Review: Vik Muniz retrospective spotlights inventive, playful artist

Bottom line: Finding the sublime in humble materials, this Vik Muniz retrospective shows an artist reaching exalted heights of insight and meaning.

The subject of a midcareer retrospective at the High Museum, the inventive Brazilian-American artist Vik Muniz seems as well-rounded as artists come. Smart, playful, impassioned, Muniz also has an inclusive social consciousness, championing the world's poor and forgotten, but in a way that never feels strident or smug.

Deliciously inventive and flat-out funny, Muniz creates drawings using an unexpected array of materials: chocolate, caviar, dust, diamonds, dirt and spaghetti sauce. He then photographs those “photographic delusions” as he calls them, of the “Mona Lisa” in peanut butter and jelly or abstract expressionistic painter Jackson Pollock rendered in chocolate sauce, preserving the ephemeral for posterity.

A work from 1997, “Medusa Marinara” references the scariest lady in Greek myth (by way of Caravaggio) in a palette of Chef Boyardee.

“Vik Muniz” is a wonderful treat. For those who know his work, it’s an opportunity to bask in this adventurous artist’s incredible range and humanity. For those who don’t know him, this exhibition of 25 years of output is a wonderful introduction to this cool, brainy, loopy artist expanding your mind even as he’s making you laugh.

One of Muniz’s most powerful, indelible series presented in this retrospective are his “Pictures of Garbage,” which feature the poorest of Brazil’s poor working in Rio de Janeiro’s edge-of-the-earth 14 million-square-foot Jardim Gramacho garbage dump. With their help, Muniz arranged the trash salvaged by these catadores into enormous tableaux referencing oil paintings by Titian, Marat and Caravaggio that he then photographed from a crane above. Photographed acting out these famous paintings, the garbage pickers are plucked out of their pariah status. It’s one of many instances in his career in which Muniz uses photography to question what or whom we deem important.

Like much of his work, collaged from unexpected materials, “Pictures of Garbage” make your brain pleasurably short-circuit in a delirious wash of joy and angst, exaltation and sadness, challenging us to see the world anew.

In addition to a shrewd conceptual artist often commenting upon painting’s tactile, fool-the-eye imitation of reality, Muniz is also something of a wag and trickster. His “Pictures of Clouds” are evidence of that puckish strain, in which the artist paid a skywriter to create cartoonish drawings of puffy clouds in the sky that the artist then photographed. Those works typify Muniz’s almost childlike sense of imagination and his playful lampooning of the effort and expense of making contemporary art as a kind of fool’s errand.

“His principal medium is surprise,” photo scholar Arthur Ollman notes in a catalog essay accompanying the exhibition, alluding to the funny, delightful effect of the work.

“Vik Muniz” is an exhibition to make you examine what you thought you knew about perception and material and even art. His work often treats a First World of plenitude, of waste and excess colliding with one of poverty and want. It’s surely a reflection of Muniz’s own surreal status with one foot in a Brazil of unimaginable poverty, and the other in the First World excesses of Manhattan’s art scene. Muniz is sifting through that dross too, salvaging something of meaning and weight from the sheer visual excess of the world we occupy.