feast for the eye | vanessa silberman

Vik Munizs Ten Tens Weed Necklace

True political ideas happen out of necessity, not theory, and usually become associated with politics only after their execution. The artist simply has to portray the world as he sees it.
Vik Muniz1

While vacationing on the small Caribbean island of St. Kitts in 1995, the Brazilian-born, New Yorkbased artist Vik Muniz befriended a group of local children. Taken by their joy and abandon, he captured them in Polaroid snapshots. The children took Muniz to meet their parents, who were weary and embittered after years of trading toil for meager pay as they labored on the islands abundant sugarcane elds. The parents lack of hope contrasted sharply with the innocent vitality of their offspring. Back in New York, Muniz thought about the parents and was bothered by the sad metamorphosis most of my little friends were bound to experience.2 He impulsively purchased some black paper and began to draw the childrens portraits by sprinkling sugar on the paper. He then photographed these drawings to create Sugar Children, a series of six intimately scaled portraits. Muniz had frequently made multiple copies of an original image through various media, but Sugar Children marked his rst use of food as an artistic medium. Since completing the series, he has experimented with a wide variety of edible goodschocolate, peanut butter, caviar, spaghetti, and black beansto create works that challenge viewers perceptions while blurring artistic boundaries. However, Sugar Children remains one of his most provocative and fully realized explorations of the historical and political resonance of food. These portraits are powerful not only for their technical mastery but also for their subtle command of the multiple layers of meaning that lurk beneath their sweet surfaces. Munizs use of sugar, a perishable substance, to represent the children accentuates their precarious future, leaving the impression that

they are destined to be consumed, disposed of, and ultimately forgotten. One portrait, Ten Tens Weed Necklace, is particularly gripping. Unlike the other sugar children whose playful expressions light up the page, Ten Ten has a gaze that is haunting and apprehensive. He does not look directly at the camera as the others do; instead, he appears to look slightly past the viewer, as if lost in thought. Ten Ten is the only

Munizs use of sugar, a perishable substance, to represent the children accentuates their precarious future, leaving the impression that they are destined to be consumed, disposed of, and ultimately forgotten.

child whose presence does not seem completely established. Instead, the portrait has a eeting quality, as though the boys likeness could easily disappear. At the same time, the sugar itself appears to be swallowing the boy as his arms fade into a white blur, lending Ten Ten an angelic, ethereal air that the other children lack. Munizs use of sugar offers a pointed commentary on the connections between its consumption in afuent societies and the plight of the indigenous people who farm the cane from which it is made. Once a luxury good, sugar has become so commonplace that its availability is generally taken for granted, as are the lives of those who produce it under harsh conditions. Millions of consumers add the sweetener to beverages and food without ever questioning where it comes from or how it is made. Indifference to

gastronomica: the journal of food and culture, vol.7, no.2, pp.79, issn 1529-3262. 2007 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press s rights and permissions web site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. doi: 10.1525/gfc.2007.7.3.7.

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the workers conditions is similarly true of other commodities that are obtained through the misery of others, such as diamonds, another material that Muniz has used. But unlike Munizs Pictures of Diamonds, in which the subjects (Marlene Dietrich and Elizabeth Taylor) exist thousands of miles away from the source of the commoditys production, the subjects in the Sugar Series are themselves destined to become the source of production. More generally, the use of sugar in Ten Tens Weed Necklace serves a narrative function, summoning a tumultuous, bloody history of agricultural colonialism and exploitation on St. Kitts that dates back over three hundred years. Considered the mother colony of the West Indies, St. Kitts was the oldest and wealthiest of the British colonies in the Caribbean. The Portuguese introduced sugarcane to the island from Brazil in 1640, necessitating the importation of thousands of West African Slaves.3 The islands fertile soil and tropical climate were well suited to this labor-intensive cash crop, and sugar plantations soon became the source of fabulous wealth reaped from the sweat and toil of slave labor. Demand drove the need for greater production, and hence, more slaves. By the eighteenth century there were ten times as many African slaves on the island as Europeans.4 At the peak of production in the nineteenth century, St. Kitts had sixty-eight sugar plantations, a remarkable number considering the islands modest size of just sixty-eight acres. Although many Caribbean islands became wealthy through sugar production, the cultivation of a single non-nutritional export crop in place of self-sustaining and nutritious crops created an economy dependent on the importation of foodstuffs in a widely uctuating market. Slavery was abolished on St. Kitts in 1834, but sugar production continued to dominate the island, with approximately one-third of the workforce laboring in the sugarcane elds. Most of the inhabitants were, and continue to be, descendants of the West African slaves who were forcibly sent to the island. By using sugar to draw the portrait of Ten Ten, Muniz confronted the history of sugar production and consumption head on. His use of sugar further comments on the nature of consumption: the portraits consume sugar in a way that underscores its ephemeral quality as an object to be ingested. They also draw attention to the consumable nature of art itself, especially in todays frenzied market where art has become a commodity like any other.

Right: Vik Muniz, Ten Tens Weed Necklace, 1996.

courtesy of sikkema jenkins
&

co. gallery, new york.

vik muniz / licensed by vaga, new york, ny.

After documenting the original drawing of Ten Ten with his camera, Muniz destroyed it, a fate he imposes on all of his drawings as part of his transformative ritual of destruction. The photographs are the end pieces, the drawings the means of achieving them. Given the context of the St. Kitts childrens lives, a sense of poignancy and regret surrounds the destruction of their images. Perhaps Muniz felt this, too. After photographing each sugar drawing, he placed the sugar in small glass jars (which he tellingly referred to as urns) to which he afxed the original snapshots of the children. This suggestion of sugar transformed into ashes is powerful in its simplicity, recalling both the seasonal burning of the sugarcane and the death of the sugar industry it foretold. In 2005 the St. Kitts government closed down the industry. Since then, many of the former sugar-eld laborers have found new employment cultivating a variety of fruits and vegetables and developing the islands tourism industry. Little did Muniz know during his 1995 visit that his sugar children would escape the sugarcane elds. The demise of the sugar industry in St. Kitts suggests that the potential of Munizs subjects, so evident in his portraits, may yet be realized.g
notes
1. Vik Muniz, Reex: A Vik Muniz Primer (New York: Aperture Foundation, 2005), 63. 2. Ibid., 60. 3. Carl and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 16241690 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 81. 4. Richard Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 16231775 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 13.

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