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| Vik Muniz - Standard Station (after Ed Ruscha) |
The ever changing concepts of Vik Muniz is a continuously evolving work in progress. His reputation as a contemporary artist/photographer is well documented, encapsulated neatly in the Academy Award nominated film Wasteland. Recently appointed as an ambassador for UNESCO, his exploits as an art trickster continue unabated.
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| Vik Muniz - Standard Station (after Ed Ruscha) |
With the Getty's sponsorship of the Pacific Standard Time exhibitions in Southern California, the master of western Pop art Ed Ruscha is being feted as one of the last vestiges of the old guard. His internationally known paintings such as Standard Station and Hollywood have become as familiar to art connoisseurs and scholars as Andy Warhol's Marilyn images. Ed Ruscha casts a large shadow on Sunset Boulevard, the last giant of an artistic era that melded previous commercial images into high art. In that sense, he and the East Coast Vik Muniz are perfect bed fellows.
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| Vik Muniz - Standard at Night (after Ed Ruscha) |
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| Ed Ruscha - Standard Station Amarillo Texas 1966 oil on canvas |
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Pictures of Car Parts (after Ed Ruscha) is one of the most deeply aesthetic yet least obvious of Muniz' oeuvre. Originally an advertising exec from Sao Paulo, Muniz' choice of Ruscha's most famous work combined with the car culture of Los Angeles is a perfect vehicle for his ever curious eye. In choosing the car parts theme for the Ruscha series, Muniz has taken his art to an even higher conceptual level by not just emulating famous paintings from common material but also in representing an entire way of life.
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| Vik Muniz - Burning Standard (after Ed Ruscha) |
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| Ed Ruscha - Burning Standard 1968 oil on canvas |
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| Ed Ruscha - Los Angeles, California |
In viewing such monumental photographs, the impact from the sheer size creates a statement as big as Los Angeles itself. Using car parts as ephemeral is a sharp contrast to Muniz' usual doughy mediums like peanut butter, jelly and chocolate. And while Muniz has utilized industrial material in the past - most notably the magnificent series
Pictures of Junk where the artist created images from garbage on a Rio basketball court while shooting from the ceiling - those works tended to create as much confusion to the eye as it did convincing. With the Ruscha series, Muniz has brought his emulations into tighter focus, employing a sharp wit that begs the viewer to create the comparison between the original and the vision. In juxtaposing rusted car sheet metal onto steel and then photographing the work in close up, Muniz has been able to create the illusion that the photograph is an actual flat steel sculpture, standing five feet by nine feet across. Yet in viewing the works at a distance, without nuance, the illusion suggests the image is simply a pastiche of the original painting. It's only after close examination that the viewer comes to realize the method the artist employed to create the work.
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| Vik Muniz - 20th Century Fox (after Ruscha) |
With Muniz' advertising background, the three Standard Station images he chose (Standard Station, Standard at Night and Burning Standard) represent a trilogy of graphic representation, an advertisement for not only the the original Ruschas, but for the oil company itself. The obvious logo of the 20th Century Fox Company, still vastly incorporated and well known along with the obscure yet graphic Googie architecture of Los Angeles' Norm's Restaurant, potently remind of not only the iconic significance of these recognized major commercial entities, but also of the effect Ruscha achieved when he created the works almost fifty years ago, just around the time Muniz was born.
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| Vik Muniz - Norm's on Fire (working detail) |
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| Ed Ruscha - "Norm's, La Cienga, on Fire" 1964 |
Five years in it's making,
Pictures of Cars (after Ed Ruscha) is a collision of artistic aesthetic between two major artists - one a noted master, the other a promising art star - which re-informs the work without pandering to it. With Ruscha's artistic roots planted firmly on the West Coast and his painting style with it, Muniz recognized immediately that saturating this new vision with a Los Angeles sensibility was the key to establishing an effect that would pay equal homage to Ruscha as he did to Warhol and Johns, without diverting from his own purity of style. In refusing to play to the joke by overusing spark plug wires and pistons, Muniz develops a subtle difference between the images while employing a medium that allowed for an exacting use of color and form. The brilliance of incorporating a hard edge with the strength of color that car paint on steel allows cannot be ignored, as the effect created becomes dimensional. For the hardest trick to master in photography is depth, the flatness of the printed paper being the foe. In the case of this series, the work appears as heavy as an automobile, as if the work the viewer is seeing is actually a gigantic welded steel object resembling a billboard selling gasoline.
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Vik Muniz - Norm's on Fire (after Ed Ruscha)
This is Muniz' only series to fully embrace the West Coast art movement and is a remarkable and poignant commentary on Ed Ruscha and Los Angeles. The relation of Standard Oil to Los Angeles car culture and the tongue and cheek celebrity wink to Hollywood with the 20th Century Fox imagery serves to further remind of Ruscha's potency as a Pop artist who represents a different rational from his New York peers. For it is only Ruscha that fully employs the edicts of Pop art as defined by the East Coast school while fully claiming it for himself. As Muniz is an intense student of the Pop art movement and has captured every one of it's major works utilizing a style particular only to him, it is the car analogy that nods more to influence as opposed to inspiration. In choosing car parts as the signifier of this series, Muniz shows his understanding not only of Ed Ruscha and his art, but also of the city Ruscha represents. |
In effect, this body of work becomes as much an homage as it does an incredible artistic statement.
Consider it a dual citizenship of artistic expression.....
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| Vik Muniz - Brooklyn, New York |
