One Man's Trash . . .
Artist Vik Muniz Re-Creates Old Masterpieces in a New Medium -- Junk

By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 11, 2006

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."

Muniz also has a cultishly devoted fan base among collectors; a photo from his chocolate series fetched $102,000 at auction last year. And he is popular enough to have achieved Highly Coveted Backlash Status, or at least a whiff of it. On his blog, acclaimed photographer Alec Soth recently likened Muniz to a boxer who punches too hard, arguing that "After awhile, his work starts to feel like those corny digital photomosaics." Muniz treads close to gimmickry, say his critics, who consider him a maestro of special effects rather than an artist whose work will endure over time.

What is certain is that his images connect with both curators and kids, as he demonstrated a few years ago when the Whitney Museum invited him to create a series of photographs based on art from its collection. Muniz thought about it for a while, then called with a surprising request. He asked the Whitney's janitorial staff to collect dust vacuumed from exhibition halls and then deliver it to his studio in Brooklyn.

There, he painstakingly arranged the dust on paper to mimic photographs of exhibits at the museum. Then he photographed the arrangement. (Yes, these are photographs of dust that look exactly like photographs of rooms filled with art.) One of the images, for instance, is modeled on a shot of Richard Serra sculpture, as it looked on display in the Whitney. Everything in the Muniz version is made of dust from the room where the Serra was displayed.

"People went crazy for them," recalls Sylvia Wolf, a Whitney adjunct curator. "Even kids. I think they loved the idea of making art out of dirt, because art is usually something pristine, something you can't touch." Muniz remembers the dust as the most difficult material he'd ever worked with, because the slightest move sent it swirling. It was also disgusting.

"It's mostly skin," he says, grimacing. "Really gross."

Quick on the Draw

Muniz appears to be the world's least tortured artist. He has edge but no cynicism. He speaks with a slight Brazilian accent -- and pretty much nonstop. His favorite topics include theories of perception, the anatomy of the eye, the history of art and the advantages of Bosco over other chocolate syrups when used as paint.

"I tried them all, and Bosco is the thickest," he says. "I swear they made it with art in mind."

It is a few days before the opening of the "Junk" show at the Chelsea gallery. Muniz has offered a tour of his studio in Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife, artist Janaina Tschape, and their infant daughter. (He also has a son by a previous marriage.) The work area is a large and stylish white room with steel fans spinning overhead. A camera so huge it appears to have support struts is sitting in the middle, and "Pictures of Junk" test shots are tacked to the wall.

When you make art in a crime-plagued city, he says, working with toss-aways makes practical sense.

"We couldn't bring nice things in, because people would steal them," he says, with that ever-present smile. "For a while, we were bringing these old bicycles from the junkyard, but they kept disappearing."

The sunniness that Muniz brings to every subject is surely a matter of temperament, but it might also stem from the ongoing and pleasant surprise about what has become of his life. He was raised working-class in Sao Paulo, the son of a waiter. About half of the kids he knew from his childhood, he has speculated, are either dead or in prison. Muniz, on the other hand, was thoroughly absorbed by art from the age of 7, according to his mother, speaking from Sao Paulo.

"The director of his grade school came to me and said, 'He's a smart boy, but he does well only when he wants to because he spends all of his time drawing,' " Maria Celeste Muniz says through a translator. "His lesson book was always covered with drawings -- kids, teachers."

Muniz held a series of odd jobs, including a stint at a roller rink where he was hired to knock down people who were fighting. (Bouncers would take it from there.) When he was a teen, he noticed that highway billboards were so poorly designed that nobody could read them as they drove by. So he began an informal study, involving angles of approach, car speeds, reading speeds -- and at the age of 19, he visited one of city's biggest billboard companies.

"I said, 'Your ads are horrible,' " Muniz recalls. " 'I've been studying them, and if you want to hear what I have to say, well, I come from a very poor family.' "

Muniz was hired, but quickly decided that advertising wasn't his calling. Working on a campaign for a whiskey company, he discovered that what excited him most was the thought of airbrushing naked people into ice cubes. "I was never into selling whiskey," he says. "I was into selling ice cubes."

His advertising career ended violently. On his way out of a black-tie ceremony where he received an award for his advertising work, Muniz passed two men, also in tuxedos, who were in the middle of a horrific brawl, one beating the other in the face with brass knuckles. Muniz intervened, but when the bloodied man returned to his car, he got a gun and shot the first tuxedo-wearer he could see in his impaired condition. It was Muniz.

"Remember that scene in 'The Matrix,' where the guy can see the bullets shot at him?" says Muniz. "I lived that scene. I remember seeing bullets."

Shot through the leg, Muniz clawed his way to his car and tried to drive to a nearby hospital. Instead he fainted and crashed, smashing his face against the steering wheel. Surgeons later told Muniz that his heart stopped during the ensuing operation, but he was revived and spent weeks recuperating. His assailant, who had been taken to the same hospital for his own injuries, came by to apologize and offered to pay Muniz's medical bills.

"He also gave me some extra money -- and with that, I could buy a ticket to the United States. I often say that without that bullet, I would never have come here. I'm not sure it's true, but it makes a better story."

In New York he studied theater and dated an artist. The two argued constantly, and after one particularly acid exchange about how to market art, he thought, "If she can do this, I can, too." He started off making sculptures, most of them high-concept one-liners. Like "Ashanti Joystick," which looked like the remains of a video-game console from some ancient civilization.

"I saw his work the first time while I was visiting a different artist," says Stefan Stux, owner of the Stux Gallery, the first to show Muniz's work. "It was incredibly intriguing and conceptually very seductive, and I thought, I've got to meet this guy."

When he did, Stux remembers that Muniz looked emaciated. "Like a skeleton," Stux recalls, "but he couldn't stop talking. He was just a gusher of ideas."

Eventually Muniz started photographing his creations, and decided that those images, rather than the originals, would be his art. The choice freed him to fine-tune his visual sleights of hand, and to think big. He once hired a skywriter to draw the shapes of clouds in the sky, then photographed the "clouds." Most often, he's riffing off an easily recognized image -- a photo of Elizabeth Taylor, for instance, which he reproduced with thousands of tiny diamonds loaned by a jeweler. For another series, he reconstructed a landscape by Claude Lorrain with 12,000 yards of thread.

"If people are familiar with something, they are often betrayed by their own familiarity," he says. In other words, you think you know what you're looking at (Andy Warhol's famous portrait of Marilyn Monroe, for instance) but a moment later you realize you've been duped. (It's a Muniz piece, made out of cayenne pepper.) "The worst possible illusion" is what he calls his art in his autobiography, "Reflex," published last year. By which he means it's like a trick by a magician who insists on demonstrating exactly how you've been fooled.

"Vik has managed to make a form of conceptual art that makes people feel intelligent instead of stupid," says artist James Hyde, a friend. "That's quite an innovation. And he is able to do it because Vik really likes people."

Sweet Success

Muniz was struggling at the margins of the New York scene until he took a 1996 vacation in St. Kitts, where he and his wife befriended some local kids whose parents worked in a sugar factory. When Muniz returned home, he bought a few pieces of black paper, then re-created photos of the kids he'd snapped -- not with pen or paint but with sugar. (The mix of black from the paper and white from the sugar yields depth and uncanny clarity.) The series, "Sugar Children," earned Muniz a spot in the highly esteemed New Photography show at MoMA in 1997. "That was my big break," he says.

There's an attention to detail about "Sugar Children" that borders on the obsessive. That impulse -- to fine-tune, then fine-tune some more -- is part of every Muniz series, and it reaches some kind of apotheosis with "Pictures of Junk."

He spent much of his time in that hangar in Rio standing on a riser with a laser pointer, directing his assistants. Adding degrees of difficulty, the hangar was near a bus stop and, with all the potholes in the street, Muniz had to time each photograph carefully. Otherwise the rumbling of the bus would rattle the junk and blur the picture.

"There was a traffic light that I could see," he recalls, "and when it was red, I knew I had time."

With the benefit of hindsight, it all sounds a little strenuous, even to Muniz. Among the upcoming illusions he has planned is a series in which he'll etch medieval castles on individual grains of sand. How exactly he'll pull that off is, for now, a mystery. But at minimum, the story behind this bit of visual punnery won't include back pain and Advil.

"For me, some works are fun to make, others are fun to look at," he says, gazing at one of his "Pictures of Junk." "These were more fun to look at than they were to make."