Vik Muniz
- Artist Statement
- Curator Statement
- zingmagazine project
- Website
Artist Statement
How many people know Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and how many people have actually seen it? For most, the gargantuan work was not larger than a page on a book or magazine. How many people have actually seen children sprayed with napalm, the surface of a nearby planet or the procedures of an open-heart surgery? Mediated knowledge comes with strings attached: it substitutes the opacity of not seeing for the transparency of seeing through. The Black Forest of myth has been replaced by a crystal garden of holographic distortions. We’re equally blind by our ability to see through everything. The man who stands on top of Spiral Jetty can’t see it better than the man who gazes at it in a book.
My work attempts to define the levels of such mediations as if they were a landscape itself. Like a nineteenth century easel painter, I try to render the scenery of signs, trying to depict things, as an Impressionist would insist, as I see them. The landscape has changed, the role of the artist remains the same—to shed light on the complexities of relationships between mind and phenomena.
Curator Statement
Vik Muniz’s Milan (Last Supper) is the first in his series of chocolate syrup photographs inspired by Andy Warhol’s works of the late ’70s and early ’80s. A triptych, the three Muniz photo panels depict a rendering of The Last Supper as composed by Leonardo Da Vinci and appropriated by Warhol. However, Muniz’ rendering is not a fresco, silk screen, or paint, but chocolate syrup captured by a photo. While the feat of drawing The Last Supper in chocolate is amazing and incomprehensible, the gesture is the first of what became a culpable photographic series called “After Warhol” that includes images of Mao, Elvis, and Marilyn among others.
