Vik Muniz, Saturn devouring one of his
Sons,
after Francisco de Goya Y
Lucientes,
from "Pictures of
Junk", 2005,
Courtesy of
Vik Muniz and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
Giving
students tangible results of their efforts may be important, but Muniz
also believes that a basic art education increasingly holds keys to many
of the employment sectors that are growing in the service economies of the
developed world. "Artists are using the same tools as the regular media,"
he argues. "And what we’re doing when we’re dreaming up schemes to deal
with visual information is really no different than what advertising
agencies are doing. You can’t claim that all art is pure and that
commercial media are not."
Vik
Muniz, Beggar 4, after Rembrandt,
from
"Pictures of Nails, 2001
Courtesy
of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
Unfortunately,
conventional art education doesn’t always deliver the skills that
commercial media demand. "Art class in high school is a joke. You make
little crafts and give them to your mother," he says. "When they teach
language, they teach grammar, the history of literature, but when they
deal with images, they don’t deal with the history of images, the grammar
of images! All this is taken for granted because of the invention of
photography. People think there is a machine which deals with this so you
don’t need to know anything about it."
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Vik Muniz, Butterflies, after Odilon Redon,
from
"Pictures of Pigment", 2006
Courtesy
of Sikkema Jenkins & Co
Muniz sees
art today as less the fruit of genteel idleness than as a kind of
by-product of the busy environments of industry, mainstream media, and
culture. He’s only too conscious of how close the worlds of art and
advertising are, as over the years many leading brands have sought to hire
him. He’s rarely been keen to oblige, but he’s found that when he turns
them down they often simply pay some other hired minion to hijack his
ideas. So when the cosmetics giant Lancôme
approached him to create new responses to their logo, a rose, he said he
had a better idea. Why don’t they ask the students at the Centro Espacial
to make them? "They created all these variations—they did graffiti of the
Lancôme logo in the slums, made them out of newspaper, out of make-up, out
of soil, trash. It was incredible!" The project was a great success, and
this year Muniz hopes to repeat it in a new partnership with Nokia
and the Brazilian mobile phone company Oi.
Apollo
and the Cumaean Sibyl,
after
Giovanni Domenico Cerrini,
from
"Pictures of Junk", 2007
Courtesy
of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
"The last
time people talked about visual education seriously was in Victorian
times," Muniz adds. "Back then, a group of privileged people had access to
the practice of drawing, not as a means to create nice, cute decorative
objects, but as a way to learn how to see things." And as he sees it, we
may just have to look back in order to look forward.
Vik Muniz:
VERSO
September 6 - October 11, 2008
Sikkema
Jenkins & Co.
New York
[1]
[2]
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