One Man's Trash . . .

Artist Vik Muniz Re-Creates Old Masterpieces in a New Medium -- Junk

NEW YORK There is always a great story behind the photographs of Vik Muniz, and for his latest series, "Pictures of Junk," the story is about heavy lifting and gunfire.

Let's start with the gunfire.

The tons of junk in these massive photos, which hang through Sunday at a Manhattan gallery, were collected from a junkyard in one of Rio de Janeiro's worst neighborhoods, nicknamed the Gaza Strip. As Muniz and his assistants rummaged, members of two rival drug gangs, the Red Commando and the Third Commando, tried to kill each other.

"We'd hear the bullets over our heads," says Muniz, an elfin man of 45 who seems perpetually amused, even by this. "The gangs in Rio are insane."

The heavy lifting came in hauling several truckloads of urban detritus: tons of wires, tires, tubing, sinks, pylons, trash cans, fans, shelves, barrels, rusted appliances and thousands of nuts, bolts and chains, all of it driven to a massive dockside hangar, part of which Muniz had turned into a makeshift studio. He and his team spent weeks arranging the junk on the floor, meticulously re-creating Old Master paintings of mythological figures -- Goya's famous take on Saturn, for instance, or Rubens's rendering of Bacchus. What looks like the flesh of the characters in these tableaux is actually the floor of the hangar.

After endless tweaking, Muniz would climb to a catwalk 40 feet up and photograph an assemblage, which was about the size of a basketball court, with a large-format camera. Then he'd clear the floor, head back to the junkyard and start all over again.

"The first one we did" -- the Goya -- "took six months," says Muniz. "After that we got more efficient."

The result is Caravaggio meets "Sanford and Son." The images on display at the Sikkema Jenkins & Co. gallery in Chelsea are huge, about 9 feet by 6 feet, and whimsically gorgeous. There is some winking humor here: paying homage to treasure with trash; enshrining the permanent with the disposed-of. There are some eye-tickling shifts in perspective, too. From a distance the photos look as if they were snapped up close; up close, you realize they were shot from yards away. As your brain absorbs this optical flimflam, it's hard to suppress a giggle.

This is vintage Muniz, right down to the anything-goes approach to raw materials. During his nearly 20-year career, this Brazilian turned New Yorker has made art with beans, dirt, sugar, pepper, and fake blood, to name a few. He made horror-movie stars out of caviar and reproduced a series of iconic images -- Leonardo's "Last Supper," publicity stills of Elvis Presley and Marlon Brando, among others -- with chocolate syrup. He has conjured a pair of Mona Lisas out of peanut butter and jelly and made a Medusa from a plate of spaghetti. (Each work is essentially a drawing or sculpture that Muniz discards once it's photographed.)

His canon would merely amuse if it weren't so dazzlingly executed. "He's a virtuoso," says Peter Boswell, curator of the Miami Art Museum, which organized and hosted "Reflex," a major retrospective of Muniz's work. "And it's amazing how many levels his works succeeds at. You can call him a photographer, but he's also a superb draftsman, a conceptualist, an illusionist and an art historian."

He's also on a roll. "Reflex" is on a five-museum U.S. tour and winning raves. (Montreal, alas, is as close as it will get to Washington.) In Washington, six of his photographs are owned by Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Corcoran is currently displaying its Muniz for a show called "Redefined." The Museum of Modern Art, which is basically Cooperstown for working artists, owns several of his works and wants more, according to Peter Galassi, the museum's curator of photography.

"There's this amazing wit and verve and variety, and this huge affection for images of all kinds," Galassi says. "In a way all of his work does the same thing, but he does it so many different ways and with so much different material that he makes it incredibly rich."