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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As a graduate student at the respected M.I.T. Media Lab, Marcelo Coelho collaborated with the artist Vik Muniz to help him achieve a poetic and technical feat that teases the imagination: drawing a picture of a castle on a single grain of sand. After two years of failed experiments with various lasers, they finally began getting images of beautiful complexity using an electron microscope with a focused ion beam to etch superfine lines—when it didn’t pulverize the grains altogether. The tiny etchings could then be scanned and printed large scale.

“If you ever try to do something in a science lab that’s not science, people look at you in a really funny way,” said Mr. Coelho, who initially had to schmooze the gatekeeper to the multimillion-dollar microscope, which was designed to repair microchips (the pair settled for access in the wee hours). But once the lab technician saw their surprising results, in which the microscopic contours of the grains resemble mountainous landscapes, he offered more time on the machine and his own ideas for images they could make. “You could see the excitement percolating through the system,” said Mr. Coelho, who spent four years on the “Sandcastles” series.

Mr. Muniz is among the more than 30 artists, including Tomás Saraceno and Anicka Yi, invited to embed directly in the M.I.T. labs as equals with faculty and students since the creation of the school’s Center for Art, Science & Technology in 2012. It is supported by $3 million in grants from the Mellon Foundation and a recent $1 million gift from the Russian arts entrepreneur Dasha Zhukova for a new artist residency. CAST, as it is known, has revitalized an M.I.T. model begun in the late 1960s of bringing in artists to humanize technology and create more expansive-thinking scientists. M.I.T. is at the forefront of this cross-disciplinary movement with its institutional commitment, but it is drawing on a legacy of artists who are interested in science that dates back to Leonardo da Vinci and that has proliferated as technology has become ever more commonplace and accessible.

Images from “Sandcastles” are on view in Mr. Muniz’s midcareer retrospective of photographs made using unconventional materials and methods at the High Museum in Atlanta. It includes photographs of fluorescent bacteria and cancer cells choreographed into intricate designs from his “Colonies” series, also made at M.I.T. in collaboration with the bioengineer Tal Danino.

“They push the boundaries of what seems to be possible,” said Brett Abbott, the exhibition curator, who is contrasting photographs at microscopic scale alongside Mr. Muniz’s “Earthworks” series, which were drawn at monumental scale with bulldozers and shot from a helicopter. “There’s that moment of transformation where you’re looking at a picture of a motherboard, and all a sudden you realize you’re actually looking at bacteria. These M.I.T. pictures take Vik’s interest in scale and perception to a new extreme.”

Mutually beneficial collaborations have often taken each party into new territories in their fields.

Leila Kinney, executive director of CAST, said that good matches between artists and scientists “really contribute to the development of an artist’s work and also challenge our researchers.”

Mr. Muniz said he finds scientists to be imaginative yet with such a different focus from that of artists. “It can have broad repercussions for these people, who are extremely bright, to take a little vacation from their specific field of research or think of it in a different way,” he said. He was fascinated by how Mr. Danino engineered bacteria and cancer cells to glow with fluorescence to better track their organized behavior. The artist suggested using these vibrantly colored micro-organisms — cells that typically conjure chaos and fear in people — to make images of order, balance and beauty such as Victorian and Islamic patterns and circuit board designs.

“Vik said, ‘What you really want is an image that you can see as a whole but you can also see the individual constituents,’” Mr. Danino said. That meant taking pictures on the microscope at an extremely high resolution so that every nucleus of every single cell was visible on the blown-up print. But the method to make really complex patterns did not exist in the scientific literature, according to Mr. Danino. So he and Mr. Muniz invented a technique of making stencils out of collagen, a sticky growing medium on which the cells bind and proliferate to “paint” patterns.

Mr. Abbott believes these are “the first art pieces fabricated of trained virus cells.”

Mr. Muniz has been donating the proceeds of the sales from “Colonies” to cancer research. (A floral image from the series, made with liver cells infected with the vaccinia virus used to make the smallpox vaccine, was part of an online campaign sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to promote vaccination.)

“‘Colonies’ is a very concrete way that we built a technique for the art that’s useful for the science,” said Mr. Danino, who recently moved to Columbia University as director of the Synthetic Biological Systems Laboratory, which will publish his research.

Mr. Danino got pulled in a very different direction in his collaboration with Ms. Yi, a conceptual artist known for incorporating science and scent in her sculptural works. During her residency at M.I.T., Ms. Yi had the idea to explore what she called “the patriarchal fear” that lingers around hygiene and contagion, much of which she says is a gender-based stigma. Their collaboration involved creating a collective “female bacteria” for her exhibition at the Kitchen in New York last spring.

She mailed Q-tips and Ziploc bags to 100 of her female friends and colleagues and asked them to return bodily bacteria samples that Mr. Danino cultivated individually in the lab and then together in a giant petri dish on site at the Kitchen.

It was an uncontrolled experiment. A large amount of nutrient gel, heated in pots and pans on the Kitchen’s stove, was the wrong temperature, and they had to start over. Random things started growing in the petri dish from the nonsterile environment. “I saw Anicka using the bacteria almost like finger paints with her hands,” Mr. Danino said, noting that even though she was using rubber gloves, it was just something he would never do. “I had to calm down the scientific side and embrace that. It made the piece really nice in the end.”

The artist took an olfactory reading of the final sculpture and converted the pungent scent into a fragrance. It will be diffused in another sculptural installation to be included in the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea this fall.

Mr. Saraceno, who is known for making huge inflatable sculptures and complex gallery-size webs that can evoke floating cities, neural pathways and the infinitely expanding cosmos, was CAST’s inaugural visiting artist in 2012. He has continued to work actively with M.I.T. faculty exploring his utopian vision of flying around the world on one of his buoyant sculptures kept afloat only by the differential temperature between the air inside and outside a solar balloon. “The Earth becomes the big battery of the sculpture,” said Mr. Saraceno, who exhibited two prototypes of his giant silver Mylar balloons in “Solutions COP 21” at the Grand Palais in Paris during the climate change conference in December. He has successfully launched and kept them airborne for several hours with the help of scores of volunteers in recent test flights in Berlin, New Mexico and Bolivia that are part amateur science experiment, part performance art.

When the M.I.T. meteorologist Lodovica Illari first met Mr. Saraceno, she found his dream of alternative flight a bit far-fetched. “He began the conversation by asking, ‘If we were going to fly off on a balloon and ride a jet stream, where would we go?’” Ms. Illari said. “As a scientist, you want to be precise, correct. But he pushed me a little bit out of my comfort zone, saying, ‘Imagine something and see if it can be done.’”

She has embraced the proposition and has been working with him to analyze past flight trajectories of solar balloons and to simulate possible flights based on launching conditions and patterns of turbulence in the stratosphere. She plans to exhibit these during M.I.T.’s open house on April 23, celebrating the centennial of the university’s Cambridge campus. Her goal is to equip one of his solar balloons with an instrument that could sample the ozone throughout the day and night.

Mr. Saraceno, whose observation of spiders has inspired installations of webs made of elastic cord or monofilament, also collaborates with the M.I.T. civil engineer Markus Buehler, who studies the structure of the protein in spider silk as an ideal building material that could be replicated synthetically. Mr. Buehler had modeled two-dimensional webs only on the computer and was astounded by the artist’s photographs of a black widow spider’s web he had manually scanned millimeter by millimeter. They have since developed a scanning mechanism that tracks webs in three dimensions as they are being built.

“We’re working right now with Tomás on understanding how spiders build extremely complex shapes in open space without any scaffolding or help,” said Mr. Buehler, who has spiders building small cities in his M.I.T. basement. He imagines this research could be applied in the future to new architectural and engineering approaches.

Even when Mr. Saraceno careens off into flights of fancy, the scientists are tolerant.

“Tomás and I have pushed the boundaries in what we thought we could do,” Mr. Buehler said. “We ground ourselves when we actually get to work, but it’s important to be creative. That’s why I put Tomás and the students in the same room. They can learn from him as an artist to think wildly, and that’s necessary to solve a problem.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.


]]> http://vikmuniz.net/library/vik-muniz-by-mark-magill/feed 0 http://vikmuniz.net/library/a-twisted-kind-of-realist http://vikmuniz.net/library/a-twisted-kind-of-realist#comments Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:49:00 +0000 http://localhost/wordpress/?p=1834 by Tonica Chagas*

In his two new series, “Pictures of Magazines” and “Monadic Works,” Vik Muniz again plays with human visual perception to show that”a picture can be neither what is on a wall nor what is in our brain; it can be rather what is in between the two.” “Pictures of Magazines” aims to deal with physiognomic recognition through media on many levels and discloses some of the artist’s feelings about the new profile of Brazil, his native country. In “Monadic Works,” as if translating the theory of the mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646 – 1716) on the nature of all things in the universe and the basic elements of reality, he creates simple and beautiful images with the repetition of funny and sometimes disturbing units.


Observing minutiae in pictures published in magazines and tabloids, Vikhad a question spinning inside his brain: how far could one visually break up the physiognomy of a person, reconstruct the characteristics of the face with pieces of other images, and still recognize it? These ideas gained form in enlarged passport-like portraits of very famous, as well as ordinary Brazilians.


“Faces are made-up of thousands of little subtleties that determine recognition. When we identify somebody through an image, we tend to draw from a profile of generalized facial features,” says Vik. This physiognomic deconstruction was re-enacted in “Pictures of Magazines” by creating portraits with varying degrees of recognition. They are made-up of thousands of pieces from pages of magazines cut with a hole-puncher and then assembled into colorful mosaics of accumulated and overlapping circles. The result was then photographed and enlarged into big prints. Each portrait took three weeks to one month to complete.


Focusing on perception, memory, and illusion, Vik’s work subverts our ability to recognize and leads the observer to imagine if what he sees is a drawing, a painting, or a sculpture. “Pictures of Magazines” can be seen as a series of pointillist drawings. The photographer has chosen to fragment the images in small round shapes to explore what in ophthalmology is called “saccade,” the rapid movement of the eye from one still position to another in the visual field. In studies regarding visual perception, “saccade” is always represented by individual points.
With “Pictures of Magazines,” Vik selected a pantheon of people he cherishes as his own personal heroes. They encompass both faces well known by Brazilians — such as the writer João Ubaldo Ribeiro, the “carnavalesco” Joãosinho Trinta, and the soccer icon Pelé — and ordinary people the artist cares for.  Among these is Francisco, an elderly man who sells flowers in Rio de Janeiro restaurants who adds with finesse and thoughtfulness a branch of “arruda;” (a weed for good fortune) as treat for his customers, and the manicurist Luciana, who has to face 30 miles of commute twice daily to go to work but always displays good humor.


Vik reveals that the idea for the series came after last year’s presidential elections in Brazil. For the first time, a working class citizen — Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, who is one of the sitters in “Pictures of Magazines” — was elected to office with the largest ever number of votes. This event gave a big boost to Brazilian self-esteem and led Vik, who has been in the USA for the last 20 years, to examine the new meaning of being Brazilian.


Made of such unusual materials as ketchup, yarn, or dust collected from museums, Vik’s photos are tricks, as he himself says, to disclose the tricks our mind uses in order to reconstruct images that are filed in our visual memory. Through the simple images of “Monadic Works,” we see his dexterity as a draftsman and his ironic humor, playing with objects as little as pennies or plastic toys.

In Vik’s works the shift of scale forces the viewer to choose whether to focus on parts of the image or the image as a whole. The elements he used to create “Small Change,” “Probability,” “White Rose,” or “Toy Soldier” are a little bigger than those employed in his previous series. They are immediately recognizable and carry their own meaning.


“I would like people to walk towards a picture, to see how it changes as they walk. Pictures mean different things at different distances. There are always micro-narratives being played,” explains the photographer to writer Mark Magill, in a long interview published in Bomb Magazine. Through Vik Muniz photographs, we learn to look and think about what reality is. “I have been called an illusionist,” he says, “but I have always considered myself a twisted kind of realist.”


*Tonica Chagas is a journalist who writes for the Brazilian newspaper “O Estado de S. Paulo”