Victoria Olsen

Vik Muniz, "Memory Rendering of Man on the Moon," (1990)In class this week we're looking at originals and copies.  Today we listened to songs that my students suggested alongside their cover versions.  One student said that one difference between the two versions was always one's own associations with each.  That is, memories can get in the way of a "pure" experience.

Here, Brazilian artist Vik Muniz interrogates the original and the copy from the opposite direction. What if we made art from what we remembered instead of treating the memory as an aside or a distraction from the "real thing"?  In this series Muniz drew what he remembered of iconic images (here, Neil Armstrong walking on the moon) without reference to the original photograph.  He then photographed his drawing and printed it as a halftone (as newspapers do).  The result is a highly mediated image that makes us question each stage of its artistic process: mind, hand, film, print.  Where is Neil Armstrong in this?  In our collective memory, from which Muniz retrieves him in a uniquely personal way. This memory is both a shared tradition and Muniz's own vision.  His art then connects the two.

But what intrigues me most about this image is its formal reversals.  The white shape on the black background is already commenting on our assumption that we make art by putting marks on a white background or blank canvas.  Instead of the black print on white screen you are looking at now, Muniz gives us white-on-black and an abstract, faceless rendering of the artist/human.  It's alien in the best sense.