Vik Muniz: a visit to the High Museum

During a preview of the Brazilian artist's new show at the High Museum, Muniz stood in front of one of his monumental works, called "Self Portrait (I Am Too Sad to Tell You, after Bas Jan Ader)," a photograph that looks to be seven feet tall, and talked about how he made it.

Come within 10 feet of "Self Portrait" and you'll see that, like all of Muniz pictures, it's an illusion, an image built from solid objects, artfully arranged, then carefully lighted and captured by a camera. In this case, it's a collection of multicolored toys, spread across the floor of one of his enormous warehouses.

Seen from a distance it resolves into his face. But it’s not just his face. It’s his face in a moment of terrible sorrow. He’s crying, real tears, in an homage to the Dutch artist “Bas Jan” Ader, whose “I’m too sad to tell you” captured a similar image, his own crying face, in a 10-minute film.

Did Muniz he really cry? Yes, said Muniz, 54, a dynamic figure in a black leather jacket, whose stories about his work are as entertaining as his work. He was able to cry by thinking of sad things. What made Ader cry? And was he really sad, or just performing?

These are the layers of the “onion” that is a Muniz photograph. “It’s a medium that revolves around things that are not real — things pretending to be something else,” he says.

The uninitiated may not have heard of Muniz until this spring, but his remarkable images are making waves. In one series of photos he hired “pickers” who scavenge garbage from the world’s largest landfill to help him assemble artifacts to create colossal mosaic portraits of the pickers themselves.

Filmmaker Lucy Walker followed the process to make the Academy Award-nominated documentary "Waste Land." Proceeds from Muniz' work went to help the Brazilian pickers build a library, go to school and keep their trucks in working order.

He has created images big enough to be seen from Google Earth and, using an electron microscope, has inscribed pictures of castles on single grains of sand.

Among the 120 photographs in the High Museum’s thorough retrospective are examples of all of these. Here is Jacqueline Kennedy, in a pointillist image constructed from 1.5 kilos of diamonds. Here is “The Death of Marat,” created by the artful arrangement of an acre of garbage.

Get right up on one of these pictures, and you’ll see a host of vignettes. “That’s a nun having a glass of wine with a pig,” he says, pointing to the toy figures that he uses the way Georges Seurat used dots. “There’s a party with a group of aliens talking.”

Look carefully and you'll also see that the scale of the objects that make up these fabulous mosaics isn't consistent. Some are huge, some are tiny, and they are placed near or far in the frame to confuse things ever more.

There’s another falsehood in another one of Muniz’s huge frames. It’s the image of Alice Liddell — Alice from “Alice in Wonderland,” as photographed by Lewis Carroll, who took hundreds of photographs of the little girl he was infatuated with. In this one she’s supposed to be a “beggar,” with downcast eyes.

Alice was no beggar: She was Victorian nobility, a friend of Tennyson and a leading intellectual of her time. Muniz is drawn to Lewis Carroll, because, “like Lewis Carroll, I’m reluctant to become an adult.”

That’s partly why he still plays with toys, albeit on a grand scale.

It’s hard not to be impressed with Muniz’ ability to assemble all kinds of materials — caviar, diamonds, toys, junk, threads, scraps of paper — into remarkable images.

But he’s not impressed. He tries not to emphasize this skill, partly because, as he says, “my interest in making objects, per se, is very little,” but also because he’s found that a lot of effort doesn’t always pay off. Once he spent four and a half minutes making an image out of spaghetti with sauce — a screaming face in a bowl of pasta — and another time he spent four-and-a-half months making a landscape out of powdered pigment. People liked the spaghetti face better.

“People are always asking me, ‘What is art?’ For over 20 years I always thought this was a very general question and I could never have a good answer for it. After 20 years I thought, ‘Why can’t I answer it” and I came up with a really fair answer. Art is the development of the interface between the universe of mind and the universe of matter. A sort of a membrane. The world is nothing like we think it is. It is subjective and is based on a set of senses that we’re given. And (the photo) is the last physical state of this membrane that separates mind and matter.”