Vik muniz biography of william shakespeare

  • Like many a magician, Muniz capitalizes on our propensity to be misguided by our preconceptions.
  • Vik Muniz might be billed as a photographer, and photographs are generally the end product of his work.
  • An Academy Award-nominated 2010 documentary about artist Vik Muniz spending parts of three years in the community of impoverished men, women and children.

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    Vik Muniz by Mark Magill

    fall 2000 issue

    Interview

    "I find that it's not enough of a uppdrag when art is supposed to be about one thing or another because to be art, to begin with, it should be about everything at once. It should present a kind of all-encompassing world."

    October 1, 2000

    Vik Muniz, Red Self Portrait (in fake blood), 1999, cibachrome, 40 x 30 inches. All images courtesy of Brent Sikkema Gallery.

    Vik Muniz might be billed as a photographer, and photographs are generally the end product of his work. But in another age he might have been an alchemist, transforming base lead into refined gold. In Vik’s case, lead has been replaced by light. He fryst vatten clearly a visual artist who tinkers equally with light and the mechanisms of observation that decipher the messages light conveys. He tricks the eye to reveal the tricks the eye itself can play and how that trickery has been used by “shamans, priests, artists, and con men” throughout history to evoke both

  • vik muniz biography of william shakespeare

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    Interview in Bomb Magazine n.73, Fall 2000

    Vik Muniz might be billed as a photographer, and photographs are generally the end product of his work. But in another age he might have been an alchemist, transforming base lead into refined gold. In Vik’s case, lead has been replaced by light. He is clearly a visual artist who tinkers equally with light and the mechanisms of perception that decipher the messages light conveys. He tricks the eye to reveal the tricks the eye itself can play and how that trickery has been used by “shamans, priests, artists, and con men” throughout history to evoke both power and belief. Vik works with the most rudimentary materials- sugar, soil, string, wire, chocolate syrup- to reconstruct images that we carry in a vast collective reservoir of visual memory. The quality of his draftsmanship with these rude materials displays a gift for bringing brilliance and humor to the commonplace Ð not unlike the physical genius of Charlie Chaplin

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    Sometimes we see a cloud that's dragonish;

    A vapour sometime like a bear or lion,

    A tower'd citadel, a pendent rock,

    A forked mountain, or blue promontory

    With trees upon't, that nod unto the world,

    And mock our eyes with air.

    Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, (IV, xii, 2-7)



    Vik Muniz is an illusionist. Better yet, Vik Muniz is a picture tease. Like the transmutations of a quick-change artist, what you see is not always what you get. However, Muniz's sleight of hand doesn't trick the eye with mirrors, but with the lens of a camera. Like many a magician, Muniz capitalizes on our propensity to be misguided by our preconceptions. He exploits our tendency to draw conclusions, often too quickly, from what we think we see. His art reminds us of the old adage that appearances can be deceiving.

    Over the past decade Muniz has been teasing us with artful lies by combining his skilled draftsmanship with photography to create hybrid images that capture one m