“The really magical things are the ones that happen right in front of you. A lot of the time you keep looking for beauty, but it is already there. And if you look with a bit more intention, you see it.”

 Vik Muniz

Clouds here in Lisbon loom overhead pregnant with moisture. It has been raining on an off all day.  In an attempt to try and get out of the house in spite of these uncooperative elements, I thought you, me and Maria could all head to Belem and check out the Vik Muniz exhibit.   I first saw his work in a bad-ass documentary called "Waste Land."   On a trip to São Paolo, Vik was disheartened by the plight of a group of people called catadores, self-designated pickers of recyclable materials who work and live in  one of the world's largest garbage dumps, Jardim Gramacho, on the outskirts of the city.   He began taking photos of some of the catadores and then began to paint huge portraits of them with the garbage from the dump.  It's funny because when the film starts and he begins explaining his "art" project to these people they are completely perplexed.  It's a "what the fuck is this motherfucker talking about" moment and they can't possibly imagine a life outside the dumps much less having the luxury of making art.  As the process continues over a 3 year period they began to understand and actively participate in the project.  It becomes a jumping off point for many of them as they begin to see the world in a different light and for the first time start thinking of possibilities beyond the mountains of people's waste.   It's is amazing and I hope you get a chance to see it if you already haven't.  I love the idea of using otherwise discarded items and people to create something truly beautiful and inspiring.  I have to admit when I first started looking at the collection I immediately felt a little apprehension as it appeared to be heavy in a kind of Andy Warhol "pop." But the more I looked and the more pieces I came across I couldn't help but smiling.  Vik seems to have the kind of eyes that we all have as children, heavily tinted by a wild and playful imagination.  The kind of eyes that can change a plate of vegetables into a multicolored symphony orchestra.   Whatever people want to label it , it really made me feel like a kid again and reminded me how much the world at it's best is shaped by what we see in it.  I wish you could have been here and even tried to call you while staring at a particular piece that had been painted in chocolate.  I  couldn't stop thinking how much your punk ass would have loved it and how much I would have loved to been walking through the exhibit with you. Below are some of the pieces that I liked or reminded me of you.  Have a good Sunday shithead! 

                                 

  

  

Vik had a series of pieces that he made with chocolate. While he was experimenting with the process he realized because of its relatively perishable and temporary state he had to paint faster and faster to get out what he wanted, before the chocolate solidified.  This reminded him of how Jackson Pollack used to paint sometimes in what could be interpreted as a kind of dance.  So he made a portrait of Pollack in his process out of chocolate.  I am sure you would have gotten us kicked out of the museum for trying to eat this one.

 

This one is a portrait that reminded me so much of you.  Something in the expression. At first she seems to be sad and then I realized she wasn't sad, she was just looking directly at you in a state of pure innocence, emotional beauty and a "what the fuck do you want?" I literally stared at it for at least 10 minutes convinced that if I waited long enough eventually you would materialize in front of me.  It was made completely out of plastic children's toys.

The first is a portrait of a Hollywood movie star made entirely of diamonds, the second a portrait made of ketchup. I almost got myself kicked out of the museum trying to put some of this on my hotdog.

The one on the left was one of my favourites.  Vik hired a plane and had used the vapor trails to draw clouds.  There is just something pretty god damn amazing about a drawn cloud in the sky.  It's as if for one brief moment reality became a comic book.   I am glad Maria came.  She really enjoyed it. Every time I found her she was scribbling notes and completely absorbed in the work.  She smiled when I read her your text message.

 

This one is completely made of string and needles.  It was one of my favorites and also really made me think of you.  Something about that quote about architecture being a combination of science and art is really captured here. 

These were two of the the pieces that initially struck me as kind of pop, but I still loved them.  The one on the right was part of a pair of portraits.  Garbage recreations of Goya and Caravaggio.  The one on the left was a bird sitting in a dream made completely from paper cuts.

One of the other things that makes me really admire him besides his imagination is how he "feels" the world. A lot of his pieces like this one were focused on making things we normally try to ignore like poverty, injustice and waste and making the people who are most affected by them something more in his depictions. Highlighting something terrible that people should see and making his subjects believe in hope through art.  This was a series of children who live on the streets made out of sugar.

 I am going to finish this entry with a coupe of cool things I learned about him while doing some research and a quote from his movie.  I hope you enjoyed the exhibit with me and Maria.  I know I did.  You make me smile.

**Vik says his grandmother taught him to read at a young age, but according to a system that identified complete words, not syllables or letters. That meant he consequently had trouble writing when he entered school, and during those first two frustrating years of schooling turned to a more universal language: drawing.

**Vik credits the painting A Child’s Head by Peter Paul Rubens as the work of art that prompted him to become an artist, and a trip to Europe as the moment he felt he could live up to the title. Facing Hungarian guards without a visa, Vik was asked to prove he was an artist and sketched a clipboard picture of one of his interrogators holding a machine gun. “He looked at it,” Vik says, “and said, 'Oh, indeed you are an artist! Can you sign it?' After that… I could call myself an artist.” 

**He returned from Europe to New York City with about $100 to his name, a piece of plasticene, a camera and some film. Vik made a sculpture. He liked it, but having used all the plasticene, he took a picture of the sculpture, destroyed it and made a new one. Soon he had 60 pictures of the same lump of plasticene as different sculptures. A friend offered to print them for him, and the result was a 1992 solo show, Individuals, featuring the photographs alongside empty pedestals representing the missing sculptures.

**If drawing was one half of the equation, compulsive curiosity was the other. One day the Encyclopedia Britannica arrived at his house via wheelbarrow — Vik’s father had won it in a pool game. Instantly, the book was Vik’s link to the mysteries and details of the outside world. “It was like the Internet,” he recalls. “But, you know, for primitive people.”




“The beautiful thing about garbage is that it’s negative. It’s something that you don’t use anymore. It’s what you don’t want to see. So, if you are a visual artist, it becomes a very interesting material to work with because it’s the most nonvisual of materials. You are working with something that you usually try to hide.” V. Muniz

Kiss my Asimov

It was the summer of 1975 and in the small New Mexican town of Santa Fe, two very important events were on a collision course with each other. Events that would forever change the cultural make-up of our universe. One was happening somewhere in a seminal pool and the other was being written out onto paper as a work of science fiction. One would go on to become one of Isac Asimov's collection of short stories and the other would turn out to be me. OK, Maybe only one of these events would have any bearing on culture. But, Isac Asimov would end up having a pretty good run as well. As long as I can remember my mother used to tell me a story about my birth. She had said that because I was the first baby born in December, that Isac Asimov had dedicated a signed copy of one of his books to the local public library in my name. I can't say which one it was because it always seemed to change. Sometimes it was "I Robot," other times it was one of the "Foundation" series. The constant changing of the book, being the first baby born in December on the 14th and the fact that a lifelong New Yorker would dedicate a book to a child in some small town in the middle of the desert never quite reinforced the validity of her tale.
I think it was her way of getting me to take an interest in reading. I am guessing her logic was that if I felt some sort of connection with a particular author I would be more inclined to delve into their work. It was no coincidence I guess that she decided to choose an author that in his lifetime would publish more than 390 books. Maybe she just smoked a lot of Marijuana. Whatever the reason I love her for it anyway. I did grow up feeling some kind of embryonic connection with Asimov and with science fiction in general. I loved science fiction not only for its futuristic vision of the world but also enjoyed it for it capacity to explain and experiment with relatively complicated ideas. The caring for our Global environment and survival, the future of energy, the future of the human species and how we reproduce and alter ourselves, our technological devices and their effects on our culture, the clash of ancient tradition and the changing reality, these are all ideas that have created a conversation about where we are headed and what possible futures await us depending on our current action or inaction. It's a shame that it's a conversation that has been confined to the pages of a peripheral literary sub-genre.



This is a video where asimov is speaking about the future of learning and basically predicts the internet.



An exhibit I would have loved to see in London.