In today’s episode, I sit down with one of my favorite artists, Vik Muniz, to explore how art - the ability to represent the world - might be humanity’s most important invention after fire.
Born in São Paulo and now collected by major museums around the world, Vik reflects on his life journey, from growing up in a Brazilian favela to the gunshot that launched his career. He also explains why, for him, the artwork is only ever half complete.
This was a fun one - I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
— Jim
Links
Highlights
The Gunshot That Made Vik’s Career
Vik Muniz: I went to this thing, picked up this thing, and then on my way out, somebody, a woman, stopped my car, and she said, you have to help me out. They’re killing my fiancé. And then I looked, and in fact, there was a person. They were all dressed. They were all in the party. They were dressed with bow ties and tuxedos. And these guys were, this guy was hitting the other guy with brass knuckles against the car.
And I got out of my car, left the car in the middle of the road, ran, and I pulled the guy, the aggressor. And this guy ran away. And I hear people, horns. Because I had left my car in the middle of the road. And I said, I’m going to park my car, then I’ll see what happened. I’ll help this guy. On my way to my car, I hear an explosion. And then I’m on the floor, and I said, what happened? And then when I turned, the guy who I had just saved thought that I was his aggressor because everybody was wearing a tuxedo, looks like a James Bond film. And he started, he grabbed a gun in the car and started shooting at me. So he hit me. And I just saw him shooting again and again. And I saw the bullets. I mean, I tell people that nobody believed when I saw The Matrix, the bullets come. I said, I’ve seen that. And then I somehow made it to my car and drove to the nearest hospital. And I even hit the car on a corner, and I don’t remember anything anymore. Three days later, I wake up, and the first thing I see is the guy who had shot me, apologizing. He was full of bandages on his face. I thought I had died and gone to mummy heaven, or mummy hell. And then this guy said, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I had dislocated my jaw. I couldn’t speak. So I was, couldn’t even say, it’s fine.
Luckily, he hit my leg, half inch, half centimeter from my femoral vein, or I wouldn’t be telling the story here. And luckily, also, he was rich, this guy who shot me. And then he paid for all the medical expenses and agreed to pay a sum of money that would help me go through a year without being able to work. I couldn’t walk. With this money, I bought a ticket, and I came to the United States in 1982. So this is the reason we’re having this conversation is because I got shot. This is how lucky I am.
Representation is the Greatest Invention Since Fire
Vik Muniz: This is probably the most interesting part to think that maybe 50,000 years ago, a guy walks into a cave, and he sees in the cracks of the cave something that […] he seems to have seen before. But it’s not just a shape. It’s a shape that’s like animal. Not any animal. It’s a bison, okay? And not any bison. It’s the bison that he had hunted when everybody was hungry, and his tribesmen. And then he remembers the hunt. He remembers the rush, the adrenaline and the taste of the meat of the animal. And all of a sudden, he looks at that again. It’s just some cracks on the wall. And then he picks up some kind of a little rock, and then he draws the missing eye, a little horn, a tail.
And all of a sudden, all those memories come back. This is really interesting. But the most interesting part is when he brings his tribesmen, his fellow tribesmen, and shows it to them, and all of them see the same thing. And this is how magic it is. And he can bring the past into the present, and that hunt will be forever there, and future generations will be able to get access to that. So it transcends time and transcends space. I think representation is the greatest invention after the control of fire, because it allowed us to actually extend our experience beyond the reach of our senses.
🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Vik, it is so great to have you here. I am one of your biggest fans. I’ll get that out of the way. We’ve been collecting your work for a long time. Most of it is at our house in Connecticut, but this one, we had a fight for that one, Vik. When we went to buy it, the gallerist came over and said somebody a little more important than you is interested in this. And I’m crushed, right, because we just loved this piece and we ended up getting it, obviously. But let’s start with your background. For people who might not know, tell us your superhero backstory.
Vik Muniz
Well, it’s a long story though.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
That’s fine.
Vik Muniz
Because it’s a long life, thanks God. I was born in Brazil, in São Paulo, the largest city in the southern hemisphere. And my father was a waiter. He worked as a waiter. He died this year. And he worked as a waiter his entire life. My mother was a switchboard operator at the local phone company. And we lived in the outskirts of the city in a pretty much a little bit more organized slum area. So I was born in a favela basically. And my father came from, is an immigrant from northeastern Brazil, very poor area at the time. And growing up I didn’t really have, neither parent had much of an education. They didn’t complete even, they didn’t go to high school.
But I was very fortunate to be raised by my grandmother who also never had a single day in school. But she learned how to read just by looking at her kids’ books. Nobody knows how she did it. And I’ll tell you, I’m mentioning this because it has a lot to do with my becoming an artist as well. So my grandmother is probably the most intelligent woman I’ve ever met. And I remember the day my father brought the only books that we had at home, a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. He brought it on a wheelbarrow. He had won this in a pool game. And my grandmother and I, we spent days and days, all our afternoons looking at those pictures and reading. The way she taught me how to read on an encyclopedia.
And she read encyclopedia from A to Z several times because those were the only things there were to read. She knew every capital, if you ask her, what’s the capital of Malta, she goes, Valletta, Liechtenstein, every bone in the human body. Although she’d never been to school a single day of her life. But she taught me how to read the way she taught herself how to read by memorizing the shape of the words. So I am a self-taught, dyslexic person so much that when I started going to school, I could not write because I had to relearn how to read and write. And it was very complicated for me to do those things. And I was reading already chapter books. But I could not write a word on my own until the third year of school.
In that period, I think it’s something very, because I had kids. When you start learning about, or actually having a different picture of the world through symbolic exchange. So you start learning more words, you broaden your vocabulary. And then you have things that stand between you and the world. So it’s this edifice of little symbols. I think it’s a very important, perhaps the most important part of your formation as an individual. When you start creating the tools that will help you interface with the real world. Until then, your relationship is very direct. So I started, I could not write and I started drawing at that time. So I had kind of a shorthand that I developed, that I would, if I would do dictation, if I didn’t know a word, I would just make a short drawing, secretaries used to do in the past. And my copybooks look like the Egyptian section of the Met. But I could read those things. And all of a sudden they started getting a little bit more refined. And eventually I learned how to read and write like everybody else. But I had a different relationship, which is very, they were kind of ideograms. And those things developed. After some years they developed into more elaborate drawings. And by the time I was 8 or 9, I was the kid that did the caricatures of the teachers and knew how to do perspective. And I could draw things from nature, do pictures of the girls I liked and things like that.
So my identity as somebody who dealt with representation, drawing became who I was. And I was the guy who made drawings. And by the time I was 14, I was enrolled in, I represented my school in a, it was a public school, obviously. And then I represented the school in a statewide, it was a bit of a contest, an art contest. It happened exactly where the São Paulo Biennial actually happens. For the first time in my life, I realized that there were kids like me. I was a bit of a loner. I remembered that day and I did things that were three dimensional, kind of perspective and collage. Not very different than the things I do today. It’s very strange when I remember, I think I’ve been doing this all my life. I thought that was the prize. And I won first prize. And it was two years of academic drawing training at school. A private school called Panamericana. So I would go there in the afternoons. So when I was 14, I was drawing naked people. And I never missed a class. The first naked person I saw in my life was during life drawing class.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
That’s a way to hook you in for life.
Vik Muniz
Yeah, it was really exciting. By the time then you get used to it. And I think there was also a moment. It’s like weight loss. You make a lot of progress. And then it gets incrementally less as you, drawing is the same. By the time you develop more and more technique, your development becomes less and less visible. So I started becoming intrigued. Not about the fact, about the drawings themselves, the technique of drawing, the ability to make reproduction. But I think I had to fulfill that lack of improvement with understanding and discernment about what a drawing really was. So I started thinking about representation in a deeper, more wider sense. How do we see things in pictures? When did it start? How did that develop?
And I went back to Paleolithic art and started understanding how do we develop perspective. And art history became something that fascinated me. And also psychology at the time in Brazil was during the military dictatorship. And it was interesting to assume the identity of an intellectual at that time. And I was into experimental theater. And I’m the last generation of, I’m the last generation of teenagers that lived through the dictatorship. But I wasn’t a victim of the dictatorship, direct victim. I wasn’t tortured or anything like that. But I was very, my understanding of society was a little bit shaped by that kind of environment. Which was a moment where you cannot say what you think the way you want to say it. And all the information that comes to you comes from very biased sources.
So you have to be very skeptical, get very cynical about the way you receive information. So it’s a bit of a semiotic black market. You just have to negotiate everything. And I think that along with this interest that I had in representation, sort of makes up for what I have done all my life. I tried to, had a deep interest in psychology too. Liked science a lot. And for a moment I started reading these books by experimental psychologist named James Jerome Gibson. He wrote several books on perception. They had very rudimentary translations in Portuguese at the time, there were not that many books available, but I remember started reading about this and he was hired by the Air Force in the moment they were developing jets in the ‘50s to understand how the eye perceives depth or perspective. So it was they had to understand perception in a challenging environment in order to improve its interface for the equipment and everything else. And he had so many interesting ideas about how the way we move, there’s not actually space, there’s ambience is what we deal because as we move and everything moves with us. So this consciousness of the visual space that was, it opened a huge set of ways of looking at things for me. And I thought maybe this is what I would like to do, I would like to be a psychologist, like an experimental psychologist, and work in the field of vision.
And I tried for the vestibular, which is the exam for the private schools twice. But there was a very broad test and I wasn’t very good at math and other things. So I failed twice. And I settled for a half scholarship in advertising, communication studies. But with the major in advertising, which I did go for six months because I realized that my father was taking a second job in order to pay for expenses. Our grandparents lived with us. So I said, I cannot afford that, I have to help at home. And I remember then that something really interesting happened. I could not read the billboards around the town. I had an extreme, it was very hard for me to read the billboards. And I thought it was some kind of, it had to do with this self-taught dyslexia. But then I realized that nobody could read them.
I drove my mom once to go to the bank and can you read that? She said no. What about if I go 20 km an hour? Can you read that now? No. What about 10? Started making notes and at the end of a couple of months, I had developed a chart that crossed the vectors of speed, angle of approach and the number of size of text. So I created and I went to one of the, there were two companies that did point of sale advertisement in Brazil. One was called Alvo Target. And then I went to this guy and I said, listen, your ads, your signs, outdoor billboards really suck. I mean, they’re awful.
You have all these billboards on the side of the jockey, the horse race track, and they’re on the wall and you have to be a person who can read three lines of text at 90 or to 100 kilometers an hour backwards to be able to buy what you’re selling. You just have to change their position. They’re really, I’ve done this. Look, I developed this chart, and I can help you do this. If you don’t hire me, I’ll go to your competitor. Well, he hired me. Very little pay. I was driving around with my Volkswagen Beetle making notations. And then I worked for, he gave me gas and some money, but it was enough for me to help at home. And I dropped out of school that year. At the end of that year, this chart that I wrote got published in an advertising magazine.
Around the beginning of the following year, I was given a prize for young talent. So it was the day I went to pick up this prize. I rented a tuxedo, and it was a Plexiglas thing. I never saw it again because I have to tell you what happened. I went to this thing, picked up this thing, and then on my way out, somebody, a woman, stopped my car, and she said, you have to help me out. They’re killing my fiancé. And then I looked, and in fact, there was a person. They were all dressed. They were all in the party. They were dressed with bow ties and tuxedos. And these guys were, this guy was hitting the other guy with brass knuckles against the car.
And I got out of my car, left the car in the middle of the road, ran, and I pulled the guy, the aggressor. And this guy ran away. And I hear people, horns. Because I had left my car in the middle of the road. And I said, I’m going to park my car, then I’ll see what happened. I’ll help this guy. On my way to my car, I hear an explosion. And then I’m on the floor, and I said, what happened? And then when I turned, the guy who I had just saved thought that I was his aggressor because everybody was wearing a tuxedo, looks like a James Bond film. And he started, he grabbed a gun in the car and started shooting at me. So he hit me. And I just saw him shooting again and again. And I saw the bullets. I mean, I tell people that nobody believed when I saw The Matrix, the bullets come. I said, I’ve seen that. And then I somehow made it to my car and drove to the nearest hospital. And I even hit the car on a corner, and I don’t remember anything anymore. Three days later, I wake up, and the first thing I see is the guy who had shot me, apologizing. He was full of bandages on his face. I thought I had died and gone to mummy heaven, or mummy hell. And then this guy said, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I had dislocated my jaw. I couldn’t speak. So I was, couldn’t even say, it’s fine.
Luckily, he hit my leg, half inch, half centimeter from my femoral vein, or I wouldn’t be telling the story here. And luckily, also, he was rich, this guy who shot me. And then he paid for all the medical expenses and agreed to pay a sum of money that would help me go through a year without being able to work. I couldn’t walk. With this money, I bought a ticket, and I came to the United States in 1982. So this is the reason we’re having this conversation is because I got shot. This is how lucky I am.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I love that story. I’m familiar with it because the serendipity, right? This awful event leads to this terrific and wonderful career. Now, you would have, I suspect you would have been as effective had you stayed right in Brazil. Because the thing that fascinates me about your work is, at least for me, I always get lost in it like this here. I can literally stand in front of that for an hour, and I just literally get lost in it. And I’m really interested because I know you have a theory that you as the artist are only half the equation, that the viewer is the other half. And I find that so refreshing because we collect a lot of different artists, and I would say that’s not a majority view for a lot of the artists that we interact with. Talk a little bit about that.
Vik Muniz
I don’t know. I think I am, as I mentioned before, I discovered books very early, and I was never good in sports or anything like that. Always a little bit of a loner. And as a loner, you get sick of yourself, and you discover pleasure in interaction, in conversation. And that, I think has shaped a little bit my relationship to the public. I think you only do half of it. The artwork starts happening when there’s somebody in front of it, and you realize what you’re seeing is something that the person can be seen as well. And how do you have this dance with the audience when you’re dealing with representation?
This is probably the most interesting part to think that maybe 50,000 years ago, a guy walks into a cave, and he sees in the cracks of the cave something that shape that he seems to have seen it before. But it’s not just a shape. It’s a shape that’s like animal. Not any animal. It’s a bison, okay? And not any bison. It’s the bison that he had hunted when everybody was hungry, and his tribesmen. And then he remembers the hunt. He remembers the rush, the adrenaline and the taste of the meat of the animal. And all of a sudden, he looks at that again. It’s just some cracks on the wall. And then he picks up some kind of a little rock, and then he draws the missing eye, a little horn, a tail.
And all of a sudden, all those memories come back. This is really interesting. But the most interesting part is when he brings his tribesmen, his fellow tribesmen, and shows it to them, and all of them see the same thing. And this is how magic it is. And he can bring the past into the present, and that hunt will be forever there, and future generations will be able to get access to that. So it transcends time and transcends space. I think representation is the greatest invention after the control of fire, because it allowed us to actually extend our experience beyond the reach of our senses. We take that for granted. I always do this. I have a school in Brazil, and sometimes I go there with the kids in the favela in Vidigal near my house. And then you go, what do you see when you do this, just as a gesture? The sun. The sun. And I said, the sun is a ball of fire, eight light minutes from here. It’s a, and you can bring it into this room just with a gesture. This is magic. And we forgot how magic it is. And because we are spoiled with easier or easy to digest forms of representation, we forgot this ritual, the power of this ritual of tools that we’ve created, and how they have actually shaped our way of seeing things. I think there were moments in our history that we have an evolutionary relationship to the ambient, to the environment, to the visual environment. But there are some revolutionary moments.
I say industrial revolution, probably the invention brought the invention of photography and serial production of images made the whole world different. And the relationship with people, to the world was so traumatic that it took two world wars for people to start learning how to deal with this new world again right now. And around that time of the Industrial Revolution, you have a complete shift in the way representation actually had to evolve and artists had to evolve with it. When in 1839, when painting, when photography was invented, the next, all the newspapers celebrated the death of painting. And we can buy paint even easier today than then. And actually, photography liberated painting from its duty to portray the world as it was.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Totally agree.
Vik Muniz
After that, painters had the luxury of saying, what is painting? Then painting is something from the dream, like in Surrealism or painting is a gesture, like Expressionism. Painting is color.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Pollock. Pollock, who you did in chocolate.
Vik Muniz
Yeah, yeah. So you start questioning the medium, and all of a sudden it’s very interesting. Right now, we’re in a, I think, in a much deeper state of adaptability, because it’s like the ghost of painting came back to haunt photography in the form of visual, digital imagery. But it’s not only that. I mean, we are, our relationship to reality has been completely changed to the point that I think it’s even more traumatic than it was, that all of a sudden you realize that the world extends beyond the city where you live, like was, almost 200 years ago. Because right now you have to think about the tools that started with that guy that I explained to you, the Paleolithic artist.
He invented something that actually improved his relationship to the environment. People talk about artificial intelligence, but they did not question natural intelligence. Intelligence, for me, is the ability of any organism, no matter how small or simple, to feel and react. If it feels and reacts, it’s intelligent. So that makes everything that is alive today intelligent. Otherwise, you’d be dead by the force of evolution. You wouldn’t be around us. So everything that is alive today, it’s intelligent to some extent. We are different because we do not think, we believe.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, that’s what I mean. That’s where I was just about to go. I think the interesting thing that I’ve heard you talk about and agree with is that of all these living organisms, we humans, at least for as far as we know, are the only ones who have beliefs. Right. And maybe dolphins do. I don’t know. Maybe. I know elephants have great memories.
Vik Muniz
They shape them differently.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
But also back to the cave paintings. I’ve watched all the documentaries on them and I’ve looked at all the books. I’m absolutely fascinated by that. Because you are absolutely right in that this was the first way for humans to not only understand their environment better, but to let their tribe understand it better, but also plan for the future.
Vik Muniz
Seeing. Model making.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yes, model making. And the Korzybski is the famous quote, the map is not the territory.
Vik Muniz
Right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And so many people, I think, sometimes confuse that. They don’t really think that way.
Vik Muniz
Right. Especially now.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And what do you think about that? What do you think about our current situation where the map is kind of becoming, we are so abstracting things and using symbolics and a variety of those things that I’m noticing some people are kind of forgetting that the map is not the territory.
Vik Muniz
The fact that the person who made the bison is, it stood there, everybody was amazed. And then two weeks later, another guy went there and they say, it’s missing the color here, it’s missing some shadow because it’s floating in the middle of the. And it improved a little bit. And then everybody go, oh. And then they got tired of it and somebody else did something else. And then the whole development of our relationship with the world through imagery has been this race between technology and skepticism. So it’s always going a little bit. And that race has actually allowed us to know the weather that’s coming and knowing things that are going to happen.
And it’s interesting to also notice that the whole deal of art happens in the realm of the inconsequential, is that we, because we deal with possibilities, not real facts. But these are important because we shape futures.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Absolutely.
Vik Muniz
Or we actually shape the past too, as we know more and more. But the thing is, art, not only say art, but because art for me is a very broad term, but also representation is a set of tools that allowed us to actually see the world and understand the world beyond the reach of our senses. But it was always in the service of feeling and reacting, of intelligence. It allows us to know that there is a city called Tokyo, that I was there yesterday, and that I can go there.
And that allowed me to think that there was a guy named Napoleon Bonaparte and allowed us to think about. But it was all based on fact, some kind of evidence. What happens right now is that the image no longer tells you that something happens, and it has become an autonomous entity. It does not serve the process of feeling and reacting any longer. So, and it’s actually, it is still the ground in which we’re walking and feeling the world around us. So it’s very dangerous proposition that you have something that is made to be believed. But it no longer serves its purpose. What’s the alternative is to think, is to actually create discernment. I find that we managed to do this before. To learn how to live in this new environment. And I don’t think this is any different.
I think we’re just going to, artists, creative people are going to start having to create understanding and discernment. But this is not going back to your question. This is not something you can do alone. Right. The artist has to have participation. And then I find it in the fine arts. This is the name fine arts already kind of, I find it very old, like 19th century. Yeah, I kind of like it, fine art. I’m a fine artist. It’s the only fine thing I am. I find it, it’s very elitist. It’s a privilege, and when it should be a right.
Almost a duty, for people to be engaged into thinking about the way they deal with the world through the representation, the way the world is presented to symbols. This should be taught at schools in a way that is not…
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Totally agree.
Vik Muniz
I’ve been working with that. Developing programs that deal with even that help kids deal with technology, the technology of images.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Buckminster Fuller made a comment about the microscopic world. In which he said, the microscopic world existed before we knew about it. We just weren’t tuned in. We needed the microscope to get tuned in. And I look at art, and by the way, I also have a very broad definition of art. Literature is art. Anything that can explore possibilities, I find is art. And I have six grandchildren. And I love watching them because we’re born natural artists. And then we have it beaten out of us. Right?
Vik Muniz
People ask me, when did you become an artist? I don’t remember when I became an artist. I remember very well when everybody stopped being around me. So I just kept going. There’s nothing really. It has to do with the idea of how you apprehend symbolic language. Some people, I kind of stayed there, in the sort of prelinguistic thing. Still speaks to me very strongly. Because I was kind of a delinquent with my learning process. Maybe. I don’t know. I’m still very curious about that. And having kids really helped me because I use them as guinea pigs. I experimented on them quite a lot.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
My wife wanted to put an end to me doing that with all of our kids.
Vik Muniz
I think it’s a fatherly thing, I guess, but to a point that I had to open a school. And I said, listen… Malu, my wife said to me, are you sure you want to do this? I said, listen, is it either that or are you going to have to keep having kids! So we have four. So I said, I think I’m going to make a school. And then the school has become a very fertile ground for experimentation and for discussion. And it’s quite wonderful because you’re dealing with school kids that very much like me, they live in an urban area where they’re exposed to desire, to media, to a lot of the mediatic environments. Very, it permeates every section of Brazilian society. People are very good with the digital era, they really, everybody has a cell phone, no matter where they live. They’re very, and they’re very good at it, posting and sharing and these kids. But they don’t have the means to actually acquire things, and when you, so they’re very similar to what I was when I was a kid. I was exposed to ideas, but I wasn’t exposed to goods, to real things. It’s fascinating to deal with image savvy kids that really represent probably the largest number of individuals in the world. The world is poor. There’s some people fail to also realize that we’re very privileged people and have to be aware of the privilege and we have to do something with it. And I always go back to where I come from all the time, and especially when we’re talking about accessibility to art.
I don’t, I think I don’t raise too many political flags in my work. I think it’s a dangerous thing because I’m very wary of art that starts with good intentions. I think good intentions don’t necessarily make good art. I think curiosity and sincerity and investment, intellectual investment makes good art. And that art may become political as a result of how close you are to what you’re trying to portray. It becomes a tool too. I think if I am, what I do is political in the fact that it helps people see things or ask questions about what they’re looking at, which I think being a sort of a product of a society where this was not allowed, I think I valued that a lot.
But also I think I’m very conscious of the fact that the first time my parents stepped into a gallery or a museum was to see an exhibition that I did. They wouldn’t venture into a space. It was very hostile, very exclusive, very, it was not something that they would go to. And it’s a pity because contemporary art, it has the power to unsettle, the status quo. It makes you put you in a different kind of way of looking at things. And that is a healthy thing. It’s like exercising your relationship to what you think.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Totally agree. But also you mentioned the power of art. And the various political operatives have always known that.
Vik Muniz
Right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
The CIA, when we were in the Cold War with the Russians, had an operation they called Operation Long Leash. And basically it sponsored abstract expressionist exhibits all around Europe. And of course it contrasted against Soviet realism.
Vik Muniz
Right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
The use of art, if you’re familiar with Soviet realism, was all meant to glorify the state and everything.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
But when I learned about that I was like, well, of course, right? On the one hand of the United States and the so-called free societies, they’re like, of course, look, abstract expressionism. We also sent because they said the United States was a very racist place. So they underwrote sending our best black jazz musicians all around Europe.
Vik Muniz
Yeah, it’s true.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
But the thing that I particularly love about your approach is there’s always a wonderful aha moment, at least for me. We have your The Birthday Party, which is the collage. And again like this piece, I just will sit and stare at it and there’s always something new for me, which gives me a new thing to think about. And I’m like, oh yeah, I never thought about it that way. And that seems to be, the more I read about you and now chatting with you, that seems to be part of your intention, right? It’s like you don’t have political intentions, you don’t have, your intentions seem to me to be driven mostly by just wonder and curiosity and wow, look at this possibility.
The other thing I love about your work is you work in so many different mediums and I love that about you because you refuse to be, this is your lane, stay in this lane.
Vik Muniz
I think I get bored very quickly. I think maybe that’s the reason I work with different things. But I mean, when I, the idea of access, it’s very important because I deliberately chose to work with simple materials. Things that people don’t, they’re not part of hierarchical things, they don’t inspire the idea of mastery. If you make something out of spaghetti…
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Like the famous Medusa…
Vik Muniz
Immediately creates a difference between the artist... And so I try to make it approachable and try to make it common. When you think about the political influence of an artwork, I feel that it’s very pretentious almost. I don’t, I don’t think I can, I want to communicate with society as if society was a thing. Right. I don’t, I don’t believe that. So I think you’re becoming older, you’re becoming aware of the scope of your influence. And I think I can affect individuals better than I can affect a group of people. And I think if you are effective, at least you’re not going to change people. But you’re on this line here. Oh, you want to.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
A nudge.
Vik Muniz
Yeah. So you go to that side. But if you, you can do that. That is, for me, my work is already done. In order to do that, I have to be close to things that I am involved, personally involved, and I try to be involved with. I work, for instance, I love toy stores. I like to read. I like to, I get, for one thing, like the piece that you described, The Birthday Party. I remember when I arrived in this country, I lived in Chicago, in the suburbs of Chicago, for a few months, because I was initially, the idea was to learn English and then go back to Brazil. And I did something, I did a mistake. I came to New York on the 4th of July, and I became infatuated with the city. And I said, I want to live here. So that, and it was a weekend before I was about to go back. And the weekend now is like 40 years. 40 years. And I remember when I was in Chicago, it’s a northern suburb of Chicago, Northbrook. And when I was a kid, my mother’s sister worked in the airline, so she lived in between Miami and Chicago. She worked as a stewardess. And she’d come to visit us every year. And she has a camera. So she takes a picture every year of me, and then she goes back and it takes me a year to see the picture. Now, when I told that to my daughter, she was like, why didn’t she show you on the phone? No, no, it wasn’t like that. So I had to explain it to her how it was. She was sorry for me. But I, as a result, I had only nine or ten pictures of me as a child. When I saw on a garage sale, photographs being sold, I didn’t understand. How can those, could those pictures become separated from the people they portrayed? They’re like orphans. And I had, no, had very little money then. But I bought them, I kept buying them so for 40 years, I’ve been buying family pictures. And then I have to say, I never had a class. And I taught photography at Bard College, but I never had one class on the subject in my entire life. But everything I learned about photography, I learned from looking at family pictures. And it became more than a hobby, because every picture is fascinating. There, if you get, now I have 250,000 photographs of people that I never met, people who are not here anymore. And it’s, you look at it. Every single one of them is a moment that somebody thought was important, and it’s beautiful, and then these things are in boxes. I said, I have to do something. So I started making collages with them and bringing them back to life and back to people’s awareness. But there was, I mean, there were so many amazing things from looking at especially bad pictures. There’s one that’s very funny. It’s like the picture of the Eiffel Tower. People go to Paris and they say, I want to take a picture with the Eiffel Tower. But there’s the problem of scale.
There’s a discrepancy because the Eiffel Tower is a huge monument, and the person is a small thing. So you try to make a picture. They go to the Eiffel Tower to take a picture with the Eiffel Tower. So they could never do it. So there’s a little head, and there’s pictures of people with camels. Camels are very big, but people don’t realize until they are, because they’re either, so if you get the whole camel, you don’t know who it is, so it becomes a complete nonsense. But if you get the person, you lose the camel. Right? So how you get the parts and the whole. And then when you’re talking, maybe this is one thing that is always in my work. It’s to think that everything that you see that’s representing something is made out of other things.
And it’s the transformation that actually makes it possible for you to, there’s a moment of transformation that you actually, you reenact when you’re making the work that is almost like the ritual, that how you get to connect to the world. I don’t know if I’m being clear.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
No, you are. And that sort of leads into the fabulous documentary Wasteland that was made in 2010, I believe.
Vik Muniz
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And you helped those people see themselves.
Vik Muniz
Yeah, I like to think so. Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Well, I think, I think you definitely did. But for listeners and viewers who aren’t familiar with this, let’s tell them a little bit about the project.
Vik Muniz
Well, it all started when a group of, there was a director and the producer, they approached me for a documentary on my work, and I didn’t want to make, I had already done that, a small documentary, and I thought, I wasn’t interested in doing that. I thought, what about if you document one series? Because I work in series the way I do this, because it allows me to use what I learned from one work to the next. And at the end, I’m not into making a masterpiece. I do not think of art that particular way. Making an amazing artwork. I make incremental pieces that actually make up a curve.
The moment I become interested in a material and the way it interacts with a certain subject, I start putting these things together, experimenting with them, and then I get better and better at connecting this thing to the point that I get bored. And then I’m just filling up gaps. And the important thing, after almost 40 years working as an artist is how do you manage these creative flows? And this curve is something that I hadn’t really, I was aware of it, that I wanted to maybe document so I could understand it better. So I proposed that they would follow me through a series from the beginning, from conception to the moment I show it in a museum. Right. And then I had, I wanted to do these things with garbage because garbage is a material that tends to invisibility.
It’s something that normally you hide. It’s a part of our history that we’re always hiding. And I thought maybe if you do something, it would be quite interesting because it would shake up, the way we’re looking at things. I had already done works like the one behind you with pieces of metal scraps.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Junk.
Vik Muniz
Junk, yeah. And, but garbage is different. Garbage is in the state of decomposition. So it’s, it’s something that is not, doesn’t have the usefulness of what it was made to do.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.
Vik Muniz
But also it hasn’t become material.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.
Vik Muniz
Doesn’t become… substance.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
It’s, it’s in a transition.
Vik Muniz
So it’s, I love anything that’s in between, I’m very interested in grays, so these gray areas are very good. So I thought I had tried before to do this a few years before, but the place that I had to work with garbage was controlled by the narco traffic in Brazil. So they used to put weapons and, and it was a very dangerous environment to work. So I gave up. But I still wanted to do it. And I thought maybe I should try and propose it to them. And they bought the idea. So we thought about doing this and we had some help from some other people had filmed in this particular area. And we didn’t know that this was the largest garbage dump in the southern hemisphere.
When I went there, Gramacho was the name of the site. I thought that I was just going to make these drawings using this material. And all of a sudden I see this workforce there. The people who actually do make their living from the extraction of recyclables. Brazil is the second country in the world that recycles more. Not because we’re organized, it’s because there’s a lot of poverty that lives from it. And I became involved with these people and not for how different they were, but how similar they were to me. And I kept thinking that maybe if by some turn of events, if my father had become sick, I could possibly end up in a place like that. And it’s amazing to think about that, right? I invited them to work on their own portraits using the material that, the same material that they do with every day. Because that was what makes something change. When you use, you work with something in a certain way, you work in a different way to actually create something completely different than what you’re doing. These people, they had not seen most of the representations of themselves. They were, that they had, were from cell phones that they were, they were found, tiny little screens, pictures of themselves. Sometimes in a document they’ll see a little, identity papers and things like that. And all of a sudden they were, we had a whole, something the size of a basketball court where we make these portraits. And you cannot immediately see what they are because they are not, they’re elongated and they are trapezoidal. They are a number of, it’s a number of forces.
So when you’re looking at that just looks like junk. But when you go on top of a 10 meter tower, you see what it is. So we had this in the film, this reveal and it was very, it was very emotional.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Oh incredibly, so.
Vik Muniz
Because when they see themselves at that scale. It’s, something changes, the way…
Jim O’Shaughnessy
The way when I was watching I literally turned to my wife and said he has unlocked something in them by. But because you have to, I definitely recommend watching the movie if you haven’t seen it. But that moment, you could see on their faces, they saw themselves in a new and different way.
Vik Muniz
But unlocked something in me, too.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, sure.
Vik Muniz
Because when I make an artwork and I share it with people, you share the result, but sharing the process, it’s also fascinating, when you bring people into the studio. And also made me become aware that I work with people. I’m always having people say something to me. I’m very porous. So I work with assistants. They say, oh, why can’t we do this? I say, yeah, let’s try. I don’t have that kind of control authorship. I’m getting better and better at this. I’m also getting better at communicating the ideas. But I, this was, because at the end, if you work with people on a project like this, you don’t end up with something you want, but you end up with something much bigger.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.
Vik Muniz
And it’s something that reflects, it’s more than you. I don’t think I want that much control over what I do anymore. I mean, this is important when you’re still acquiring a concept or a technique about what you’re doing. But after a while, I mean, I think this is part of the way you become an artist. And I consider myself a successful artist because I can live from what I do, and I can live very well from what I do. And I think there was a point that what you want to be is an artist. You do everything to be an artist. You want to be called an artist. You want to be important, relevant as an artist. So you play the game of the art world. Right?
But then after a number of years, you’re an artist already, so what do you do? What is that for? So this question starts haunting you. And I think Wasteland was, for me, what really changed is also I realized art can be a lot more than just a simple practice, something that you do and you test on people. And I mean, one thing, for one thing is just, it made me realize that when you are dealing, you’re dealing with the world or the interface, I think art, my concept of art is just that. My idea is that art is the evolving interface, between mind and matter, between consciousness and phenomenon. And when you’re dealing with that, you’re already dealing with the world. But the fact that you can fix or change the world beyond the model.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yes.
Vik Muniz
You see that. That is, I had the work. The film had an impact on these people’s lives that extended beyond the simple fact that they were looking at something that, or the fact that they actually were part of the process of doing their portraits, which was already something important. But we sold the works, we actually sold, gave them the money, we worked, we did many things. But I think the most, the greatest achievement of the film was it changed the perception of the entire Brazilian population. Because it was a big deal there about who these people are and dehumanizes them. Before people didn’t think of them as people, as workers, as professionals. And now it allowed them also to organize better. And now these cooperatives, they don’t, they’re not in garbage dumps anymore.
They get the recyclables directly on large events like the Olympics or the World Cup or they were allowed to actually, now they’re organized to actually pick up their recyclables directly when they are disposed, where they are disposed. And I think there was, soap operas are big in Brazil, right? And there’s this guy, Cauã Reymond, very good looking guy. And once I was having lunch with my wife and this guy just, hey, I want to talk to you because I’m going to portray catador guys, people who actually live from recycling. And I said, are you? Yeah, you are? He said, yes. I said. And then you did the film and wonder if you could help me out because I want to meet some people and actually learn. Because I want to do a laboratory. Because I want to know more about, to become, to be a, to do the character well. And when the best looking guy in Brazil is just doing a, playing a catador means that we did something, we achieved something. The perception is different. But for me, I think the biggest thing is just, I realized the power. And actually if I do something that is remotely political, which I think this film is, I think there’s, you have to come with a capital exchange, you have to, it has to have, you have to, that, you have to transform that in something that actually helps directly the people. You’re not just illustrating a problem, right? You’re actually acting upon it. And I’ve been lucky with that.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
You know, I put everything through a filter which I call win-win. And I don’t do deals anymore that are not win-win because they’re just so much better for everyone involved, myself included. And when I was watching the film for the first time, we rewatched it recently as I knew I was going to be having the pleasure of chatting with you and, and I had the insight that you grew up in an authoritarian military dictatorship. Like you, I’m not a very political person, but I am fiercely anti-authoritarian. And one of my insights was what do authoritarians do? What did the Nazis do? They dehumanized people. They looked at them not as human at all. And when I was rewatching the documentary, I’m like, you know what his genius here is he is repositioning these people to the rest of other people. These are people, these are human beings. And so I love that story because that, what a great arc.
Vik Muniz
It’s a conclusion. I said, no, it could be you. Could be me, absolutely. And the fact that I think this is the most important part. When you perceive something that is not right, and the fact that sometimes you have an opportunity to act upon it and you end up winning more than giving. I have always have this sort of adapted to these people, to this project in general. But I’ve been there was this, after Wasteland, I became very attentive, very aware. I’ll give you an example. Between my house and my studio, there is a daycare center which is run by nuns. I got married at this church and I baptized my daughter in this church because by convenience, it’s very close, right?
They came to me one day, they said, we’re about to close the daycare center. The daycare center attends all the poor people that live in [inaudible] and all the favelas nearby my house. And the people, these people work in the south side on the houses of rich people, and they leave the kids there. And if there’s one sound that I love from a safe distance, it’s when they go on breaks, they go, yeah, I love that sound. And I couldn’t bear the fact that I wasn’t going to listen to it anymore. And I said, well, what’s the problem? So, there’s not many baptized people are not doing weddings here. And they were actually, we’re about to close. We’re going to serious finance.
And when we got married there, we actually got married in the parking lot because there’s a garage. But my wife is very good at transforming spaces. So she turned it into sort of a magic jungle. And I said to them, so the month of December, are you free? She said, yeah, we don’t have anything going on. They said, well, I’m going to give you this money just to help you this month, but I think I have a better idea. So I was working on portraits of saints for many years. And obviously, it’s very hard to show this in a gallery or show this to a museum. People see, when you study art, you study all the, Caravaggio, Giotto, there’s all sacred images, Catholic canon, and these images are supposed to be in a palace or a church, and you study this, and then when you, you get graduated and you’re supposed to be atheist and communist, so it’s kind of very confusing. So I love religion in general. I’m very curious about it. And I think belief is something that set us apart from any other living species, and you have to understand it. But also it’s something that is a broad subject that deserves attention if you’re an artist. And I had these pictures of saints that I didn’t have a place to show them. And I said, well, what if it’s a church and a convent there? It’s a perfect place to have this show. And then I, because I have the thing I have before, there were superheroes, they were saints, right?
They’re very similar, and you have to understand there is a direct relationship between the Marvel superheroes and the saints. They perform, they do amazing things. They’re superhuman. And I thought, oh, this would be a, so I said, what if we do a show? And I showed the nuns. They really liked the idea. And we sold the works. And with the sale of the works, we managed, it’s open right now, and we managed to keep it open. Things like this. Another example, the National Museum caught fire. The major museum in Brazil. The entire collection was burned. And this is the place where I took my kids. And I was working in a project in Holland at the time, and I thought, oh, God, this is a place that, oh, they burned the, they had the skull called Luzia.
14,000 years old, the greatest, the oldest found skull of a humanoid. All these things. There was mummies, there were the Egyptian. There was a paleontology collection. There were several dinosaurs and things. They were, it was the largest entomological collection, I think, in the southern hemisphere. Millions of little specimens, butterflies, bugs and things like that. I love museums. I’m a museum rat. So I felt so bad that I realized that during the, this happened during the Bolsonaro, the last administration, and they had, the funds for museums, for institutions were severely cut, so they had no money to deal. They had a lot of 3D renderings that they have tomographies that they had done on some of these artifacts and that they needed to actually print them or use digital work. They had no funding for this. So I teamed up with them and actually they gave me the ashes of these specific artifacts. So for the Luzia, for the skull of the Paleolithic skull, they gave me the ashes of the skull, and I actually made the picture of it. And we made several of this because there’s something very incredible. Normally, archaeologists, they work in the field and they bring what they find to the museum. There were teams of archaeologists working in the museum, something completely unheard of, so they’re very organized, so they had little Tupperware with specific dust from specific things. So I, they gave it to me, they lent it to me, so I made pictures of it.
And with the funding from the sales, we actually managed to keep the program of the rescue alive so that we actually helped them reconstruct many things because they were not having any other help from the government or anything. And now I’m going to have, this is an exhibition that I’m very excited to do because the museum is going to reopen the first wing, and they’re going to reopen with this exhibition, the Museum of Ashes. And I never had the opportunity to show it before. So they’re going to open with sort of a memory of these artifacts, that they were there before. And it goes on and on. I’ve been able to actually do things that had a practical, physical impact. And I am very fortunate that I had the opportunity to do these things.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And one of the things that I love about you is this idea of, I made most of my career in asset management, right? And that’s all probabilities. I’m fascinated by possibilities, which is where I take such inspiration from you. And when I look at your work, I just, I always get a smile because, how did he think of that? And of course, the famous spaghetti Medusa. Weren’t you reading a book on Caravaggio? And then just, huh, I might be able to turn this into a Medusa.
Vik Muniz
I was just playing with it, while I was looking at the book. I mean, it was leftover pasta from the day before that I heated up, wasn’t very good. And I was, I was doing a piece at the same time that was actually is at the, is in Rio right now at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio, which is The Descent from the Cross. But I did, I looked at the Medusa, I look at the pasta, and I just changed, oh, put some oil here. And I looked, and then I look good. So I just put it under the camera and took a picture of it. But a friend of mine had put me in a show that I was curating. But I was, I was the curator. I didn’t want to be in the show. It was a show about apparitions. And then she said, what about your work? I said, I don’t have a work. I said, oh, you have to have a work. Oh, I have something. And then I made a print, and I put it on a round frame that I found around here, Union Square. And I found this print, this frame, and I made the print to size, and I gave it to her. She put it under a vitrine. And funny enough, I got a review in the New York Times. And it was, this was Monday when I made the piece on a Sunday, arts and entertainment issue. There was two thirds of a page. It was my plate of food.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And that makes me…
Vik Muniz
It’s funny, I did this in five minutes, and at the same time, there are things that I spent four months making, working with dental tools, masks, gloves.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
The pigment series. We have one of those.
Vik Muniz
Four months working on that thing. And I have to sell them for the same price.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And what that makes me wonder is, it seems to me that many people in the art world really attach the value to you, the artist, the human being, dead or alive.
Vik Muniz
Right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And two things made me really start thinking about that. One was this idea that if Andy Warhol found a dollar bill just lying on the sidewalk here near his factory, and if he took that dollar bill, did a little doodle on it, signed it Andy Warhol, and put a frame around it, it would become worth a hell of a lot more than $1. But then I was also watching, have you seen the film The Last Vermeer?
Vik Muniz
No.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
It’s about the very famous Dutch forger Van Meegeren.
Vik Muniz
Oh, yeah, I’m familiar with him.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
He did a lot of forgeries of Vermeer. And his backstory was very interesting because his own art was a big failure, and he was really upset about this. And so he did all of these fake Vermeers, and famously, he sold one to Göring, the Reichsmarschall, who was, the truth of that man is stranger than you could ever make him fictionally. But the Dutch were very brutal in the way they treated any collaborator. Anyone who was found to be a collaborator was literally tied to a post in the public square and shot publicly. And they said by selling that to Göring, he not only took this wonderful Dutch art and sold it to this monster, but that he was actively collaborating with the Nazis.
Vik Muniz
Actually, I saw the film. Right, yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Now, now I’m thinking about the end of it, though. To clear him, the man who was representing him had him do another forgery. He actually put his representative, his representative in court, his lawyer, into the painting. Nobody noticed. They had all of the famous authenticators would said, yes, this is a Vermeer, et cetera. And then I think the film dramatizes this, but he splashes a solvent on the painting.
Vik Muniz
Yeah, yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And underneath it is Van Meegeren’s signature.
Vik Muniz
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And then Van Meegeren has this moment where he says to the courtroom, isn’t this fascinating? Not a single brushstroke on that painting has changed. Not a single image on that painting has changed. But with that reveal, it went from being priceless to being worthless. And I wonder what you think about that.
Vik Muniz
Well, we live in an era of quantitative value. I think it’s very interesting that before, let’s say, in a time where there was art, criticism was very important and people read about art and that had a sort of, there were movements, there were manifestos. Actually people were influenced by each other. There was, the flows in the art world were easier to identify. Sometimes the opinion of a single individual would just set, things in motion in that particular direction. The idea of quality, even though it was probably artificially developed, like you just mentioned, there were other forces acting upon it. Like in the case of Abstract Expressionism or even, Russian pamphletary posters. And there’s always outside forces that come and shape the taste or the market of art.
But what seems like we live in a digital era, numbers sort of took over, and you mentioned possibilities and statistical value. All of a sudden, great art is the art that sells for a lot of money. Or great images are the ones that get a lot of likes on Instagram and everything became very numerical. But what is interesting, though, is that how do you, you tap into taste when it’s just based on what everybody is looking at? And it’s, how do you, how do you gauge, how do you control, how do you measure these flows when you know, the game is clearly rigged, the algorithms are actually used, they’re designed, they’re biased. They’re not impartial. So there is an enormous control over taste and fashion and the way opinions go around.
And it’s a very scary proposition, I think, because it is just focusing a lot of power in the hands of very specific interests. And people don’t seem to be aware of this. And art is being part of this whole thing because it’s also something very basic. It’s something that it’s very easy to, it’s something that, it’s just like the Plasticine. It’s like what you shape is so primitive. It’s so basic, it’s so, it’s how ideas, visual ideas come, you think visual art is something that, it’s what shapes the rest of it, I feel like sometimes I’m working with clay, in face of all the, all the types of sophisticated media there is around it sometimes.
My first film was called The Worst Possible Illusion because I think I’m dealing with illusion, in the sense that only through illusion that you understand what the reality is. But I cannot compete with people who are at the end of the technology of the simulacrum. At the time, it was Steven Spielberg. Now it’s OpenAI. Instead, I work on the other end of the spectrum of illusion. It’s just we look at something, you go, how can I be fooled by this? You try to get the simplest, the most crudest, because you’re not just fooling people, but you actually giving people a measure of their own belief. How, why do they get fooled by that? I think there’s one work, probably my first photograph. It’s something, and it’s at the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
And I’m so happy that it made it there. It’s just a picture of a nail on a wall. I’ve seen it hung by a real nail. Yeah, it’s called Two Nails. And then what I do sometimes with the pencil, I figure out the light, and I pencil a little bit the shadow to match the shadow. So when you look at it, you see two nails, but when you walk, only one nail moves. Right. I think all my works come from that piece because there’s something that moves, something that doesn’t, something that is physical, something that is not, something that is, things that is like a puzzle that doesn’t really fit. And it’s up to the viewer to actually try to make it fit, even though it doesn’t.
For me the most important thing is actually to create something that is left to the viewer to complete.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And that is one of the central things that I think about all of your work. We collect a variety of artists, and your work in particular always invites my participation. It always, my grandchildren, I love watching my grand, they go in age from about one and a half to 11. And I love, especially the younger ones, when I take them around and ask them what they think about art and guess who’s winning.
Vik Muniz
Yeah. I’m big with children because I have. Yeah. It comes from testing on them.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
But there’s a lot more, as far as I’m concerned, to that, because it is that invitation that gets yourself thinking in terms of possibilities and opening your mind up and saying, wow, that’s really cool. I’d never had that thought. And that’s a real gift, in my opinion, because I’ve met a lot of artists and I’ve dealt with artists all my life because we love art. And there is a certain segment of artists who are the auteur. Right? No, this is my work, and I do this. You said something really funny that I heard when I was going back over your career, and it was about an artist who said that she just did the work for herself and you… and this is why I felt such a connection with you, because you did what I would have done.
Oh, and parenthetically, by the way, I grew up also reading the Encyclopedia Britannica. Anyway, you raised your hand and you said, well, then why do you make series?
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And every time I think of that. I just smile and laugh because you really just nailed it.
Vik Muniz
Make editions. Yeah, yeah. Some important artists, some artists that I really like, but she was giving a lecture. She said, I make work for myself. I don’t make it for anybody. I said, look, so why do you make editions? To which she got really pissed. She didn’t want to talk to me anymore.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
But that’s the other great thing about you, as far as I’m concerned, is you just have such a wonderful, another thing that we seem to lose when they try to mold us out of what we kind of naturally are as children is the spontaneity, the curiosity, but also the sense of humor.
Vik Muniz
Right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And I just love that about your work because it can be both at the same time. And I, I don’t see a lot of other artists where you can see all of those various things at play at the same time and come away kind of with a different feeling.
Vik Muniz
But humor is a strategy. I use visual illusion, for instance, something that is always somewhere there. Because ambiguity is something that you have to inject in the work in order for the image to be interesting.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yes.
Vik Muniz
Or to actually be engaging to some extent. Humor is also a technique which is very similar to visual illusion. What it is like we have, a handicap, a problem because we have a little bit of a bottleneck in the way our thoughts.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Vik Muniz
Or the experience of the world is filtered through our inner self, our thinking. So we can only have one idea at a time. And I have argued with neuroscientists that actually the fact that our eyes are so poorly designed helped us create narratives. We only see a little bit in focus, so we keep moving our eyes in movements called saccades. And that actually what developed the narrative thinking model. That helped us develop ideas in linear way and organize them and create memory. Threads, maybe consciousness comes from the fact that we see things poorly. There is a relationship to the size of brain in animals and how well they see. Crows, for instance, don’t see very well. And they have huge brains. Right. And they’re very intelligent.
Well, humor works in a very similar way because that, with visual illusions. But what it is, we have this bottleneck that only allows us to have a single idea at a time. And what happens is when you’re actually telling a joke, you’re focusing the attention of a specific narrative, and you’re building a structure as you’re giving elements to it, and the person who’s listening to it is actually building it with you. And at a certain point, when this structure is at a certain level, you take a very important part of it and the whole thing collapses. And when it collapses with the punchline, because your entire attention, the world, is based on that narrative thread.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.
Vik Muniz
All the logic collapses and you have a moment of intense relief that is expressed through laughter. You have this spasmodic reaction. And this is because you feel free from all these little constraints, all these little logical things.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. The logic box, it frees, it breaks up the logic box.
Vik Muniz
It breaks up the logic box. And now all of a sudden, you’re free. It creates what Antonin Artaud said, it’s a space for life. Laughter is something very important, in that sense. Well, when you’re looking in the comparison to visual illusion is that with visual illusion, you’re dealing with things that are, you learn how there are structures that you built at, at your entire life. We’re learning to look at things and all of a sudden there’s something that doesn’t work. But the fact that these are so inside of you because you lived with those cues for visual thinking for so long, makes a visual illusion work every time you look at it.
And different than a joke, that if I tell you the joke a second time, it’s not going to be as funny because you’re going to know when I’m going to take that impulse out of it. I mean, but these are all dealing, they’re all structural exercises, and humor. I think everybody who wrote about humor, Freud did, many people did, they weren’t funny, and I think that, yeah, Bergson did. There’s a lot of texts about humor. And they were, I think they got something wrong because in order to write about humor, you have to write it in a funny way. There’s a really interesting book about comic books by a guy named Scott McCloud, and he wrote it in a comic book format. It’s brilliant.
I think you have to use the language of the subject you’re dealing with. And I think this is the practice that I’ve never met a funny person who wasn’t intelligent…
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Nor have I ever. And in fact, I find myself using it as a litmus test.
Vik Muniz
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
If they are not funny or if they don’t appreciate humor.
Vik Muniz
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Thank you.
Vik Muniz
Well, it takes a keen control of language to be able to subvert.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yes.
Vik Muniz
Once subversion is something that you need in order to do it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Humor is incredibly subversive just by its very nature.
Vik Muniz
Oh. You know that you speak another language when you can tell jokes in that language and people are laughing, you can tell jokes in it. People are laughing. Yeah. It means it’s okay. You’re actually doing better.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And it’s coming back to the authoritarian theme, right. Hitler made it the death penalty for mocking him. So he didn’t have a good sense of humor, but he understood the power of humor. So did Mark Twain, where Twain has that great quote where he says that laughter can destroy anything. It can bring down the biggest drags who want to be the head of society. It can just rip through anything. And I think it was Billy Wilder who said, if you want to tell people the truth, you better be funny, because if you’re not funny, they’ll fucking kill you.
Vik Muniz
Well, Twain said also that fiction is more difficult than reality because fiction has to make sense.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right. But you know, I’m working on my, I’ve written four books. They’re all nonfiction, and I’m taking a swing at a fiction thriller. And one of the things that’s really coming through, doing the work is it’s easier to tell the truth in fiction.
Vik Muniz
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Than it is in nonfiction.
Vik Muniz
Well, that, that explains the success of, comic satire in politics. Yeah. That’s really, that is incredible. How when people actually trying to tell you what’s happening in politics, they seem suspicious. And when somebody’s laughing about it, it seems, right. It seems, it’s totally convincing.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Vik Muniz
And you can tell, the preoccupation with humor, it’s something that’s age old, as in the example of Hitler, but still going on.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. It’s just, again.
Vik Muniz
Humorists are being persecuted as we speak.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Exactly. And because they, I have never met a really funny person who is also not really intelligent. It’s because it’s also, it’s that, that’s the key to a good joke. You do get them. You build a structure for them, and they are following along. They’re following along, and then you pull that part out, and it is this, I love the way you phrase it, a relief, because it is life.
Vik Muniz
We were, we’re talking about the idea there’s something there, there’s not something there.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Vik Muniz
I think this is my thing with theater, for instance, comes from the fact that you mentioned something about before, about the ambiguity. The ambiguity immediately forces viewer participation. If you, something that is complete, that is perfectly done, the viewer will look at it, will think of how good the artist is. I’m not interested in that because I don’t even think I’m that good. I think I am good at creating connections, and in a film, you see something that is happening may happen before, was edited, it was cut. But in theater, you’re seeing somebody becoming somebody else in front of you.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Vik Muniz
And you have the actor and the character sort of negotiating a role. How, sometimes in conceptual theater like Brechtian Theater, the actor has to appear as well. Stanislavski were completely opposite to that. But there’s a very funny story that once I paid $40, I think, to see Anthony Hopkins do Lear, he did it for a very brief period of time. And I felt robbed because when the moment the great actor became, the dying king, he was Lear, he was not Anthony Hopkins. And I paid to see Anthony Hopkins. And I didn’t want to see, I’ve seen the King before and I read about it. It’s funny. But then a few weeks later, I paid $5 to see a guy perform Othello in a place in Queens, was an abandoned fire station. And, and this guy, he started out, he was a, his name was Joey.
He was a community theater actor. And he started out, he’s an Italian guy with a face painted black. He was doing Othello. And then in the first five minutes of his performance, he was, the Moorish general. He was Othello. And then he, after five minutes, he became, he was a plumber. I talked to him. Then he became the plumber. And then he became the general and he became the plumber. And then for $5, I had two tragedies for the price of one. But this guy, Joey, while Anthony Hopkins delivered a character, Joey delivered theater. And, the pleasure that I had watching the amateur actor was the fact that I was trying to figure out exactly when the plumber became the general and when the general became. There’s a moment.
And this is, for me, the magic of art is the sublime is when you are looking at something and it’s a landscape and you approach a little bit more and it becomes just pigments, minerals and, paint, just material. And then you go back and it’s a landscape.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. Well, it’s also like the Vermeers at the Frick, right? You get really close to the fur.
Vik Muniz
Oh, yellow.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Vik Muniz
I take students there because what’s fascinating is not that, just that you don’t know why you’re seeing fur.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.
Vik Muniz
Something that looks like a gel when you look back.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yep.
Vik Muniz
The guy, not only he knew how to, how to see fur in something that is just a, a glazed gel looking thing. There’s not one hair painted individually. But he knew how to make it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, well, he was a magician.
Vik Muniz
Yeah. And this is a funny thing. Why, why would he, you try to fake Vermeers from all people. Very difficult to do. You try Duchamp or Miró or something like that. Much easier.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Well, I think that was the reason Van Meegeren did it, because he was like, I can even fake Vermeer.
Vik Muniz
Yeah, that’s very pretentious.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, very very.
Vik Muniz
But I think the idea of being able to just sense what glues, what connects the physical world from what’s outside and inside, I think this is the most, when I think about my work as an artist, for me, the most important thing is to focus on this little fragment of a moment when the outside becomes inside, when something is physical, becomes something, an idea. These are the moments that we miss. Some people spend an entire lifetime without being conscious of this transition.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Vik Muniz
Or because this is what really, this is what defines real consciousness. When you’re fully conscious, you can slow down the process. Some in the East, people do it through meditation. And you create a more porous space between the inside and the outside.
But I find it fascinating when you do it in an everyday life when sometimes just when you hold a cup and the heat from that cup becomes a sensation and you are aware of that. I mean, these little things, they may be insignificant, but sometimes things start adding up and they become a weird soup in which you can create and think of things in a different way.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Which is, I think, the perfect place for us to conclude. We have a tradition here at Infinite Loops. We are going to make you, just for the day, the emperor of the world. But careful, there are rules. You can’t kill anyone and you can’t put anyone in a reeducation camp. I know, I’m sorry, I’m so not fun. But what I am going to do is I’m going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it and it’s going to incept the entire population of Earth. Whenever their morning is, the next morning they’re going to wake up and the two things that you’re going to incept will be in their minds and they’re going to look to whoever they’re with.
Or they’ll say to themselves, if they’re alone, unlike all the other times when I had these ideas and never acted on them, I’m going to act on these two things. What two things are you going to incept into the world, Vik?
Vik Muniz
You are only a child once, but that can last a lifetime.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I love that. You get another one.
Vik Muniz
Another one. Oh, God. Now you got me. I think I only had one.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
You got that one. Well, I think that obviously I think that kind of covers everything, doesn’t it?
Vik Muniz
I hope so
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Because that’s that whole beginner’s mind when you break through to real creativity. I think you have to start looking at the world through the eyes of children again. Because the wonder, we lose the wonder or we have it beaten out of us.
Vik Muniz
Yeah, we start, I think we started out very, we started out right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Oh, yeah.
Vik Muniz
I think we just, education at, oh, who, who said that? I think was Mark Twain. Oh, never, never, oh, yeah, it was Mark Twain. Never let education interfere with.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. Never let, yeah, yeah.
Vik Muniz
School interfere with my education.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
With my education.
Vik Muniz
Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
We’ll make that your second one. All right, Vik, thank you so much for coming on. I love your work, and this has been just so much fun for me.
Vik Muniz
Thanks.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Cheers.
