Best of Life

Vik Muniz likes to play games. In 2001 Muniz employed a skywriter for two months to draw very childish pictures of clouds over Manhattan and other major American cities. When people look into the sky, they expect to see clouds, but never a drawing of a cloud. This was a drawing of a cloud, made out of clouds. This is an example of how Muniz likes to play with how we see things and how drawings and images are presented to us, and how the lines can become so blurred that we are not sure what we are looking at anymore. 

Muniz likes to challenge what people think they know about images, by presenting them in an unexpected way. Just like when a child picks up a stick and draws a circle with lines radiating from it in the sand, we automatically see the sun; Muniz explores the representation of images. If we see Da Vinchi's Mona Lisa made out of peanut butter and jelly, is it still the Mona Lisa?

One of Muniz's first works was a series called Best of

 Life. In this series he gathered very iconic and potent images of the time, images that had been heavily circulated and regu

rgitated by the media. From memory, he drew these images in pencil, and rendered very close copies of them. Anybody looking at these reproductions would believe them to simply be the real photograph, but when compared to the original, it is astonishing to see the differences. Here Muniz is showing how distant we are from images we think we know everything about. We see certain signifiers and straight away 'know' that it is the image we think it is. He is trying to get his audience to stop and think and observe the image a little more closely.

The outcome of my project has been greatly influenced by Muniz's approach to making art. The idea of things being there but not being able to see them is one that i have been able to implement well with the help of UV light. The function of wallpaper, which is traditionally used to make a room more homely and inviting, can be destroyed by rendering a brick wall onto it, which is classically seen as cold and hard, not what you want from a living room. 

Overall, i have enjoyed researching Muniz, it has given me some insight into the workings of representation and has taught me to be abit more humourous in my approach to making art.