Vik Muniz
São Paulo (Brazil), 1961

Born in São Paulo, where he received his education, his artistic career began when he moved to New York. Vik Muniz belongs to a generation of artists who, during the late eighties, completely abandoned the discourse based on straight photography and became interested in photography as object. This approach to photography as a construction a priori, separate from the historical and everyday reality, was a throwback to the historic avant-garde artists such as Man Ray and El Lissitsky. The creation of an event to be photographed, whether a record of the photographer’s performance or a predefined way of treating the image conceptually, bestows on the photograph a specific value within that performance. Vik Muniz takes this idea to the extreme, for he photographs the creative process of what are generally rather meticulous works of mimesis, which involve the creation of artificial realities. As a result, Vik Muniz’ photographs are objects in themselves, in which the image is self-producing, and leaves out any reference other than its own definition or the photograph itself. After Muniz arrived in New York in 1983, he began to assimilate American imagery and icons, which he was to use continually in all his work. In one of his very early pieces, Best of Life (1989), he photographed the drawings he had made by recalling the illustrations from a book with memorable images. And he paid homage to one of the most influential American artists, Alfred Stieglitz, by photographing clouds made from cotton in Equivalents (1993), demonstrating his intention of establishing a referential framework that had nothing to do with reality. His work has since focused on the transformation of the familiar. For this purpose, he has not hesitated to resort to imagery as well known as works by Warhol (After Warhol, 1999), Piranesi or Leonardo da Vinci. He replaces reality, which in these cases were copies, by manufacturing visual traps through the use of a variety of odd materials: string, chocolate, wire, dust, ink or soil. This allows him to define the image perfectly and to make it completely independent. Following this procedure, Muniz has produced several pieces, all of which he has called Pictures, adding to the title the name of the material employed in the creation of the image. The first he produced was Pictures of Wire (1994) and the most recent was Pictures of Magazines (2003), in which, in the truest pointillist style of Chuck Close, he used magazine cuttings to make portraits of people well-known in his native Brazil. His settings are sometimes quite theatrical, as we see in the sepia-toned photographs of Clayton Days (2001), a museum house in Pittsburgh that was the stage for a story added to the real one. He has even created small-scale artificial realities such as those in Pictures of Earthworks (2002), where, with a touch of irony, he recreated scenes that seem as if they could be works by Walter de María, a fact belied by the reality of some toy bulldozers. C. D.

Chocolate Disaster, 1999

One of the most recognizable and surprising materials employed by Vik Muniz is chocolate. His works entitled Pictures of Chocolate began to appear in 1997. In them, we recognize icons such as Mohammed Alí, Manolete, Jackson Pollock, a group of paparazzi, a last supper… all drawn with moist and shiny chocolate syrup.
The original piece created by Muniz for Chocolate Disaster was photographed seven times during its production, seven different moments of the performance, resulting in a narration of the creative process. It starts with the white background, then the crashed car begins to appear in the chocolate syrup drawing, gradually taking up more and more space until it finally floods the entire image. In this case, the photograph is not the result of the perfect stratification of the materials once they have been converted into an image, as is customary in the majority of his works. Instead, Muniz ironically calls the process of the chocolate inundating the image a disaster, as if it were an accident in a film and the blood was filling up our television screens little by little.
Muniz’ works address the permeability of meaning in the world of images, where things are not always what they may seem. This is why he likes to remember Godard’s utterance, “Ce n’est pas du sang, c’est du rouge”.
As film and television have shown us, real objects are often scarcely persuasive when represented, not appearing as they actually are. In much the same way, there are materials that, given their versatility, can be employed to represent things they are not and be even more convincing than the true material would have been.
Just as chocolate elicits myriad psychological phenomena, such as desire, addiction or sex, the other materials chosen by Muniz for Pictures have certain connotations. He usually chooses them because of the specific relationship the subject has with them or because of the power the material has in questioning the meaning of the subject itself. The latter occurs in The Sugar Children, portraits of children on the street, whose parents work in the sugarcane plantations, and who are sweetened by a veil of sugar. The communication established with the spectator goes beyond the characteristics of the materials employed, also introducing the meticulousness with which Muniz has created these fictitious scenarios. Muniz takes on the technical difficulty of the engraver by using wool to mirror the etching of Piranes’s prisons. With the bottle of chocolate syrup, he imagines Pollock’s action painting, with marmalade, Warhol’s double portrait of Mona Lisa; Isn’t Warhol’s Marilyn made of strawberry?
The diversity of materials he uses is not unlike that of the artists he resembles, but Muniz´s process is innovative because he brings the language of surprising materials into the photography field. As in this series, which invites the viewer to consider a double reading: up close, only the plasticity of the flowing cholocate, and from afar, the narrative sequences of a chocolate accident. C. D.

Serie detail of Chocolate Disaster (in 7 parts), 1999