Sweet illusion - Vik Muniz's Sigmund, 1997

ArtForum, Sept, 1997 by Andy Grundberg

Vik Muniz's Sigmund, 1997, is a five-by-four-foot color photograph of a drawing made with chocolate syrup on a five-by-four-inch piece of white plastic. Muniz used a view camera mounted on a copy stand to take the photograph, a straight pin to draw the portrait, and Bosco brand syrup as his medium. When he finished, he licked the plastic dean.

Such dislocations of scale, medium, and aesthetic expectation are a source of pleasure to this thirty-five-year-old, Brazilian-born, New York-based polymath; more to the point, they're his artistic stock-in-trade. Muniz calls himself a "low-tech illusionist" - "more in the tradition of Ricky Jay than Siegfried and Roy" - and his legerdemain has the virtue of being both witty and challenging. Photography, with its claims to verisimilitude, plays a large part in the illusions he creates, but the more traditional mediums of drawing and sculpture are essential as well. In the last seven years he has produced drawings based on his memory of famous photographs; photographs of sculptural "drawings" constructed from wire, thread, and cotton balls; a series of bogus newspaper articles incorporating his own bogus photographs; and other conundrums of materiality and appearance.

In an age when the notion of "the original" seems all but overwhelmed by a flood tide of digital technologies and Derridian-do, Muniz might seem the proverbial Dutch boy with his finger in the dike.

Yet for all his work's material uniqueness, "originality" is less a claim than a foil. In the case of Sigmund, the skill and conceptual audacity involved in drawing a portrait with chocolate sauce is mediated by the final product: a photograph. The painstakingly constructed drawing is erased with a swipe of the tongue; all that remains is a second-order representation, a convincing but nonetheless approximate simulation that is somehow stranger and more affecting than the chocolate original.

Muniz taught himself to draw with chocolate syrup not long after mastering the process of drawing with sugar. In both cases, his aim was to stretch the norms of what constitutes artmaking, to produce work that "revolves around the principle of translation." In Sigmund, which is part of his ongoing "Pictures of Chocolate Series," 1997-, the act of translating a drawing into a photograph that recalls a painting opens a gap in the formal and syntactical chain that we construct whenever we attempt to decipher a work of art. This image is, in its own peculiar way, as degraded as a painting on black velvet, but Muniz's ingenuity in choosing his materials and his ability to turn those materials into willing servants of his adaptive draftsmanship enable the picture to comment on the very devices of representation it employs. Sigmund is at once a demonstration of Muniz's mastery over his quirky medium and a reminder of how readily the codes of our common visual experience can slide into travesty.

Of course Sigmund is not only a fascinating translation of means and materials - pin for pen, syrup for ink, plastic for paper - but also a portrait of the founder of psychoanalysis, whose distinctive visage is not only readily recognizable but immediately conjures the whole history of this century-defining discovery. "The chocolate pictures started with the material and then progressed toward the search for suitable subjects. Freud was very appropriate because the piece dealt plainly with desire and representation. Everyone I know loves chocolate, but it is difficult to explain why you love the taste of something. Psychoanalysis was set up to tackle problems of this nature, to give a 'meaning' to emotions, instincts, and sensations," Muniz explains.

Other pictures in the chocolate series include near-photographic images of a couple locked in a Hollywood-style embrace; a woman rowing a boat in a river; another woman dropping a plate on the floor; and a portrait of Napoleon. "I believe all the images in the series to be descriptions of dreams or delusions," Muniz notes, adding that his next undertaking in chocolate syrup will be a re-creation of a famous Hans Namuth photograph of Jackson Pollock making a drip painting.

Muniz's scrambled but apt references to history, and particularly to art history, are as characteristic of his work as they are of Mark Tansey's. In 16, 000 yards (After the 1854 cliche-verre by J. B.C. Corot, Le Songeur), 1996, from the "Pictures of Thread Series," 1995-96, the artist essentially duplicated Corot's experimental photographic drawing of a landscape using an enormous quantity of black sewing thread (the 16,000 yards of the title). In exhibition, Muniz's black and white photographic print is hung near a pedestal displaying a tangled ball of the thread used to make it. The image alludes to the impact of photography's invention on nineteenth-century, artists and, with admirable economy, demonstrates the medium's current ubiquity.

Muniz's sense of play sets his work apart from most recent conceptually based artistic practice, which has often treated the overlap of content and form with painful seriousness. Much as William Wegman and Robert Cumming did in the '70s, Muniz demonstrates that serious conceptions are sometimes best expressed with wit. Coming from a country where the functions of poets and philosophers often overlap, Muniz is fully aware of the meanings of his manipulations and of their relationship to a state of linguistic indeterminacy. It is as if he were illustrating the sensibility of writers like Borges, Calvino, Marquez, Nabokov, and Pynchon, who are able to convey the contingency of meaning even as they construct elaborate chains of signification. As Calvino once put it, "I play the game, in other words, the game of pretending there's an order in the dust, a regularity in the system, or an interpenetration of different systems, incongruous but still measurable, so that every graininess of disorder coincides with the faceting of an order which promptly crumbles."