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Artist's Statement How many people know Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" and how many people have actually seen it? For most, the gargantuan work was not larger than a page on a book or magazine. How many people have actually seen children sprayed with napalm, the surface of a nearby planet or the procedures of an open-heart surgery? Mediated knowledge comes with strings attached: it substitutes the opacity of not seeing for the transparency of seeing through. The Black Forest of myth has been replaced by a crystal garden of holographic distortions. We're equally blind by our ability to see through everything. The man who stands on top of "Spiral Jetty" can't see it better than the man who gazes at it in a book. My work attempts to define the levels of such mediations as if they were a landscape itself. Like a nineteenth century easel painter, I try to render the scenery of signs, trying to depict things, as an Impressionist would insist, as I see them. The landscape has changed, the role of the artist remains the same -- to shed light on the complexities of relationships between mind and phenomena. Vik Muniz |