Chocolate and Peanut Butter

I’ve already written a couple times about artists who use unusual materials to create their artwork. Vic Muniz is another artist who uses materials not usually associated with art making to create his pieces. He’s used everything from chocolate, sugar, and peanut butter to dirt, and even clouds to make his images.
For an exhibition called Cloud Cloud, Muniz had a pilot sky write line drawings of clouds onto the sky above Manhattan and Miami. Muniz was on the ground as the clouds were being made photographing the cartoon like artificial drawings in clouds of clouds. So the image he was trying to recreate became the actual object.


Muniz has also made a series called Equivalents where he manipulated cotton balls to make them look like animals or praying hands and then photographed them in a way that makes them look like old photos of clouds. His work has so many steps and elements involved that it becomes impossible to categorize him as strictly a sculptor, painter or photographer. Just as Muniz is impossible to identify a lot of his work has the same type if identity conflicts. Is it a cloud, a cat, cotton the lines between the differences blur. There's a really video of Vic Muniz called Worst Possible Illusion on his website under the section for Pictures of Clouds where he talks a lot about his work and his thought process.

Muniz’s work has a great since of humor and irreverence. He looks at everything in his life as a source of inspiration and allows his ideas for work evolve from what he encounters. In his TED talk Muniz tells a story about how he became an artist and it began with the fact that he was born in Brazil included an awards ceremony, a job at an add agency and a fight among other seemingly unrelated non art experiences. I like the idea that events in your life can have totally unforeseen consequences way down the road, but they were still working together to get you the point you are at now. In my philosophy class we learned that the world is deterministic which basically means that while we can make choices in our daily lives it is predetermined how everything will work out. I kind of like this idea because it can allow you to believe that everything happens for a reason. You cannot say, “well what if I had done this instead” because you couldn’t have done anything differently. I am an extremely indecisive person and I find it takes a little of the pressure off the decision making process.