In recent months,
I had the opportunity to study two contemporary artists whose styles,
processes, and artwork intrigued me. In my Critical Theory class, which dealt
with issues of colonialism, primitivism, and alterity, I was introduced to the
work of Fred Wilson. And then, this summer, I saw the Vik Muniz exhibition at
the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
Fred Wilson’s art
primarily focuses on reinterpreting museums where Vik Muniz reinterprets
photographs and known artwork by recreating them in his unique visual style.
While Vik Muniz’s style can be playful and illusory, Fred Wilson’s style is
often serious and stark. Both are thought provoking and conceptual: Fred
Wilson’s work is more about the ideas where Vik Muniz’s work strikes a balance
between materialism and meaning. I set out to investigate whether studying
these artists could inform my work as a documentary filmmaker and help me think
creatively about new visual strategies.
Both of these
artists had childhood experiences that influenced their artwork. Fred Wilson
(born 1954) is of African American and Caribbean ancestry (Berger 11). When he
was a child his family moved frequently. They lived in African American, Latino
and European immigrant neighborhoods as well as all-white suburban
neighborhoods (Goncharov 178). In the suburbs, he was the only black child, had
no friends, and was misunderstood by teachers (Goncharov 178). He said,
“Growing up as an outsider in the 1960s and early 70s in all the communities I
found myself in, I was always acutely aware of being an observer of the
environment around me rather than a participant” (Goncharov 178). As a young
black artist in New York in the 1970s and 80s, he found the world of museums
and commercial galleries closed to artists of color, an injustice that
influenced his work significantly (Goncharov 181).
Vik Muniz was
born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1961, to a working-class family. At 14, he won a
partial scholarship to an academic studio for drawing and sculpture. He would
go to museums to look at works of people dealing with visual language as a
means of tackling issues of social and political identity (Adi 112). As he rode
the crowded, smelly buses home from the museums, he came to mistrust the
emotionless calm of the museums (Adi 112).
For both artists,
their reactions to the museum were seminal motivations to transform
environments through their artwork. Fred Wilson directly engages in
interventions in museums to highlight institutional indifference to issues of
race, class, and community (Berger 10). He juxtaposes the expected with the
unexpected, the ordinary with the unusual, to reveal prejudices and omissions
in museums’ curatorial practices (Berger 10). In his article, “Museums in the
Colonial Horizon of Modernity: Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum” (1992), Walter Mignolo uses Fred Wilson’s
installation at the Maryland Historical Society as an example of a decolonizing
perspective (72). For Mignolo, “its most astute and powerful element [is] a
decolonial statement in the heart of the museum which is an imperial/colonial .
. . institution” (76).
Wilson did not
make artwork for Mining the Museum.
Rather he reinstalled items from the historical society’s collection in order
to make the viewers reconsider them (Mignolo 74). In Cabinetmaking, for example, he showed four antique 19th
Century chairs belonging to wealthy Baltimore families and arranged them as
they might be set up for a pianist or poet. Instead, Wilson placed a whipping
post for their entertainment. According to Maurice Berger, “Wilson constructed
a new and radical curatorial history of Maryland, a reinstallation of hundreds
of objects never before publicly exhibited that told a story of slavery and
oppression, of white complicity and self-interest, of black rebellion and
triumph” (Berger 12). In another example, he placed highly polished ornamental
silver goblets next to a pair of rusty slave shackles.
Vik Muniz also
does work to transform environments through consciousness raising. For Sao Paulo’s Biennale in 1998, he
made a special body of work about the city’s homeless children by befriending
and ultimately empowering the children to become involved. When he initially
asked them to think of a good feeling or memory when taking their pictures,
they couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t the cause of pain (Muniz 64).
Ultimately he showed them an art history book, had them select pictures of
certain characters, and photographed them making the same poses as the
characters. Muniz describes how they slowly began to direct the shoot
themselves, telling him what to do to make them look like their characters
(Muniz 67). He chose to make the portraits out of urban waste by using detritus
(confetti, bottle caps, tinsel, and costume fragments) from the filthy streets
the day after Ash Wednesday Carnival festivities (Muniz 67). Similarly in his
series Pictures of Garbage (2008), he
creates giant portraits of the people at the Jardim Gramacho garbage dump of
Rio de Janeiro, modeled after famous paintings, using garbage from the dump.
The people portrayed appear to be stepping out of the chaos of the garbage and
leaving it behind them (“Vik Muniz: Solo” 6). On the one hand, he is offering
his subjects temporary reprieves from the drudgery of their daily existence. On
the other, he is exposing the more affluent world of the museum to the plight
of Brazilian society’s underprivileged.
Fred Wilson’s
oeuvre primarily involves museum interventions. He is like an archaeologist who
unearths long buried objects in museum basements and storerooms (Berger 10). He
juxtaposes the expected with the unexpected, the ordinary with the unusual to
reveal a museum’s prejudices (Berger 10). He asks challenging questions, like
“Why do history museums celebrate the triumphs and ingenuity of white
upper-class people but often ignore the stories of intolerance?” (Berger 9). In
The Other Museum, a 1990 installation
at White Columns, an alternative art space in New York, Wilson created a
fictional ethnographic museum that challenged the rhetoric of the “primitive”
of white people, art historians, curators and anthropologists. (Berger 11). In
one example, he gagged and blindfolded African masks with flags of Britain and
France, and called them “hostages to the museum”(Berger 11).
Vik Muniz’s main technique involves
a creative system, which functions through series (Mezil 16). He recreates
images that already exist, derived from photographs or well-known paintings
(Seckel 185). He makes fragile reconstructions of these images using unexpected
materials, like dust, sugar, chocolate sauce, ketchup, wire, garbage, that
often relate to the subject matter, recreating images from various sources
ranging from art history, science and society (Adi 119). He then records the
new images with his camera and destroys the originals. His mission is to
“change the way people look at things (Al Seckel 183). For example, his work Toy Soldier (2003) is constructed
entirely out of plastic war toys. For this work, he said, “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” (Seckel 209). The contrast between the violence of war that
awaits this young soldier belongs to his future, and the toy soldiers that make
up the image belong to the innocence of childhood (“Toy Soldier”).
In his series, Pictures of Diamonds (2004-2005), Muniz worked with a collection of
diamonds to make portraits of the rich and famous--Jackie Onassis, Marlene
Dietrich, and Elizabeth Taylor, among others--to allude to their immortality.
Another layer of interpretation is whether a picture of diamonds is worth more
than a picture of junk (Adi 74). In a world of mass media, short attention
spans, and indifference due to excessive bombardment, Vik Muniz uses visual
strategies to cause the viewer to stop and contemplate his work (“Vik Muniz:
Solo” 8; Benitez 149).
Site-specific Earthworks of the late 60s and 70s may be considered another point
of comparison between Fred Wilson and Vik Muniz. Wilson’s investigation of an
institution’s history and archives and his notion that art can take place
outside the boundaries of formalism are like Earthworks (Berger 16-17). In his installation Insight: In Site: In Sight: Incite: Memory (1994) in North
Carolina, he removed the floorboards in one of the city’s oldest
African-American churches, replacing them with Plexiglas, to reveal the
tombstones of slaves that had been relocated from a nearby cemetery and stacked
in the church’s foundation (Berger 16). His repossession of the past is
ideological in the same way certain Earthworks
were (Berger 16). Not only did some Earthworks
exist as memorials to a depleted geological past, they were also testaments to
the potential of art to make a difference (Berger 17). Wilson’s work created
outside of the traditional framework also strives to expose the past to create
a formidable present (Berger 17).
Vik Muniz more directly copied the
work of Robert Smithson and other Earthworks
artists. In 1999, he made a series of tabletop replicas of Earthworks and photographed them so it was difficult to tell his
models apart from the real thing (Adi 69). Then in 2002, he created two new
sets of Earthworks. For the first, he
etched 100-to-200-meter-long line drawings of household objects using a backhoe
into the dirt of a Brazilian iron mine. He then made a set of small models no
bigger than 20-centimeters long. He photographed the first set from a
helicopter and using the same camera photographed the second set. He then
printed both sets of images the same size, so that telling the difference
between the models and the real Earthworks
drawings became a challenge to the viewer (Adi 69). Like all of Muniz’s
artwork, these Earthworks projects
are commentaries on how many images exist as objects of an individual’s
projections and imaginings (Stein).
While their artistic styles are radically different,
Vik Muniz also has experience in museum intervention. In 2008, Muniz was
invited to curate a show for the Museum of Modern Art’s artist choice series
where he selected from the museum’s art collections. For the show, he paired
artworks to create lasting effects (Sudarsky 1). He invited viewers to forge
intuitive connections between the objects, based on form, color, scale,
quantity, function and pattern (”Vik Muniz Creates” 2). For example, in Behind the Scenes, he pairs Untitled by Richard Artschwager (1994),
a sculpture of an art-handlers crate, and
Bubble Wrap, by Marc A. Chavannes and Alfred W. Fielding (1960), an original piece from the 60s by the
people who designed it (Sudarsky 4). Muniz is making the viewer think about
just how much everyday objects are taken for granted (Schmerler 1).
I’ve always thought of my
documentary film work as a combination of montage--juxtaposing images to create
ideas not present in either shot by itself (Bordwell 480) and
collage--juxtaposing different materials to create meaning. My current work-in-progress
video, “Summer Diaries 2014,” is an example of this. For this piece, I’m
juxtaposing tranquil footage of the Israeli urban and rural landscape with my
personal experiences and reflections on living in Israel during a time of war
and devastation. My interjections are in the form of news updates scrolled
across the bottom, a comment on my obsessive web surfing to online news sites
for updates on the situation. In my Iran documentary, I am reinterpreting and
juxtaposing existing photographs, stock footage, and objects to retell one
family’s story of their exodus as a result of the Islamic Revolution. Although
my medium differs from both Muniz’s and Wilson’s, like them I am a visual
storyteller. My ultimate goal is to develop a signature visual style that
encompasses multi-layers of meaning and provokes viewers to think as they watch
stories unfold.
Works Cited
Adi, Einat, Ed. Vik Muniz: Pictures of Anything. Tel
Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2014. Print.
Benitez, Issa Maria. “Vik
Muniz.” Art Nexus 3.55 (2005):
148-149. Print.
Berger, Maurice. “Viewing
the Invisible: Fred Wilson’s Allegories of Absence and Loss.” Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations,
1979-2000. Baltimore: Center for Art and Visual Culture, 2001. Print.
Bordwell, David and Kristin
Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction.
5th Ed. New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies, 1997, Print.
Goncharov, Kathleen and Fred
Wilson “Interview.” Ed. Doro Globus. Fred
Wilson: A Critical Reader. London: Ridinghouse, 2011. Print.
Mezil, Eric. “The Imaginary
Museum.” Vik Muniz: The Imaginary Museum.
Arles, France: Actes Sud, 2011.
Print.
Mignolo, Walter. “Museums in
the Colonial Horizon of Modernity: Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum (1992).”
Ed. Jonathan Harris Globalization and
Contemporary Art. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Print.
Muniz, Vik. Reflex A Vik Muniz Primer. New York: Aperture Foundation, 2005.
Print.
Seckel, Al. Masters of Deception: Escher, Dali & the
Artists of Optical Illusion. New York: Sterling Publishing, 2004. Print.
Stein, Suzanne. “One on One:
Jill Dawsey on Vik Muniz’s Spiral Jetty
after Robert Smithson.” openspace.sfmoma.org
24 Jan. 2011. Web. 29 Aug. 2014. <http://openspace.sfmoma.org/2011/01/jill-dawsey-vik-muniz/
>
Sudarsky, Noah Marcel. “The
Matchmaker.” Nymag.com. 14 December
2008. Web 24 Aug. 2014. <http://nymag.com/arts/art/features/52918/>
“Toy Soldier (Monads) by Vik
Muniz.” Independent.ie. 30 July 2012.
Web. 29 Aug. 2014. < http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/toy-soldier-monads-by-vik-muniz-26881491.html>
“Vik Muniz Creates Rebus, an
Inventive Narrative of Works from MoMA's Collection.” Artdaily.org. Web. 26
Aug. 2014. < http://artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=27738&int_modo=2#.VATt9Uip38A>
“Vik Muniz: Solo Exhibition
at Arndt & Partner, Berlin.” arndtberlin.com.
20 Dec. 2008. Web. 26 Aug. 2014.
<http://arndtberlin.com/website/artist_1147>
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