Wasteland

Citation: Waste Land. Dir. Lucy Walker, João Jardim and Karen Harley. Almega Projects and O2 Filmes, 2010. Film.

Summary:

Waste Land is a documentary film that tells the story of Vik Muniz, a prominent Brazilian artist who lives and works in New York ,and who travels down to Brazil to visit one of the world’s largest landfills. While he’s there he embarks on a collaborative project with the people who collect and separate  the trash—known as pickers—and they make large scale works of art using the trash. The movie was inspiring when attention was focused on the lives, hardships, and aspirations of the pickers, but Vik Muniz is a rather self-centered artist (haha, what artist isn’t?!), and an argument could be made that he simply exploited the pickers for his own social do-gooder agenda, fed them false hope, and wrapped it all in a blanket of supposed altruism in order to continue his career as an artist. The film was disillusioning in this sense. 

Response:

This documentary was inspiring and moving to say the least, although I still am hesitant to claim that it is all because of Vik Muniz. I wasn’t inspired by him nearly as much as I was inspired by the incredible people he worked with (or should I say who he had working for him). At times I was on the verge of tears hearing the tales and hopes of the pickers, and at others I was disgusted by Vik’s first-world, high-end artist mannerisms and his phony understanding of third-world problems that he claims to have at the end of the film, sitting in his upscale New York loft, twirling a globe, claiming that he has no more desire for material possessions and that he is grateful for the “simple” things in life.  However, despite how disillusioning this documentary was, in combination with the book The Reenchantment of Art, I can say confidently that I am seriously re-evaluating my own artwork and my own aspirations as an artist and a person in general. I am feeling extremely uncomfortable in the sense that I do not feel that my art has as much of a purpose as it could given the amount of time and love and energy I invest into every piece. People tell me my art brings them varied amount of sensation, which is great, but at the end of the day it is art that I am making on a search for myself—which I believe is what I am expected to do at this point. Sure, there may be some underlying social-psychological commentary or meaning that can be drawn from my work, but I am now very inspired to do some research, become aware, become involved, and make work that can have a positive and greater impact…even if that impact lies in the concepts that fuel the work…it doesn’t have to be some grand production, and for me I don’t think that is possible at this point early on in my career, but it must be more than a self-gratifying search for self. Saying this, at the same time I cannot be a pretender and make art toward a means that I don’t fully understand, or as  fake altruism, or according to anyone else’s agenda.

 

Right now I am in the mode of creating first, analyzing second. My work all starts out as a visual narrative that I bring to life three dimensionally with clay. In the process of creating, I analyze, think, and find meaning within my work that I verbalize after the piece is constructed. This is working for me…or should I say it has been working for me…but now after reading The Reenchantment of Art and watching this film I feel rather at a standstill, and I don’t really know which way to turn. I don’t even know if I should be making objects anymore!??! Aaaa!!!

But I do have some questions about Wasteland:

Did Muniz actually ever pick trash? Or did he just minimally delegate the pickers he was “helping” from high up on the rafters?

Why did he feel he had to reference art-historical paintings in the projects he did with the pickers? I understand the Marat influence, but aren’t these people incredibly significant in their own right and so far detached from this “art-about-art” reference that it doesn’t make sense? Or does the concept lie in this detachment and the elevation of the mundane to the status of high-art? Did he do this in order to get into a museum/gallery/auction in order to make money? Is this ok if the money wasn’t for him?

Did he actually help these people or just feed them a sense of false hope? We can take what we want from all their testimonies but to me this movie was very tragic in this sense, however uplifting it was at times.