Best of life
Best of Life by Vik Muniz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-imLfLFsos
In this video, Muniz explicitly distinguishes between the external and internal definition of images – in this case the iconic, culturally significant photographs as they are reproduced by Life Magazine and as they are remembered by Americans who understand them as part of a cultural canon. Were we talking about machine generated art, we could say that Muniz was drawing images from latent space.
Looking at Best of Life now, it’s almost surprising how well Muniz’s work prefigures the sort of close-but-not-quite distortions created by image generators that we are all so familiar with now . It’s so close we could easily ChatGPT our way to an essay or a thinkpiece proving how AI is in fact doing just what Muniz was.
So what if Muniz had used an image generator to make these images? He deliberately presented the series as a set of photographs, taken slightly out of focus to remove evidence of his hand in their making, and printed in halftone to echo their original method of distribution. Since image generators didn’t exist in 1989, was drawing simply a means to a visual end for Muniz?
In a way, yes, but that end was not to have the right image. Rather, it was to complicate the very idea of “having an image” at all. For Muniz to draw these images, he had to think about them in a detailed, thorough way that goes beyond simply remembering or describing them. Drawing-as-thinking and drawing-as-remembering are more important to these works than drawing-as-being or drawing-as-making. An image generator could make images like Muniz’s drawings, but that’s not what the art is here. Remember, Muniz didn’t even exhibit the original drawings.
The distortions and the lack of rightness that Muniz purposely cultivated in this work are impressions of a cultural “latent space” that he shares with his viewers. These impressions are a crucial part of this series, and he had to be the one to make the images to capture them.
So far, the most prominent exploration of latent space is probably the Loab saga, in which image generators were found to consistently produce images of a woman, dubbed Loab, with recognizably-similar horror-movie aesthetics. It’s compelling to talk about Loab as a discovery of some external visual constant, like the original photos (or moments that were photographed) in Best of Life. However, a single Loab image means nothing on its own – it’s humans who named and gathered pictures of Loab together.