Vic Muniz.

ICP/WOOSTER GARDENS, NEW YORK 

Whether ordinary guy or an-world regular, we're all pretty sophisticated as viewers by now. In fact, in today's image-driven culture, we've become so good at looking that we can do it very quickly - in a museum, about three seconds per object. But when I visited Vik Muniz's ICP survey - a full show of pictures of pictures filled with shabby fun, a bit like Sherrie Levine crossed with a flea circus - viewers were parked in front of individual photos, staring, laughing, beckoning their companions, pointing. You might think somebody had spotted a flea doing a triple somersault.

Holding our attention today is something of a magic trick, and Muniz has referred to himself as an "illusionist," both a cobwebbed term for magician and a winking dig at the modernist prohibition against pictorial illusion. The current exhibition of nineteenth-century photographs Muniz curated at the Metropolitan Museum of An (drawn from the permanent collection) serves as a glossary for his own interests: photographs of photographs (and shots of drawings and paintings), apparently documentary yet obviously contrived studio photos, deceptive composite prints, an image of a hypnotist and his closed-eye volunteers. These ideas permeated the ICP exhibition of Muniz's own photographs of representational images that were made by hand - I'm tempted to say "from scratch" - out of dirt, sugar, wire, thread, cotton balls, plasticine, chocolate syrup, and yes, even pencil lead. (Only in Muniz's concurrent show at Wooster Gardens are items other than those made by the artist himself - artificial flowers photographed with a lush brittleness - the subject of his image-making.)

The best works in the ICP survey seem conjured by sleight of hand, a hand that puts traditional training in service of new tricks. "Pictures of Thread," 2995-98, is a series of intricate landscapes, each fashioned from thousands of feet of thread (it took 17,500 yards to redo a Claude Lorrain, 4,000 for a Gerhard Richter - I guess modernism's legacy is a reductive one). So why does Muniz photograph these creations? Obviously, like Levine, Richard Prince, and others, he is tipping his top hat to our photo-sensitivity, recognizing that we live in a culture of images, of reproduction. The least successful series here, "Dislocations," stops there, presenting photo captions below empty spaces. More interestingly, when Muniz lends a high-resolution finish (the photographic print) to a decidedly low-res medium (thread, dirt), he complicates and stretches out our viewing time. Looking at The Trout (After Courbet), 1997, we pause - are we seeing a photograph of a fish? An etching or drawing? Oh, it's little piles of dirt. Like that trout, we're hooked.

We see it's a trick, and we want to know how he did it; these odd techniques inspire a curiosity rarely felt by contemporary-art fans. Jackson Pollock, whose work is another exception, did it with a technique that let us imagine him - and ourselves - making his paintings. But in Hans Namuth's famous documentation, Pollock, however anti-illusionist his fatuously flat paintings, deceives in the calculated "revelation" of his spontaneous process. Muniz capitalizes on this distinction in his Action Photo I (After Hans Namuth), 1997-98. The photo of a drawing in chocolate of a well-known Namuth still of Pollock painting - all those ofs! - makes a complex play. Seeing Pollock dripping paint, it's difficult to resist picturing Muniz squeezing a bottle of Bosco; in this sense, both the Namuth and the Muniz photos document performances. Muniz's images, though, only pretend to fool us - he wants us to figure out the secrets to his illusions.

To do so, we need to see into rather than through the images. In the show's catalogue, Muniz describes his earliest photo-work, the series "The Best of Life," 1988-90, as "opaque" and "thick." For these images, he drew from memory various well-known photos, like that of the napalmed, screaming Vietnamese girl, then photographed the results. So many layers of reception and creation produce thick and dirty photographs, piling on the sediment of experiences with other media, other images. At first glance, as Muniz recounts in the catalogue, the results look like badly printed versions of the familiar images. The marks and distortions insert Muniz as a palpable presence in his dense photography; both makers and viewers finally exist inside the images, leaving fingerprints and seeing things that aren't there. Or things that are too obviously there. In the series "Equivalents," 1993, shots of cotton balls designed to look like a cloud that uncannily resembles a cat (Kitty Cloud) teasingly recall Alfred Stieglitz's abstract, emotive photos of cumuli. But Muniz's humorously heavy-handed "subliminal" technique does not necessarily come from the history of photography. In the catalogue, he recalls an early job in advertising (or is this yet another fabrication?), as a different kind of illusionist, airbrushing naked people into the ice cubes of a whiskey ad. Wherever he learned it, Vik Muniz knows photography's power to seduce, to lie - to make the unreal patently real. Even more, he understands the valiant absurdity, in this day of high-tech, high-resolution, virtual images, of using our hands to draw, paint, or sculpt something that looks real. Really, it's no sillier or more magical to make a face out of chocolate than charcoal.