure light. Basically, a head telling you a story. Why do they have a guy there? The same guy everyday. You recognize him. You trust him. The newscasters are very similar to saints in that respect. You have to be a good person to be a newscaster. Try to be a newscaster that gets caught sniffing cocaine! You’re gone. I love conversations where people talk about who’s their favorite newscaster. It’s like who’s your favorite saint or your favorite Greek god.

MM: It sounds like a mixture of science and belief, like alchemy.

VM: Yeah. Belief is a big part of it. The alchemists said they could turn lead into gold. And for years and years people said they were wrong. But it turns out they were right. You can do it. You just have to change the atomic structure of lead, and you get gold. It’s possible with a particle accelerator. They’ve done it. It just costs a lot of money.

MM: You’re doing something similar. Turning food into art like our breakfast this morning.

VM: It’s more cost-effective.

MM: That brings us back to transformation again.

VM: Ovid’s Metamorphosis is my favorite book in the world. I’ve read it again and again, practically every morning since I was six. I keep it by the bed so I can look at it. It starts with a beautiful line that says; “My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms”. Novelty is nothing but a kind of oblivion, everything that exists have existed before in a different form. I’m always looking at how a thing ends up like it does. Sugar Children is an example of that. I was down in the Caribbean when I saw these children of sugarcane workers. They were wonderful. But their parents were so sad, real hard people. I realized they take the sweetness out of the children by making them work in the fields. It’s very hard work. It takes all the sweetness from them and it ends up in our coffee. So I made those drawings of them from sugar. That kind of transformation I’m interested in.
MM: What happened to the sugar children? Did they ever see those pictures?

VM: Yeah. We sent them to the local post office. Children for me are very important. They are in the same class as people who understand power, like magicians and con men. We are born with everything. But I think we forget.

MM: Thanks to education.

VM: Yeah. When photography came about, it released painting from factuality. Artists had to step back to reconfigure the painting project for it to continue. They had to go backward. Some of them went to psychology, like Egon Schiele and Kokoshka, or to primitivism, like Picasso. Some went to a child-type of perception, like Dubuffet or Miró. Some started looking into the images and realizing what those marks were, like the Impressionists. There was a retrograde movement with painting in response to photography.

MM: It separated into its elements again.

VM: Now the ghost of painting has come back to haunt photography in the form of digital media. And we’ve liberated photography from factuality. The greatest thing about being a photographer today is that photography is not a believable substance anymore, it doesn’t prove anything. The greatest reason for doing something artistically is you don’t need to do it in any other way, you do it because you want to. We’re talking about pleasure again. Because photography no longer holds that claim on reality that it once did; it’s time to stop and try to understand it a little better. How do you do that? You step back. Not in terms of psychology or going back to a childlike perception. Painting has done that. But what painters didn’t doÑand it’s amazing that they didn’t do itÑthey didn’t go back into the history of the medium itself. I think with photography, we can. The most interesting work done today is by people who are going back into the medium, trying to understand it and make very simple, but captivating images. They see something which they find wonderful and they see themselves falling into the trap of the image itself. They realize how simple it is and how it’s done, like seeing the back of the computer. Photographers now are going back at making pictures without cameras, like Adam Fuss’s; pictures done with pinhole cameras, like Barbara Ess’s, or in my case, by following the idea of graphical developments. I started doing line drawings with wire. Then I went to things that looked like engravings done with string. I kept going on to the grain of the photographic image, pixelation, half-tones, all the ways of representing an image. As I get more sophisticated in producing an image, I get a bit cocky. I do something a little harder every time. But basically, as I develop, I’m always talking about things that are primitive in relation to technical means of production.

MM: When you started speaking about looking back you mentioned the children.

VM: I’ve worked with children so many times and every time I do it I learn more. I’m doing a project in Salvador, Brazil now where I was invited to work with homeless children, they basically live in the street. And there is a sculpture by Giacometti called The Invisible Object, which is an African-looking Yoruba figurehead attached to a frame. It’s holding a void. It’s holding nothing. It’s a very poignant sculpture because it talks about bondage and it talks about desire. There are mostly black children in the city of Salvador. They’re very poor but they are cultivated people. They know all kinds of traditional dance and music, how to drum and how to samba. They know the names of the African gods and the cults. The rich only hang out in shopping malls and buy expensive, imported clothing. I showed the Giacometti image to the kids and they knew it was an African copy. They knew it was holding nothing. They could relate to this image done by a white Frenchman almost a century before them. I did developed a series of exercises with these children where I asked them what would be a thing they want but can’t have. They see these things all the time on television and inside shops. They want them and they are miserable because they are exposed to these objects of desire. So I inverted the whole thing. I asked them to really think what would be the thing that they could hold in their hands, that they would desire the most. It was wonderful because they came up with all kinds of things like magic lamps, a lot of cash, a teddy bear, a radio. And they would write about it and get involved in the whole concept of the thing. They would draw the objectÑand I always asked them how they wanted to reproduce it. And they asked if they could do it in ceramic or papier-mâché. And once they made that object, they painted it, and after that I asked them to touch the object. I would videotape them and then I would take the object away and ask them to feel it without holding. This is all on video. I took pictures of this. The art work is 22 pictures of them holding the invisible objects. Then we took pictures of the objects and put them up, so you have to guess which object is in which hand. After that we got the objects and we put them in a black bag and we closed it forever. They’re showing what you can’t have, because they’re holding it inside their minds and you cannot have it. They know the people who go to museums are the kind of people who are involved in producing and showing them the things they can’t have. They turned the tables for once and learned to be the ones producing desire.


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