ART-PRESENTATION:Vik Muniz-Extra Ordinary

Vik Muniz is best known for his works made from everyday materials such as string, garbage, chocolate syrup and dirt. He engages in the referential potential of these surprising mediums by assembling works that incorporate their subject matter into their materials. In doing so, Muniz adds new dimensions to established notions of representation.

By Dimitris Lempesi
Photo: BYU Museum of Art Archive

The exhibition “Extra-Ordinary” presents more than 100 works by Muniz. The works on display include a series of high-tech sandcastle drawings carved from singular grains of sand, aerial photographs of large-scale bulldozer sculptures he led to form, and intricate collages of famous cities. One of the highlights of the Muniz exhibition is “The Sugar Children” a series of six portraits of Caribbean children made from grains of sugar. Muniz created these portraits in 1996 after visiting families on the island of St. Kitts who make a living working the sugar cane plantations. This work launched Muniz’s career, as his photographs of the portraits were chosen for the A 1997 tour of the Museum of Modern Art’s “New Photography”. Muniz’s work aims not only to entertain viewers and impress them with his technical expertise, but also to get them to question their way of seeing the world. Muniz’s work finds the extraordinary in the ordinary, and his 2008 series “Pictures of Garbage” is no exception. For that collection of seven photographs, Muniz worked with Brazilian garbage collectors at Jardim Gramacho, a 321-acre landfill just outside of Rio. Muniz employed impoverished trash pickers to help him create huge works of art modeled from trash. The work took about a month each to create. The end products were sold in the form of photographs to benefit garbage collectors and help them find new life. The 2010 documentary “Land in waste” directed by Lucy Walker, shows Muniz’s behind-the-scenes process to create the portraits. The documentary won the Audience Award for a Documentary on World Cinema at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, among other awards at other distinguished film festivals. Muniz’s oversized collage “George Stinney, Jr.” shows a photo of the main character, the youngest person in the United States to be sentenced to death in the 20th century. Stinney was 14 when he was executed by an electric chair in 1944 after being wrongly accused of murdering two little girls. Stinney’s case was reopened and it was posthumously exonerated in December 2014. The collage is made up of smaller images of people laughing and living their normal lives. It is part of Muniz’s “Album” series.

Vik Muniz began his career in sculpture with playful works such as “Clown Skull” (1987), from his “Relics” series, which depicts the realistic-looking skull of a clown, bulbous bone nose included. Eventually, however, he found photographic documentation of his sculptural work to be more compelling than the artworks themselves and gradually came to focus on photography as the exclusive final medium for all his pieces. His 1989 series “The Best of LIFE” was inspired by photographs from the coffee table publication The Best of LIFE, a book he had owned but lost while moving house. Muniz drew the legendary images in the book memory—among them “The Man on the Moon” and “Kiss at Times Square” (both 1989)—then photographed the drawings and presented the photos as final works. In another series, titled “Pictures of Clouds” (2001), the artist photographed a skywriter’s clouds as they gradually disintegrated and disappeared. Unlike fading clouds formations which are in danger of disappearing from memory, masterpieces such as Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa “and photographs of Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando are deeply embedded in popular consciousness. However, Muniz’s depictions of these images rework the iconography in non-traditional mediums that match the content of the image itself. For example, his 2004 portrait of Marilyn Monroe, titled “Marilyn Monroe (Pictures of Diamonds)”, is made of diamonds—a reference to her famous song ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend’. In his “Pictures of Dust” series (2001), Muniz replicates the works of various famous mid-century American artists, such as Donald Judd’s “Untitled” (1965) and Richard Serra’s “Prop” (1968)—in dust collected from the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

In the past decade, Muniz has extended his visual repertoire from contemporary culture to more personal encounters. In his series “Pictures of Garbage” (2008), he photographed garbage pickers he met at an open-air dumpsite just outside Rio de Janeiro called Jardim Gramacho. However, he retains his interest in iconography by staging the pickers as the subjects of classical portraits, such as the French revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat from Jacques-Louis David’s “Death of Marat”. Details of the images were accented with the garbage the models had scavenged. In the accompanying documentary film “Waste Land” (2010), directed by Lucy Walker, Muniz states that he aimed to “change the lives of people with the same materials they deal with every day”. Indeed, due the critical acclaim and success of the documentary, the artist and the filmmakers have donated more than $300,000 to the pickers’ community in Jardim Gramacho. Muniz completed his first permanent public art work in New York City in 2016, a mosaic tile masterpiece called “Perfect Strangers”, which was located in the new Second Avenue subway at the 72nd Street station. The artist continues to expand his practice, working with different mediums and contexts. A self-described “low-tech illusionist,” Muniz’s mission is to urge audiences to reflect on the concepts of illusion and perception embedded in our psyches and to question what lies beneath, or behind, everyday imagery. He continues to challenge by presenting art that contains multiple meanings – both in the immediate response to his visual stimuli and then in the reaction to its underlying message.

Photo: Vik Muniz, Jerusalem, From the series “Postcards from Nowhere”, 2015, Chromogenic Print, 74.6 x 111, © Vik Muniz, Courtesy of the artist

Info: BYU Museum of Art, North Campus Drive, Provo, UT USA, Duration: 18/6-27/11/2021, Days & Hours: Mon-Thu & Sat 10:00-18:00, Fri 10:00-21:00, https://moa.byu.edu