Those who Teach Can Do
Vik Muniz and His Art School
for Kids from the Favelas
Since
2006, the Brazilian artist Vik Muniz has been running the Centro Espacial
in Rio de Janeiro—an art school in which he works on attention-getting
projects with slum kids. The Pictures of Junk, for instance: football
field-sized arrangements of consumerist garbage that resemble the famous
works of Old Masters when seen from a bird’s eye view. Morgan
Falconer visited Muniz in his New York studio and found out why
teachers always continue to learn.
Vik
Muniz, Marlene Dietrich, 2004
Deutsche
Bank Collection
© Vik Muniz/VG
Bild – Kunst, Bonn 2008
Countless young
artists clock time as teachers in the years while they’re finding their
direction, and Vik
Muniz was no different when he came to New York from his native Brazil
in the early 1980s. Today, he’s become renowned for a wry spin on
appropriation art, using oddball, fugitive media like chocolate sauce and
thread and rubbish to remake the imagery of the past, then capturing the
results in photographs. Deutsche
Bank has two startling examples in its collection: Sunflowers
(after Van
Gogh) from 2002 revives the Dutchman’s icon using pages from a color
swatch, and Marlene Dietrich
from 2004 employs only diamonds to recreate a portrait of the actress.
With rapid-impact photographs like these, Muniz, now in his late forties,
has attained the kind of success that allows him to furnish his own
Brooklyn office like a Renaissance Cabinet of Curiosities: oils by Courbet
and Tiepolo
adorn the walls, a bear-skin rug with a solid stuffed head splays across
the floor, preserved insects and old photographs clutter shelves behind
his desk. But success notwithstanding, Muniz is still thinking deeply
about art and education. "There’s a saying," he says. "'Those who can, do.
Those who can’t, teach.' I think that’s faulty. Teaching not only makes
you organize your ideas so that you can pass them on to others, but
students bring an energy that you can’t often feel in the art world."
Vik
Muniz
Photo: Barney Kulok
Courtesy
of Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
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Vik Muniz, Sunflowers (after Van Gogh),
2002
Deutsche Bank Collection
©
Vik Muniz/VG Bild – Kunst, Bonn 2008
Teaching
has been much on his mind of late. In 2006, he sank money and energy into
creating the Centro Espacial Vik Muniz,
an art education institute based in Rio de Janeiro aimed at children
living in the favelas. "They come raw, tough," he says. It’s nested within
another school, the Galpão Aplauso,
which teaches theater arts, and four hundred students arrive each year
from two hundred favelas across the city to get involved. The students’
commitment alone counts as a success, Muniz says, as the long arms and
competing interests of the drug cartels can create animosity between
different favelas.
Muniz has been happy with
the results. He has taken several former students from the Centro Espacial
on to the staff of his studio in Rio, and recently they’ve been at work on
a series called Pictures of Junk, which remake Old Master paintings on a
huge scale using the discards of industry. Muniz’s studio in the city is
the size of a basketball court, and to make the series he had to perch on
a scaffold near the ceiling and direct work below using a laser pointer. A
heap of industrial netting serves to describe the mouth of the beast in
Saturn devouring one of his sons (after Goya),
and in Narcissus (after Caravaggio),
old buckets and fridges and wheels and rusted chains lend texture.
Vik
Muniz, Narcissus, after Caravaggio,
from
"Pictures of Junk", 2006,
Courtesy
of Vik Muniz and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
Muniz
was born in São Paulo, but it was his growing experience of Rio that
prompted his decision to establish the center there. "Rio is like Saint
Tropez surrounded by Mogadishu," he says. "And for me, as a Brazilian, I
find that to be able to live there and fully enjoy the culture, you have
to work on both sides of the divide." Some might question whether the
children of the favelas urgently need an art center, but Muniz says he’s
well aware of their needs. "Their reality is very different than that of
the regular art student. They want a profession, a job, and for them to
have something to show an employer is important." To that end, he has
helped fashion a course, influenced by the Bauhaus,
which eventually puts them to work on a project, an exhibition, and a
catalogue.
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