Art © Vik Muniz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
On view
Narcissus,
2005
To make this photograph, Muniz perched on scaffolding high above the floor of his studio and used a laser pointer to direct his staff and art students in arranging trash and detritus into a composition resembling a sixteenth-century painting of the Greek mythological youth Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection. The work is part of the series Pictures of Junk, in which Muniz arranged garbage to mimic famous paintings of mythological scenes. The artist hired catadores, garbage collectors who scavenged for a living in the Jardim Gramacho landfill, near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to serve as models for these works. In creating this illusion out of debris, Muniz emphasizes how picture-making itself is a process of reflection and transformation.
Comparative illustration: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Narcissus, ca. 1597–98. Oil on canvas, 113.3 × 97 cm. Palazzo Barberini, Barberini Gallerie Corsini Nazionali, Italy
More Context
As their collective title implies, the photographs in the series <em>Pictures of Junk</em> portray metal detritus on the floor of Muniz’s workspace in Rio de Janeiro. Yet the pictures also (not incongruously, although one might expect so) share an iconographic lineage with old master narrative paintings of the pagan pantheon. Muniz perched with his view camera in a cherry picker high above the floor, and used a laser pointer to direct a studio staff composed of local teenagers. Here, they reconfigured the trash into the form of Caravaggio’s <em>Narcissus</em> (1597). Ultimately, Muniz’s subject is illusionism itself, photography’s inheritance from a history of physical and optical craft that stretches back beyond the Romans and the Greeks to the origins of human intelligence. As his art reminds us, all picture-making is a process of reflecting and recycling that turns mere materials into stuff of the mind.
More About This Object
Information
2005
South America, Brazil, Rio de Janeiro
The artist. [Sikkema Jenkins & Co., now Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, New York, NY, after 2004]; purchased by the Princeton University Art Museum, 2006.
Narcissus, after Caravaggio
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 267 (illus.)
- "Acquisitions of the Princeton University Art Museum 2006," Record of the Princeton University Art Museum 66 (2007): p. 41-74., p. 62
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), p. 319
