Source: https://art.state.gov/portfolio/vik-muniz-at-the-hirshhorn/
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 16:01:18+00:00

Document:
Joined in conversation by notable author and sociologist Sarah Thornton, Vik Muniz will dive into his distinguished career for this Meet the Artist program, presented in partnership between U.S. Department of State’s Office of Art in Embassies and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
Brazilian artist Vik Muniz, best known for creating what he terms “photographic delusions,” began his career as a sculptor but eventually turned his attention exclusively to photography. Working with a variety of unconventional materials—such as chocolate, diamonds, dust, and sugar—the artist forms three-dimensional narratives before recording the final images with his camera. Foregrounding photography’s ability to capture and create, his work is simultaneously humorous and incisively critical. His practice often focuses on art history and its intersections with science and perception, all the while drawing attention to the constant inundation of images in our lives. Muniz, who is also interested in activism, recently starred in the documentary Waste Land (2010), which follows the artist as he aims to depict the lives of the catadores— men and women who resort to picking through the world’s largest landfill just outside of Rio de Janeiro.
0:14Are you turned on, so to speak?
0:23to interview Vik, because I never have.
0:30wanted to interview him there, and he was traveling.
0:36and the Hirshhorn for giving me this wonderful opportunity.
0:48that he’s done for the American Embassy in Brazil.
0:51And we will discuss that work at the end of our conversation.
1:11And she is made out of sugar.
1:13And we have “Medusa Marinara”, made out of spaghetti.
1:17And the question to ask might be, tell me about materials.
1:32of a figure who kind of emerges in an unexpected way.
1:36How do you choose your subject matter?
1:42I think we’re preconditioned to find forms into forms.
1:57the whole thing about language.
2:09that he seemed to have seen before.
2:16that he had seen before.
2:17Otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to see it.
2:21it was just a form of an animal.
2:23Not any animal, an animal that he elaborated.
2:31when we were very hungry.
2:40how everybody was happy to have eaten.
2:42And he looked at it again, it was just cracks on the wall.
2:51And all those images came back again.
2:57and I think we’re probably at the end of it by now, you know.
3:01And I can explain this a little bit later.
3:03But what we can call the picture project, you know.
3:44than the reach of our limited senses.
3:55because I feel connected to him somehow.
3:57I’m sort of like advancing this project.
4:16through history in order for us to be able to do so.
4:21It’s very important occupation, I think.
4:23I like to think of it so.
4:35refer to famous works of art.
4:38And the Medusa here, echoes Caravaggio’s Medusa.
4:50to have their portrait done.
4:54between high and low income.
5:03so I’m always sniffing out class wherever I can find it.
5:10of class lingering behind your choice of subject matter?
5:13VIK MUNIZ: I wish I was that organized.
5:16I’m an artist, you know.
5:36and they said, oh that’s the chocolate guy.
5:41Come on, I worked for 20 years to be the chocolate guy?
6:17I have nothing against that.
6:30in the iron mines, and have helicopters to picture it.
6:51with a picture that’s made very fast, in the case of chocolate.
6:55Or takes very long to make.
7:01wasn’t supposed to be a piece.
7:08that was making another work by chocolate.
7:11Then I saw like, I did like that.
7:16to make it look really vivid.
7:18I said, oh, that looks good.
7:27that this friend of mine, Leslie Thornton.
7:35And then I said, oh, I have a piece, I have a piece.
7:46I was like, wow, this is really magic, you know.
8:04SARAH THORNTON: Ha, ha ha!
8:07VIK MUNIZ: OK, sorry about that.
8:20Bits of pigment, you know.
8:26To do that, I have to wear a mask, and gloves, and goggles.
8:33turns into a cloud of smoke.
8:42So, and you do that for six months.
8:48and you have to sell them for the same price.
8:51It’s so unfair, because you charge by each.
9:02You have to understand that.
9:07is one of the things that makes your work accessible, isn’t it?
9:18to people who might not otherwise clock the Medusa.
9:29I think the artists only do half of the work.
9:35The other half is the viewer who does it.
9:42or in the gallery, and not in the studio walls.
9:45When it’s there, it’s just a personal thing that I do.
9:47But I really don’t go much further.
9:56if that’s art or not.
10:18that I feel stupid about it.
10:20You know, that I didn’t understand anything.
10:23So, leaving a gallery with the feeling that you’re dumb.
10:26I prefer to give the other sensations.
10:31that you know lot more than what you actually thought you did.
10:39start acquiring when we are like, just a few days old.
10:52but it must have been like an acid trip.
10:54It was crazy, you know?
10:58this is dark, this is mom, this is me.
11:07into this web of linguistic.
11:09And sort of, in a way, it stands between us and the real world.
11:30have to the visual world.
11:32Some people ask me now, when did you start becoming an artist?
11:37remember when everybody around me stopped being one.
11:40And it was around that time, you know.
11:45So it took me a long time to learn how to read and write.
11:50stopped playing with Play-Doh and drawing.
11:55I couldn’t write, I took dictation in the second year.
12:00The person said car, you know, I couldn’t write it.
12:03I would just draw something.
12:04I could only read in certain fonts.
12:08So I do everything visually.
12:16looked like the Egyptian section of the Metropolitan museum.
12:18It was just like that.
12:19It was like shorthand, you know.
12:22I was the only one who could read those things.
12:33And before I knew it, I was the kid who draws.
12:36Every one of you had a kid like this in the class.
12:42And that became my identity.
12:43So I think that’s how things developed.
12:53from 1996, and I think the translation is “Dreamer”.
13:02you’re a very accomplished colorist.
13:12on drawing than your current work.
13:15And it sounds like you did a lot of drawing as a kid.
13:2350,000 years ago, he started doing drawing.
13:50Creating illusions like you know, Spielberg, Dreamworks.
13:58I don’t have that kind of money.
13:59I don’t have that many rich friends.
14:01So I have to work on the other side.
14:07still able to fool people.
14:10Because then you’re not fooling people.
14:17You know, their own belief.
14:25that you let yourself be fooled temporarily by something else.
14:33and you’re finding meaning in it.
14:39Pictures are like this too.
14:47If I do like this, you know, and I do this.
14:56a picture of the sun.
15:02that’s hanging eight light minutes from here.
15:04And I brought it to this room only with a gesture.
15:14Believe me, they would go like, whoa.
15:31because people could just bend their noses against it.
15:37and just go into it.
15:44that we invented to be able to foster that relationship.
16:05that it can be applied to science and religion.
16:09Which at one point were the same thing, you know.
16:14I love to work with scientists, you know.
16:17And I like to talk to religious people.
16:22to talk with religious people.
16:40Every single living thing knows something.
16:44But we are the only species capable of believing something.
16:48Because artists like us, we have created models.
16:59We work in the realm of the irrelevant.
17:02We do things that don’t really apply directly to reality.
17:17It’s both spatial and temporal.
17:22I cannot emphasize how important my work is.
17:49in this dump in which 70% of Rio de Janeiro’s trash ended up.
18:00who picked through the dump to find recyclable material.
18:04And also it featured in this documentary.
18:20human beings as one of your many materials?
18:25VIK MUNIZ: Well, that’s a scary thought.
18:29But I think it goes a little bit beyond that.
18:33I have been working for over 25 years doing this.
18:42only doing art because you want to be an artist.
18:45So you make art to be an artist.
18:48No, you’re not an artist to make art.
18:54you don’t have that excuse anymore.
18:56Oh, I want to be an artist.
18:57You’ve been paying your bills for a long time.
19:00You have been in these shows.
19:04You even get a catalog resume of your work.
19:08So, why do you do this?
19:11What is that that you’re doing?
19:13And it’s important not just to be reminded.
19:17I’m an only child, so I talk to myself all the time.
19:24great because where they have in cars.
19:26Now I can talk to myself when I’m driving.
19:27People think I’m talking on the phone.
19:43of my work, so you go back to everything you’ve done.
19:46And then I said like, well, what is it, you know.
19:53have absolutely no relationship to art whatsoever.
19:56They had no relationship with images of themselves.
20:07they found in the garbage dump.
20:19to show the self-esteem, their role in society, and so on.
20:28and work on their own self-portraits.
20:30But in a huge scale, you know.
20:32Just in the way I’ve always been working.
20:38you don’t see them when you’re working on them.
20:49all of a sudden you see yourself.
20:55and you see a picture of yourself.
20:58But I didn’t want to add anything.
21:01that were foreign to them.
21:33SARAH THORNTON: It really is.
21:36and it was a huge injustice they didn’t give it to us.
21:39I wanted to get it.
21:40Oprah announced, and I was so disappointed.
21:45Remember that film about Wall Street?
21:52about how to turn money into garbage.
22:07what is this that I did.
22:14It also set me into being more open to do projects like this.
22:21I’m very happy to share what I do with people.
22:28so I can see people looking at them.
22:30I don’t make work for myself.
22:35There’s a very, very famous artist which I admire a lot.
22:43I’m not going to say who it is.
22:49And I raised my hand.
22:51And I said, what do you make editions then?
22:54And then she never spoke to me again until she died.
23:06of what I was doing, I was sharing the process.
23:15in the process of creating something it’s exhilarating.
23:18When it goes well, especially.
23:25we only show things that work.
23:27We never show the things that don’t work.
23:34you will use it somewhere else.
23:39now it takes about a week to make one.
23:43VIK MUNIZ: Yeah, that one.
23:44And then you make it, and then you photograph it.
23:50you have two kinds of pictures sort of fighting.
24:02I’d had just finished one of these pieces.
24:12but it’s got like 16,000 yards of thread.
24:24and I make one that’s 21 yards of thread that’s not that good.
24:27People will want the one that has more thread in it.
24:30You know, the collectors do.
24:39come back and shoot it.
24:46That cat is no longer with us.
24:51and he made an abstraction out of my 19th century copy.
25:01making a piece with pigment, you know.
25:06The ones that I described before.
25:13I shoot with an eight by 10 camera.
25:18that holds the lenses to the bellows of the camera.
25:29fell right on top of it.
25:35I had to sit for like 20 minutes just looking at that.
25:39You know when your legs are like, they get all numb.
25:43That, obviously, is not in my retrospective.
25:51you can see it on iTunes or Amazon.
25:54VIK MUNIZ: Oh it’s for free on YouTube too.
25:59SARAH THORNTON: And I paid $3.99 so, you know.
26:08what do we call all the art that’s not public?
26:15How do you define the public?
26:19I didn’t think about it, but you’re right.
26:21I mean, it depends on somebody looking at it.
26:25It has to be public to be art I think.
26:28It’s just about the different venues that we find.
26:34We are used to have images coming at us, you know.
26:46and these are images that are everywhere.
26:51And then you have museums.
27:00because you walk towards an image, you know.
27:07black clothes to go to the museum.
27:10And then you take a bus, and you pay to get in.
27:14Or it’s for free and you just walk.
27:15And you walk towards that picture.
27:19It’s something that I always like to do.
27:21There’s a picture that you want to see.
27:28and you stop there as if there’s an X on the floor.
27:38is because that picture filled your visual field comfortably.
27:45and you can be back in the museum if you do this.
27:55It’s part of somebody’s imagination.
27:57Or a negotiation with some nature.
27:59But it’s literally an idea.
28:02When you go like this, you see material.
28:03You see what that idea is made of.
28:17but exactly on the moment you cross that threshold.
28:22here and what’s out around you.
28:47of everything that’s happening outside in our planet.
28:51And even beyond, in our universe.
28:59that we create for ourselves.
29:01But we can’t quite feel them, you know.
29:05I am a wall artist.
29:19because you need to go there to see it.
29:29But you have to be there.
29:38I post cats, food, and sunsets.
29:49I forgot the question, it was public art.
30:03that we have these bodies.
30:05Because you know, everything seems to be digitizable.
30:15and all that kind of thing, and communally too.
30:21go to museums is to socialize.
30:23Number two, is to learn something.
30:25VIK MUNIZ: It’s like movies, yeah.
30:27I go to museums so I can get shushed.
30:31I go to movies so people shh!
30:37the point of watching it with other people.
30:54see, I come from a very poor family in Brazil.
31:01or in a gallery was to see one of my shows.
31:06is because they didn’t know what they would find inside.
31:08They were not familiar with that.
31:18to walk inside a museum or to participate in a discussion.
31:24Even popular culture, you know, I had a show in Mexico City.
31:28And it was a huge crowd coming in.
31:30And these people, they are immersed in like folk art.
31:35And they had the really best reactions to the work.
31:44to see how it fares, or how people see it differently.
31:54I’m very happy that it doesn’t change much.
31:57You know, I still make work for my mother, actually.
32:01I make work that has a sort of a universal appeal.
32:06It’s very easy to impress very intelligent people only.
32:17and it’s, oh, i really think it’s good.
32:22the guard comes to you, I like that one over there.
32:29and they have a genuine reaction to what you’re doing.
32:34But this is in a museum as, I said.
32:37know what you’re going to find.
32:40to be tricked or surprised.
32:43The gallery is the same thing.
32:56Richard Serra did that “Tilted Arc” in the downtown.
33:05the sculpture to be removed.
33:08And it was a commissioned work of art.
33:10But I had to cross that place all the time.
33:12Going around that thing was very, very annoying, you know.
33:15I mean, Richard Serra is my favorite sculptor.
33:20But he could make a little door in the middle.
33:26Something very seamless, you know?
33:40And what that is doing to the people around you.
33:42It’s not like just doing something at the gallery.
33:44It will be placed on a different scale to another place.
33:53How about this work that’s in the New York subway?
33:57The new line up the Upper East Side.
34:00Can you tell us a bit about that context?
34:02because I think you talk about infected context.
34:13than, let’s say, an empty gallery space.
34:15VIK MUNIZ: Yeah because you have a different mindset.
34:22because they’re open to an experience.
34:25have all kinds of concerns, you know.
34:27Time, being on time, or lateness, or too many people.
34:32They’re conscious of the environment they’re around.
34:35You know, I’m going to do a Brazilian politician thing.
34:40to finish my point before.
34:45And has to do with this, I promise.
34:51I did it for Creative Time in 2001.
34:58on the sky over Manhattan.
35:00Because I didn’t want that interference, you know.
35:09that you expect to find in the sky, but never as a drawing.
35:14and also it moves with the wind going like this.
35:19And it is not selling anything.
35:21It’s just the cloud going like this.
35:22It was really silly, but it’s a very interesting experience.
35:27It makes you awake a little bit.
35:31In this case, it’s the opposite, you know.
35:34Then I said, I don’t want to make things that last too long.
35:38People get tired of it.
35:41because time adds a different dimension to the work.
36:03Initially I had another proposal for the MTA.
36:15in the pen gets naked?
36:18Very, very, very powerful technology.
36:27and they were also anamorphic.
36:33all of a sudden you see a ghost appear and dematerialize.
36:35And you’ll freak out everybody, I promise.
36:39Obviously, it was an idea that was very hard to sell.
36:56Egyptian sculpture, it’s not going anywhere.
36:59And that’s why most of them are sitting down.
37:02It’s about sharing time with fellow passengers or people.
37:11and I kind of enjoyed that.
37:13So they said, can you actually make the people visible.
37:23I had to do a lot of soul searching.
37:24Because is that part of my work?
37:30you’ve always been a mosaic artist.
37:39Between making something out of something else.
37:42And I said OK, good.
37:45I’m going to buy it, and I’m going to make it.
37:50that could really do amazing photo realistic glass mosaic.
38:03of the 72nd station of the second avenue line.
38:11before it was an apparition, then became a presence.
38:20People always think artists are crazy, but they we’re not.
38:32that people look like midgets?
38:48the tile of the station and make the shadow, tiles warped.
39:04that you would take a lifetime to learn how to master.
39:09So you have to deal with other people.
39:23you don’t know how to blow glass.
39:24But the guy speaks Italian.
39:39of communication with the fabricator.
39:41I was very happy with the results.
39:57It’s not a train station.
40:09even, before I decided to do or not.
40:14And what to do about this, you know.
40:21And it’s both the Everglades, and the Amazon.
40:30but also your national identity as a dual citizen.
40:33SARAH THORNTON: Both Brazilian and American.
40:35And you were an illegal alien for a little while in America?
40:48and sense of citizenship affect your choices?
41:00that validate your presence in one place or another.
41:08or maybe you do feel it.
41:14going through customs, for instance.
41:19and you start going like, ooh.
41:30like you’re in between if you’re crossing that threshold.
41:34It is an environment that represents a threshold, a wall.
41:42And how to transform a wall into a bridge?
42:16a little bit oppressive and dehumanized.
42:21was a way to balance a little m these changes.
42:26That was the real appeal.
42:29how I feel when I’m in of these places.
42:36and Brazil is a very funny place.
42:37It was designed a couple of guys, you know.
42:42They had some beers and said, let’s do this airplane thing.
42:45And they designed the entire thing in one go.
42:48And it’s like, it it’s not organic.
42:51Everything is already thought, is done.
42:54In a number of ways, it’s dead.
43:06Something that is out of control.
43:10Forests a start like that.
43:14convey a feeling that is a common origin for all of us.
43:18We all come from nature.
43:20It’s a place where we bond.
43:27we don’t know what we’re dealing with.
43:29We’re so illiterate when it comes to nature.
43:34it’s a sort of a conceptual mosaic.
43:38Because we went through all the species that did not occur.
43:47and do not exist– and we mixed them up.
43:49And then we create a forest that is an impossible forest.
44:02I have my opinions as a citizen, you know.
44:09of the policemen, or the baker, or the candlestick maker.
44:21think they know more about politics than other people.
44:24Actually we live in another planet.
44:27We shouldn’t even be allowed to vote, sometimes, I think.
44:58to be conscious of their relationship to reality.
45:02Which is very much in peril right now.
45:14We’re a little bit falling behind.
45:22Where do we get our doses of reality from?
45:30It’s here, it’s in Brazil.
45:33that we need some serious adjustment.
45:35And I don’t think artists can provide that anymore.
45:39SARAH THORNTON: So can I clarify?
45:46kind of, political illustrators or didacts.
45:58which is entirely apolitical either.
46:03as a side note to this spot.
46:06VIK MUNIZ: He was having fun doing that.
46:15that it connects with reality.
46:30when you do it effectively, and you make people sense it.
46:34I was talking about this today at the National Gallery.
46:41of a myriad of little pictures.
46:45and then I make a picture out of all the pictures.
46:59think you are doing something political one way or another.
47:27So I work with them.
47:39I grew up during a military dictatorship.
48:02you cannot just say things.
48:05You cannot say what you think.
48:07You have to use metaphors.
48:12the language allows to be able to pass messages through.
48:35Or very aware of the elasticity of language.
48:38How many ways you can say something.
48:52political statements are made of.
48:55I also have a commercial art background.
49:03steal all of their ideas from artists.
49:07full of Post-its like this.
49:09See, I steal ideas from advertising people.
49:32the idea of visual culture.
49:39which is marketing and advertising, lobbying.
49:43And then the other one is contemporary art.
49:47an enormous amount of freedom.
49:49We don’t have to sell anything.
49:51We sell the thing itself.
49:53We sell ideas, you know.
49:58an enormous chunk of our environment.
50:06like you are immersed in marketing.
50:12that the artist is trying to explain.
50:18said that I feel like an easel painter.
50:23People that did that in the Barbizon in the 19th century.
50:27But my landscape is different.
50:32is based on these references.
50:35And they’re very, very complex and very powerful.
50:44of the things you have to do, you have to pace yourself.
50:50or not to be overly didactic.
50:52I think I have a tendency to be overly didactic.
50:56I’m trying to avoid this right now.
51:01SARAH THORNTON: Well I think we have to move on to questions.
51:28you have to stand a long time.
51:31Sometimes you’re exposed to weather and everything.
51:34You know also, I keep thinking how would I feel?
51:50I’ll feel much better being there on that line.
51:53So I think that, you know, I thought of flowers.
51:55But flowers would be too camp, and maybe too pretentious.
52:05Something more chaotic as a forest.
52:11is that it matches the trees that are behind it.
52:16So it’s somehow somebody creates a fake sense of transparency.
52:21Outside the wall there’s a street.
52:23There are things going on.
52:25But then it just matches the top of the trees there.
52:33I have nothing against art that’s pleasing, really.
52:36When I say I still make art for my mother, I really mean it.
52:45do not expect to see art.
52:46They don’t know anything about it.
52:57you privilege a physical reaction.
52:59Something that’s perceptual, that’s sensorial.
53:07and the artwork at that level, all the rest is guaranteed.
53:11So you look at thousands of images every day.
53:19If an image then is to go like, hey look at me.
53:22And you do look at it– that’s an enormous achievement.
53:27This thing is, nobody can escape it.
53:42they perform very specific functions.
54:02thank you so much, Vik, for being such a great speaker.

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