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Lot Essay
Working betwixt and between the visual codes of photography, the Brazilian-born, New York-based artist Vik Muniz has critically engaged the syntax of image-making and art history for over thirty years. “I think that a photograph is always something that you made before you clicked the shutter button,” Muniz observes, and his practice has evolved through an empirical analysis of photography’s process, structure, and categorical truths (in M. Fernández-Cid, “Memorabilia,” Vik Muniz, exh. cat., Santiago de Compostela, 2003, p. 69). Essential to Muniz’s work is the use value of the copy, which he mines as a creative point of departure. “To copy is to extend the symbolic value of an image by suffusing it with new technology, thus updating its rhetorical approach,” he explains. “In the same way that a book changes as we reread it at different times in our lives, artworks assume different forms as they are reinterpreted throughout history…The system of copying masterworks puts an artist in direct contact with his role models so that he might possibly transcend them” (in Reflex: A Vik Muniz Primer, New York, 2005, p. 89).
In his ongoing Pictures series, begun in 1993, Muniz has appropriated iconic images from the annals of art history, reprising and playfully transforming masterworks by artists from Claude Monet and Caspar David Friedrich to Leonardo da Vinci and Richard Serra. His innovation lies in his unorthodox materials—chocolate, wire, thread, ash, spaghetti—and in his method of photographic reconstruction. For the Pictures of Magazines series (2003-2005), to which the present work belongs, Muniz repurposed scraps of paper torn from glossy magazines to create portraits (e.g., of the Brazilian soccer legend Pelé and the musician Seu Jorge) as well as copies, notably of still lifes by Juan Sánchez Cotán, Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh, and Giorgio Morandi. He used a hole punch to generate thousands of paper circles that he then collaged together to construct the images. Fragments of mostly black-and-white text form the background of the present Self-Portrait as well as the related print, Self-Portrait (Back); cut-outs in sundry colors define the contours of his face and the pattern of his shirt, offering glimpses of logos, patterns, and even other faces. Muniz has portrayed himself through a variety of means, including soil, foliage, and murrine (Murano glass) over the years; (self-)portraiture remains an enduring interest.
“When I became involved with portraiture, I was more fascinated by the fact that we can recognize one face from millions of others than anything else,” Muniz reflected in 2003. “After working for so long with recognition, I decided to explore the subject in which this phenomenon is exercised with the greatest skill by our brains. How do we recognize a face? The eye wanders through a face, scanning for familiarity. It goes from point to point, making every face a narrative. Every face is a story.” Narratives and faces cohere through series of saccades (brief, rapid movements of the eye) that process visual information and ultimately “create consciousness in the human mind,” Muniz explains. “My work Pictures of Magazines explores this ‘saccadic narrative.’ There are a series of dots. The viewer stands at a distance where the picture covers the entire visual field, and this means that each dot covers about 3% of the entire visual field” (in V. Muniz and D. Melcher, “The Mystery of Representation: A Conversation with Vik Muniz,” Art and the Senses, New York, 2011, p. 355).
“The dots have an identity themselves: pictures, faces, houses, body parts, letters, or words,” Muniz continues. “This gives your saccades target points, where the local image makes you pause longer; it slows down your saccades. The picture refuses a smooth reading. As your eyes are sweeping the picture, your eyes have to ‘stop,’ and so the picture becomes problematic. This is something I try to do in much of my work: to create little problems that make you ‘feel’ what is going on. It is like finding a little bone in the fish that makes you stop and realize that, right now, you are eating fish” (in V. Muniz and D. Melcher, op. cit., p. 356).
This print is included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
In his ongoing Pictures series, begun in 1993, Muniz has appropriated iconic images from the annals of art history, reprising and playfully transforming masterworks by artists from Claude Monet and Caspar David Friedrich to Leonardo da Vinci and Richard Serra. His innovation lies in his unorthodox materials—chocolate, wire, thread, ash, spaghetti—and in his method of photographic reconstruction. For the Pictures of Magazines series (2003-2005), to which the present work belongs, Muniz repurposed scraps of paper torn from glossy magazines to create portraits (e.g., of the Brazilian soccer legend Pelé and the musician Seu Jorge) as well as copies, notably of still lifes by Juan Sánchez Cotán, Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh, and Giorgio Morandi. He used a hole punch to generate thousands of paper circles that he then collaged together to construct the images. Fragments of mostly black-and-white text form the background of the present Self-Portrait as well as the related print, Self-Portrait (Back); cut-outs in sundry colors define the contours of his face and the pattern of his shirt, offering glimpses of logos, patterns, and even other faces. Muniz has portrayed himself through a variety of means, including soil, foliage, and murrine (Murano glass) over the years; (self-)portraiture remains an enduring interest.
“When I became involved with portraiture, I was more fascinated by the fact that we can recognize one face from millions of others than anything else,” Muniz reflected in 2003. “After working for so long with recognition, I decided to explore the subject in which this phenomenon is exercised with the greatest skill by our brains. How do we recognize a face? The eye wanders through a face, scanning for familiarity. It goes from point to point, making every face a narrative. Every face is a story.” Narratives and faces cohere through series of saccades (brief, rapid movements of the eye) that process visual information and ultimately “create consciousness in the human mind,” Muniz explains. “My work Pictures of Magazines explores this ‘saccadic narrative.’ There are a series of dots. The viewer stands at a distance where the picture covers the entire visual field, and this means that each dot covers about 3% of the entire visual field” (in V. Muniz and D. Melcher, “The Mystery of Representation: A Conversation with Vik Muniz,” Art and the Senses, New York, 2011, p. 355).
“The dots have an identity themselves: pictures, faces, houses, body parts, letters, or words,” Muniz continues. “This gives your saccades target points, where the local image makes you pause longer; it slows down your saccades. The picture refuses a smooth reading. As your eyes are sweeping the picture, your eyes have to ‘stop,’ and so the picture becomes problematic. This is something I try to do in much of my work: to create little problems that make you ‘feel’ what is going on. It is like finding a little bone in the fish that makes you stop and realize that, right now, you are eating fish” (in V. Muniz and D. Melcher, op. cit., p. 356).
This print is included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park