What Does Vik Muniz Art Have to Do With the Materials Used
Ever since we formed the Material Collective, I've been thinking about the intersections betwixt collecting, collections, and collectives. Groupings of objects and people seem to have an awful lot in common, and I'm kind of fascinated by multiples in a lot of different ways. Maybe it's the only child in me, ever wondering what it must be similar to enter the world with the abiding companionship of a sibling. So many of my childhood companions were things rather than beings, but I didn't feel any lack equally a effect. I was perfectly content to play a circular of poker with my dollies—and I didn't even win every hand.
But the question of how collections and collectives function with regard to the visual arts is apparently a much more circuitous i, and I've just begun to fathom what I want to say about the field of study. I'm going to try to codify some initial thoughts here, past sharing my experience of the incredible 2010 documentary Wasteland (http://www.wastelandmovie.com/alphabetize.html and http://world wide web.youtube.com/watch?v=sNlwh8vT2NU). I hope that y'all'll laissez passer it on, re-web log it, talk about information technology in your classes and with your friends, because, truly, it'due south worth sharing.
The movie is about Brazilian artist Vik Muniz's work with the catadores, the "pickers" who once lived and worked in the world'southward largest garbage dump outside of Rio de Janeiro. Jardim Gramacho was an open up-air landfill built in the 1970s. It was closed in 2012 considering of environmental concerns well-nigh the contamination of Guanabara Bay, and information technology is slated to exist replaced by a marsh gas recapture plant. Sounds slap-up, right? We're cleaning up the environment—not to mention the city that volition host the Olympics in 2016. But there'south a catch. What nearly the catadores?
For generations now, they have been picking through the trash at Jardim Gramacho, sorting out recyclables to make their living. (Those of us who live in urban environments, are familiar with the phenomenon on a much smaller calibration—at least in Brooklyn, it's very common to come across someone with a shopping cart, working his or her style up and downwardly the block to pick out recyclables, which they turn in for cash). It's not a glamorous lifestyle, by whatever means, but it has kept the catadores from starving and offered them the dignity of doing genuinely skillful work. During the 70s, 80s, and even the 90s, when much of the world was only just beginning to institute real recycling programs, they served an essential social and ecology purpose. They recycled out of necessity when most of the rest of usa were besides cocky-involved to do it for ourselves.
And they took pride in their work. They formed a spousal relationship (oft referred to in the media every bit a "collective" or a "cooperative"), the ACAMJG (Associação dos Catadores do Aterro Metropolitando de Jardim Gamacho, or Association of Recycling Pickers of Jardim Gamacho), which became part of a national motion. That national motility and then spawned a global brotherhood, which yous can read more nearly hither. Presumably, such national and international activeness wouldn't have been possible without the exposure the catadores received through the Academy-Award-nominated motion-picture show, and new media outlets like the Internet. After the closure of Jardim Gamacho, the pickers were supposed to receive lump sum payments and the opportunity for chore placement, just registration bug and long lines caused many of them to surrender.
Ok, ok, you're thinking. That's all pretty interesting, just what almost the art?
Although he began his career equally a sculptor in the late 1980s, Vik Muniz institute his groove in works that use surprising materials to render images that are often familiar. He has riffed on many fine art historical icons, such every bit Da Vinci'due south Final Supper in chocolate syrup:
Or the Mona Lisa in PB & J:
His glorious portraits of the catadores look like this:
What you're looking at is a photographic reproduction of a collection of things, a collector of things, and a collector of people, all in one incredible recreation of Jacques-Louis David's famous painting, The Death of Marat (1793).
Muniz'southward photograph is an image of Tiaõ (Sebastiao Carlos Dos Santos), the young catadore who served as the energetic president of the ACAMJG at the time the motion picture was made. Tiaõ has worked as a picker since he was 11 years onetime, and he was inspired to organize his co-workers when he read political texts that he establish in the landfill. After years of collecting recyclable things, Tiaõ shifted his focus and began to bring people together, forming the wedlock that changed the fashion many of the catadores felt about themselves and their vocation.
Muniz took his picture, posing him to resemble the murdered French revolutionary, and granting the young man the dignity he deserves. Here's the before and after:
Simply the final image that you see at the right is not only a picture of Tiaõ slumped over the edge of a bathtub. Muniz has recreated his contours with fragments of grit and other affair, sketching the human class out of rocks and bits of debris taken from the trash heap itself. In fact, all of the color and texture that surrounds the main figure is a drove of garbage, which Muniz arranged on the floor of a vast warehouse—effectually his "drawing" of Tiaõ—and so re-photographed to create the terminal piece of work. By gathering all these things together, Muniz captures both the young organizer'south radical spirit and his tragic circumstances. The image's link with David'due south famous painting asks viewers to have Tiaõ seriously equally a political figure, and the ensemble is definitely more than a sum of its parts.
What interests me the most about these photographs is the transformations that are made possible when things come together. Past itself, each object in the image is a discarded, used-up slice of rubbish. By himself, Tiaõ is only some other nameless, faceless, member of the Brazilian working poor. Simply when they come together—the materials that Tiaõ collects and the people that he gathers effectually him—something magical happens. In that moment of see, there's a comingling of atoms, voices, vibrations and scents. Invisible transactions occur, and matter—both living and inert—is forever altered.
In many ways, the process of Muniz'southward piece of work is nearly every bit important as the final results. Hither's a shot of one of his catadore portraits in progress:
That's Magna (Magna de França Santos), whose photo depicts her as a potent, proud, and hopeful effigy. Magna came to exist a catadore afterward her hubby lost his job and she made a choice not to work as a prostitute. Here's her before and after:
In the original photograph, her radiant face is surrounded by plainly cloth; in Muniz's collage, that drapery comes alive with the objects from her collection. Her humanity is so much more than palpable in the midst of all that other stuff.
For me, Vik Muniz offers a model of what the Material Collective should strive to exist. He transforms the stuff of life—even the dirty, messy, seemingly banal substances—into beautiful and moving things. Those things have existent impact. They tin can bear upon honest and measurable alter in the globe. They have inspired many of the catadores to look beyond their circumstances, and I promise that they have too aroused afar viewers—like usa—to look beyond our environment and work towards a universe that nosotros would exist proud to inhabit.
More than anything else, I experience a kinship with Muniz. His expression of the pickers' pride, intelligence, strength, and dazzler makes me feel guilt, powerlessness, and inspiration all at once. And, truthfully, isn't that the perfect combination? Just enough guilt to make you feel aback of the accident of your nativity, the cost of your education, and the overall cushiness of your life. Precisely the right amount of powerlessness: you lot accept no hope of e'er affecting real change for these detail people (peculiarly at your historic period!), but all the same you desire to rail against that ineffectuality and make some kind of difference in your ain arena. And, just a dash of hope, plenty to urge you on, force you upwards off the couch to Do SOMETHING.
So I'1000 writing this to ask you to pass information technology on, web log near it, bring it upwardly in your classes. If Muniz'south photos can magically transform the basest of matter into the loftiest of ideas, maybe our work can besides manifest some real change in the earth. Maybe, if we work at it, we can bring things and people together in inspirational new ways.
Source: http://thematerialcollective.org/collecting-material/