The artist’s eye plays tricks

VIK MUNIZ has a soft spot for bad acting. An actor who performs brilliantly disappears into the role he plays. But when that transformation isn’t so deft, actor and character continually oscillate; one recedes as the other comes forward. For Muniz, a photographic trickster who aspires to “the worst possible illusion that will still fool the eye,” that slippage is far richer than a seamless performance.

Watching something pass for something else is more enticing when the mechanics of the trick are showing, he feels, when the audience not only enjoys the performance but also is conscious of its nature as performance. His work aims to set in motion just such a perceptual dance.

Among the 100-plus photographs in “Vik Muniz: Reflex,” a survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, are images of the Mona Lisa rendered in peanut butter and jam, a landscape by Corot redrawn in black thread, an installation shot of a Minimalist sculpture remade in dust and debris, a portrait of a young boy in military uniform made up entirely of brightly colored plastic toy soldiers. All of Muniz’s images are recognizable. Either the subjects are familiar, everyday objects (binoculars, toilet paper, teapot) or they’re art historical icons. Each is re-created in unconventional materials, then photographed.

“I tap a lot into a poster-store kind of iconography,” Muniz says, walking through the La Jolla show, his grayish-blue eyes a bit bleary after the previous night’s opening festivities. “Basically, it’s a move toward more abstract ideas without having to go through the problem of abstraction, which leaves people out.

“I find it very funny, when people meet an artist and ask if their work is abstract or representational -- as if there couldn’t be anything in the middle. One thing feeds the other. For me, what’s beautiful is the shift between something you recognize and something you don’t know.”

Muniz says he doesn’t believe in still pictures, and there’s a certain self-referential logic to the claim. Compact and boyish at 45, he is always gesturing, demonstrating, his speech and movements persistently animated. Pictures aren’t static, he explains, because we move around them and what we see changes depending on our distance. Looking at Monet’s vast canvases from several feet away, we see the waterlilies; up close we see only paint.

“You cannot ever have both at the same time,” Muniz says. “You have to choose, which is empowering. The moment you cross the threshold between the material and the mental, that’s a sublime transformation.”

Making art out of what he calls “stupid things” widens the gap to be crossed and, he hopes, intensifies that transformation, charging it with the element of surprise. His version of Monet’s aqueous icon is a photographed collage of colored hole punches from glossy magazines. From a distance, the flower and plant shapes cohere; from close by they read as a vast spread of vibrant dots -- the bad actor seizing the stage and relinquishing it, seizing and relinquishing.

Working with ketchup

BORN in 1961 in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Muniz moved to the U.S. in 1983 and landed in New York the following year, during the heyday of appropriationism. Art critical dialogue was thick with theories on the death of originality. He started making sculpture, but by the end of the decade, he was showing only photographs, and his work had assumed most of the chief characteristics it still retains: engagement with collective memory, serious flirtation with illusion and a determined mix of the high and the humble.

He drew well-known photographs (an astronaut on the moon, the lone resister in Tiananmen Square) from memory, then photographed them with a slight blur, so the images read as materially ambiguous but still instantly recognizable. He started to adopt such unlikely materials as chocolate syrup, ketchup, wire and caviar to fashion familiar images, which he would then photograph. He made portraits of the children of sugar cane workers out of white sugar meticulously drizzled over black paper. After each image was photographed, the sugar was swept away in the manner of a Tibetan Buddhist sand painting.

Muniz, who maintains studios in Brooklyn and Rio de Janeiro, considers himself an heir to Andy Warhol, and his recycling of known images (including many by Warhol, which themselves are copies of other artworks) certainly has its roots in Pop. But other strains from the ‘60s and ‘70s also influence his practice. An emphasis on process is key to his work, and each of his images represents a unique, transient performance. The photograph is the only enduring trace of the action.

Muniz is dismayed that visual literacy is not high on the nation’s curricular agenda in spite of the way images -- even more than words -- flood everyday life. “Nobody dismantles the grammar of pictures, nobody makes it transparent so people can see how it works. We’re dealing with the face of the clock. Nobody wants to look at the back to see how the gears relate to one another. It always ends up to be the work of the artist to create some kind of awareness about this.”

According to Muniz, countering the seductive, numbing effect of image saturation is an ethical responsibility. It’s crucial, he feels, to jolt people into a state of alertness to the processes of perception.

Miami Art Museum senior curator Peter Boswell, who organized the “Reflex” exhibition, feels Muniz’s picture-making strategies accomplish just that.

“When he uses an image you’re familiar with, you think you already know it, and you do that first double-take when you realize it’s not really the Monet or the Andy Warhol but it’s someone dealing with that image,” Boswell said by phone from his office.

“What he does is probe the original image and ask questions about it. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to see Andy Warhol’s image of Mona Lisa again without thinking about Vik’s image of it in peanut butter and jelly. Is that what Warhol did to the Mona Lisa -- make a peanut butter and jelly version of it? I think Vik is doing to Warhol what Warhol did to Leonardo. It’s like two facing mirrors; you see endless depth between them.”

Questions about depth

DEPTH, though, is not what every viewer -- or critic -- sees in Muniz’s efforts. Though he has been hailed in print as a “smart provocateur” and his work described as “exquisitely crafted” and “devilishly funny,” he has also been skewered by writers who find his work superficial, gimmicky, “clownish,” more about “gamesmanship” than anything else.

Reviewing the “Reflex” exhibition for the Miami Sun Post last year, Franklin Einspruch dismissed Muniz as a clever poacher, hiding “behind technique, behind concepts, behind non-art materials, behind the filter of photography, behind other people’s work.” Muniz lacks inspiration of his own, the writer concluded, referring to what he judged a disappointing group of photographs of studio debris, a rare series not based on replicating the works of others. “It damns the work beyond redemption to realize that the artist is better when he’s not being himself.”

All great art is gimmicky to some extent, Muniz argues in his defense. It has to be visually engaging, and can get there by whatever means necessary.

“People don’t take me seriously because there’s humor in the work, as if humor was something that would take intelligence out. Having enough freedom with the way you put your ideas that you can subvert them from within -- this is humor. It’s a powerful tool to get people into what you’re doing or to attract people to what you’re trying to say.”

For someone whose work has been criticized as shallow, Muniz is extremely articulate about its position within the history of image-making and visual perception. He wrote the 200-page book that accompanies the exhibition, a memoir/manifesto rich in anecdote and broad in reach, studded with quotes from, among others, Aristotle, Oscar Wilde and Lily Tomlin, Marshall McLuhan, Michel Foucault and Charles Baudelaire, Jorge Luis Borges, Buckminster Fuller and Yogi Berra.

How seriously to take Muniz’s work is, like the work itself, an ambiguous matter. The accessibility that draws people to the work also pushes others away.

“I think a lot of people in the art world, because it’s their business and their passion, like to think that the really good work is really tough, tough to get. It’s taken them a lifetime to get it,” says curator Boswell. “Vik’s is different from that. Anyone can get it at some level. I suspect that some of these people who accuse him of being superficial just aren’t getting it,” he laughs.

“It’s insightful, complicated work. There are lots of aspects that I don’t get. That’s one of the things I like about it -- you can keep getting more from it.”

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‘Vik Muniz: Reflex’

Where: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 700 Prospect St., La Jolla

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Fridays through Tuesdays; 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursdays, closed Wednesdays.

Ends: Sept. 2

Price: Free to $10

Contact: (858) 454-3541, www.mcasd.org