Vik Muniz: Pictures of Garbage

We are delighted to present works from the series "Pictures of Garbage" and "Pictures of Junk" by the Brasilien arist Vik Muniz for the first time in Zurich.

How the Work of Vik Muniz Questions the Reality of Images

Certain images today are incredibly widely known; they have been reproduced and distributed in the media so often that they have become etched in people’s memories. These images are of many different kinds, ranging from portraits of celebrated pop stars to photographs of wartime atrocities. In addition, many artists have even achieved a sort of celebrity status: They are present in the media, they are talked about, and there are countless reproductions of their works. This includes more than just the universally recognized classics of art history, but many works of art produced in the 20th and 21st centuries as well. The flag paintings of Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings and Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvases have all attained iconic status. The reproduction of art, of course, has a long history. In classical antiquity, statues of gods were cast in clay in bulk and sold as souvenirs. In the Middle Ages, reproductions of paintings were widely distributed as woodcuts. And copperplate prints of famous works of art attained enormous popularity in the 18th century, thanks to the emergence of a middle class and its need to display its strong social identity. Still, none of these methods of reproduction can take the place of painstakingly copying paintings by hand. Even today, painters can be seen at their easels in the world’s great In a sense, the Brazilian artist Vik Muniz is also a copyist. In his meticulous reproductions of great works or classical motifs of art history (as in his series Pictures of Pigment, Pictures of Junk and Pictures of Garbage) and photographs (as in his recent Pictures of Paper), he goes to enormous lengths to replicate his models. For Pictures of Paper, he uses paper cutouts in different shades of gray – corresponding precisely to the gray-scale values in the black-and-white originals – and layers them to create a paraphrase of the original photograph. It is a method that requires careful planning and a considerable capacity for abstraction. The original must be analyzed and transferred to an entirely different medium, in this case from photograph to a kind of silhouette. During this transfer, the medium of the model and that of its reproduction enter into a relationship that incorporates the content of both. Silhouettes are often considered a precursor of photography, as they too use light to produce an image. Thus it verges on irony given that the silhouettes so painstakingly produced by Muniz serve merely as the basis of photographs and are then destroyed. In the end, the photograph is all that remains. The photographs in Pictures of Paper are lit from the side so that the bas-relief-like layers of paper are clearly discernible. However, this play on materials is tempered by the fact that the photograph contradicts this materiality with its own material presence. The photograph’s threedimensionality, i.e. the structure of light-reflecting layers in the print, is only visible under a microscope. To the naked eye it appears to be a two-dimensional medium, albeit one in which the illusion of spatial depth can approach perfection. Considering the complex layers of content engendered by Muniz’s method of working, the question arises as to where the pictures are actually located. What reality do they inhabit? Where do they happen? In the 1970s, literary scholar Lucien Dällenbach introduced the mise-en-abyme model to examine the nested planes of reality in texts. When someone tells a story in which a character tells a story about someone telling a storyteller’s story, the narrative point of view can easily become lost in the multiple layers of reality. With each step in which a narrative is reframed, one must assume that it will be colored by the angle from which each narrator views the events and by his or her intent in recounting it. This can initially leave readers feeling disoriented because it thwarts their expectation of obtaining a simple account of events. Each narrative tells them more about the narrator than about the actual events. On the other hand, this disappointment forces readers to question their expectations and attitudes towards the narrative. A hall of mirrors in which images are reproduced into infinity would be nothing without the human being who enters it and thus puts an end to the endless game of self-reflection, both physiologically with the retina of his eye and mentally by reflecting on what he sees. The layers that are implicitly present in each of Muniz’s pictures reflect the different meanings it contains. The motif is the point of departure, its initial manifestation as a picture – either as a photograph or as a painting. Then there are the reproductions of the image in circulation on the Internet and in books and magazines. Superimposed on all this, we have the ephemeral recreation produced by Muniz as an interim step in the artistic process. The process culminates in a further image, the photograph. On the one hand, this image is a record of the preceding stages. Yet this identity also entails subsequent reincarnations of the image, namely in reproductions in catalogues of Vik Muniz’s work or as illustrations in articles about him, such as this one.

Vik Muniz: Pictures of Garbage