A Quick Coït

by ShawnkThompson

The Museum of Contemporary Art of Montreal held a huge retrospective of Vik Muniz’s work. Firstly organized by the Miami Art Museum, the exhibition comprises over 110 compositions that date back to 1988.

The genesis of the exhibition comes from Toy Soldier, a reconstruction of a 19^th century picture of a child-soldier. Peter Boswell, the senior curator of the Miami Art Museum, wanted his son to see this picture, since child-soldiers are still part of today’s reality.

Almost two years later, in Montreal, Toy Soldier (2003) had its affect. ‘’Look mommy! There’s lots of soldiers in the shape of a mister,’’ said a four years old boy, pointing at the picture.

Indeed, in his Monads series (2003), Muniz makes images out of multitude of images from the same element. In this case, a soldier is made out of plastic soldiers, exactly like what this clever boy noticed.

The Brazilian artist is labeled as a ‘‘photographer’’, but it is only for practical reason. No such categories can described his hybrid procedures.

Muniz started as a sculptor, but he soon realized that he was just creating objects for the sake of photographing them. The snapshots captured the essence: the idea. From them on, he explored ephemeral materials - like chocolate syrup, ketchup and garbage - because the photos are able to embody the concepts and act as a materialized and immortalized memory.

Muniz draws, paints, weaves, designs and sculpts complex 3D compositions that takes you on a tour worthy of an illusionist. The artist’s ‘‘magic tricks’’ are firstly created by the negation of the 2D support of the final photographic display.

His Picture of Threads series (1995-1999) include landscapes created out of thread and objects in metallic wire. About the latter, Muniz said that ‘‘you can never see the wire and the flower (or the object represented) at the same time.’’ To understand the flower is for a moment to ignore the plane surface. This is what we call monosemic images.

Effectively, through is work, the artist explores extensively how the distance affects the perception of an object. Often the viewer need to walk away from the pictures to understand them.

However, this is also the power of photography. It enables the representation of objet from all sizes. Hence, in his Earthworks series (2002-2005) the lens captures the totality of the gigantic sand drawings.

Furthermore, the illusion continues with his Best of Life series (1988-1990) in which he draws with an astonishing precision famous photographs entirely from memory. Here, he illustrates how culture is equipped with the tools of forgetting and remembrance. Moreover, one could conclude that collective memory is an affective relationship with events as opposed to a representative relationship because even though we have no personal memory of Vietnam war, for example, we are needless affected by it and can relate to several images of it that caused a ‘‘trauma’’.

The same phenomenon applies to Muniz’s After Warhol series (1999). It is because we know (or think we know) Mona Lisa that we can see her face in the peanut butter and jelly’s version of the artist. Here, the artist illustrates how the material affects as well our perception.

Although, Muniz is convinced of the deep desire of people to believe in images. E.H Gombrich, a prominent art historian once wrote ‘‘expectation creates illusion.’’ In other words, we project our expectations on the images, where ‘‘the slightest stimulus’’ will makes us believe that we guessed right. In addition, the recognition of shapes and things depends on the images we find stored in our heads. ‘‘We see only what we know.’’ wrote Gombrich.

The Brazilian artist also plays on that idea with his Equivalents series (1993) where he reproduces clouds out of cotton balls. The latter works explores the archeiopoietic images or ‘‘accidental’’ images that aren’t made by human hand – but in which we recognize shapes and things.

Though, how much fun is it when you see things in clouds or faces in your spaghetti bowl?

Well, I think someone already thought about it and he amused himself to create what he calls ‘‘the worst possible illusion’’ - an imagination that is so obvious, but from which you’ll still fall for it.

Just because you want to.