Vik Muniz in the Jardim Gramacho
Last night I saw Waste Land, the documentary about artist Vik Muniz spending two years in the Jardim Gramacho, the world's largest landfill (the place where Rio de Janeiro's trash goes). He worked with a group of garbage pickers for an art project. When I think of Vik Muniz, I think of a guy who draws pictures with really unusual pigments. Chocolate syrup, for example.
Vik Muniz, cover of Tribalistas, 2002
This was the cover of an album by a Brazilian supergroup, Tribalistas (Marisa Monte, Arnaldo Antunes, Carlinhos Brown). I'm listening to it right now to get in the mood to write this.
Vik Muniz has never been my favorite Brazilian artist. (That honor belongs to Ernesto Neto.) There is something kind of gimmicky about his work. Look, not only can I draw pretty good, but I can do it in chocolate! I call this kind of art "stunt art."
Despite my judgment, Muniz is about the most successful Brazilian artist in the world. But he was feeling a bit alienated from his success. A guy from a lower middle class background who manage by a combination of luck, hard work, and talent to become a rich, successful artist--you start to think about the people left behind. The people who didn't have your luck or your talent. So he decided to work with the garbage pickers, to see if he could create a project that would help them in some way.
Sebastiao Carlos dos Santos (aka Tiaõ) posing as David's Marat in a bathtub picked out of the garbage
Among the people he chose for his project was Tiaõ (in my experience, virtually every Brazilian I have ever known has some nickname. Tiaõ's real name is Sebastiao Carlos dos Santos). He runs an association of garbage pickers that negotiates prices with recyclers. Garbage picking is a disgusting job, but it is an actual job--these guys are going through and picking up recyclable materials, removing tons of garbage every day. Tiaõ is a self-made politician--he set up the Association of Recycling Pickers at Jardim Gramacho from scratch. The president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio da Silva (Lula), started out in a similar way, so who knows where Tiaõ will end up. I think Muniz probably figured that the best way to help the pickers was to help someone who was already doing a lot to help them. Using his "Marat" photograph of Tiaõ, Muniz created an enormous portrait made of garbage and dirt.
