Film Review: Waste Land by Lucy Walker

Waste Land, by Lucy Walker
Playing November and December at Select Theaters

(Reprinted from For Your Art)

The catadores, or trash pickers, of the Jardim Gramacho dump outside of Rio de Janeiro can deduce a person’s class by their garbage. Small bits, in re-used grocery bags, indicate someone hovering near poverty line. Playboy magazines, shoes that could have sustained much more wear, old technology — all these lead the catadores to conclude the dumper was middle or upper-class. The pickers can be analytic, even philosophical, in their jobs. They know which piles have valuable potential; some also reflect on the meaning of their labor.

Waste Land, a new documentary film by Lucy Walker, follows artist Vik Muniz as he makes photographic portraits of Jardim Gramacho’s catadores. Muniz’s builds images out of all sorts of materials -- dust, ash, to chocolate -- and then subsequently photographs the material; it is, in some respects, a reuse and reinvention, an ideal artistic metaphor for the life of the catadores. The optimism of Muniz’s work suits his subjects here as well: the catadores, at their most optimistic, can transform their existence in trash into one of dignity.


Waste Land, which is playing in November and December in theaters across the United States, is a series of vignettes about the pickers who become the subjects of Muniz’s photographs. We meet Tiaõ, the leader of the Association for the Pickers of Jardim Gramacho (ACAMJG), who becomes one of the protagonists of the film. We meet Isis, Irma, Suelem, and Magna. We meet an elderly gentleman, Valter, who is compelling not only for his pithy philosophy, but for his comfort with his status as a picker and his fundamental belief in the value of his life. Then there is Zumbi, who dreams of building a library of discarded books.

As each player tells his or her story, Muniz becomes absorbed. He is inspired by their cooperation, horrified by the conditions, and is taken up by their tragedies. He is also captured by a poetic idea: using the garbage collected by the pickers, and arranged by them, to create their own portraits, one of which will be subsequently sold at auction in support of ACMAJG.

Yet what starts as a feel good film (partially motivated by big ticket concerns over over-population, the need for sustainability, and the horrors of poverty, not to
mention, self-satisfied with its bullish belief of redemption through
art) becomes a complicated moral knot. Muniz begins to recognize the potential for extreme harm in his actions, the moral ambiguity of his pursuits, and the vulnerability of his subjects. In a sharp moment, Muniz is interrogated, “What are you going to do, bring them to London?” In other words, what can Muniz do for the catadores now that he has shown them art and offered them a more comfortable job for a brief period of time? Can they return, with any sort of contentment, to the landfill?

The artist, from a working class family, came into some money after a bizarre turn of events in which he got shot in the leg. Afterward, Muniz left Brazil for the United States and worked a variety of odd jobs before achieving a successful career in the arts. Once the beneficiary of strange fortune, Muniz would now appear to be the bearer of good fortune at the landfill, but it’s not a role he can fully live up to. Unforeseen were the complications and troubles of his involvement with the catadores. Muniz has the power to improve the catadores’ life for a short time, but ultimately is powerless to truly transform their lives.


Hiring the catadores to be part of his photography practice—taking them temporarily away from the landfill—is akin to giving a person candy for the first time. On one hand, the experience throws into sharp relief the previous candy-less existence, which can lead to despair. On the other hand, the taste of this sweeter reality can lead to a transformation, the creation of a desire to make such a reality permanent. The worst outcome, however—and this hovers in the background in this film—is that candy isn’t good for the person. The introduction of this troubling element in their lives, in fact, may harm a person who had been quite content.

Waste Land faces these dilemmas as Muniz does, and the outcome is worth observing. This is a rich documentary, exquisitely structured and emotionally penetrating. The character to watch, however, is Muniz. The moral ambiguities he faces as he realizes his ambitious work face anyone trying to effect a change inside of a large problem. The outcome is not always uplifting. This film has the admirable courage to show this tough side of giving back.

Blinky Palermo

Blinky Palermo: Retrospective 1964-1977
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Through January 16th, 2011

(Reprinted from Artslant.com)

Blinky Palermo was born Peter Schwarze in 1943, subsequently adopted he became Peter Heisterkamp. And, as far as I know, there are at least two origin stories for why, around 1964, his name changed again to Blinky Palermo.

First, some say his teacher Joseph Beuys gave him the moniker because of Heisterkamp’s resemblance to the famous gangster and boxing promoter (Beuys loved boxing), and this makes a certain amount of sense: origin myths and the magic of names (his name especially) were central to the elder artist’s practice.

Beuys was the master of the Kunstacademie Düsseldorf, the most famous living German artist, and, not the least, a diva. I can imagine Beuys, from his figurative height atop the apex of German art, bestowing the nom de guerre “Blinky Palermo” onto Heisterkamp, along with it the secrets of the artist as, in Beuys' words, both “shaman and showman.” It was as if Beuys was trying to bring his student Heisterkamp into a type of artmaking where your name and art practice become ever more massive, appropriating the myths and history of the German past, concocting new myths, and asking for everything. What was expected was nothing less than a complete transformation, starting with the personal and concluding in political revolution.

Think of Anselm Kiefer (two years younger than Palermo), and how more than anything else, his self-portrait and personality are the origin and center-point of his oeuvre. Beuys and Kiefer are part of a German cult of personality rooted in the stridently romantic Teutonic past, where a lyric poet or an opera composer could unlock the secrets of the universe and heal the world.


Viewing Palermo’s work at LACMA, however, the other story of how Heisterkamp became Palermo becomes more probable. This story holds that he came up with name in his studio, alongside his friend and studio mate, Klaus Wolf Knoebel. Klaus Wolf had already changed his first name to “Imi,” after a shortened form of goodbye he shared with his friends prior to studying in Düsseldorf. Both epithets in this version are more friendly nicknames and less career posturing stage names.

The two young artists were influenced heavily by Beuys, but in important ways were removed from him and had different values. Knoebel, for a case in point, later occupied the classroom next to Beuys, and Knoebel’s room 19 (his first major work being even called Raum 19, 1968) becoming an intellectual counterpoint to the activities of Beuys’ room 20. Knoebel and Palermo had other interests in mind than mythology that would grow their names into out-sized egos that Deutschland could rally behind.

Though this may have shifted later on for Knoebel, they wanted something more humble, more ethereal, more fun, an art that neither needed to become a political party nor needed to unify the universe. In fact, looking at LACMA’s important presentation of Palermo (along with several works by Knoebel and Gunther Forg for comparison), it is wonderful to take in just how basic Palermo is and how un-ambitious his project is as an artist.


While Beuys would make a metaphysical postulations about primal conditions of heat and conservation, Palermo just seems to ask questions like, “Can I get something from the Utopian forms of Malevich without buying into his mysticism?” or “Can I just have the dynamism of basic shapes playing intuitively on a canvas, sensing a purpose in the play yet not needing a reason?” Palermo’s funky result is Composition with 8 Red Rectangles, 1964.

When Kiefer is walking Germany, taking pictures of himself in the compromised poses of the Third Reich, wanting to boldly address the very raw and recent past, Palermo asks if there a tonal, jazzy way to make a connection between two roughly drawn triangles as in Devoted to Thelonious Monk, 1969. Palermo wants the essential intuitive energy of basics and fusses over the details in order to achieve it.

I don’t use the phrase un-ambitious in a derogatory way, instead Palermo’s inquisitive, almost philosophical lack of ambition, his ability to take art to its rudimentary starting points and discover invention in those humble beginnings is exactly what makes him charming. There are no wails and grinding of teeth, no existential dilemmas. Actually, what is strangely present is a bit of comedy, mostly as the expense of American modernists.

Palermo, for instance, admitted an interest in moody Americans such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, eventually moving to New York in 1973 and living there for two and a half years, longing for a formal modernism whose sun had set. However, the spirit with which he approached figures like Newman and Rothko is with a playful spirit, as in works such as Time of Day I, 1974-75.

Both Newman and Rothko would have probably balked at the achievement of Palermo in the largest room of the LACMA exhibition, where he used purchased fabric to mimic painting, offering expanses of color and wispy transitions of hues. They smack of a Duchampian joke on Newman and Rothko yet they have the visual impact, they have the punch. That they are cloth and not paint is no matter to Palermo. “I believe in you guys,” he seems to be saying, “just allow me to find your beauty in things other than paint.”

LACMA is full of these charming moments (charm being a word easy to use with Palermo), tracking his early explorations into his larger cloth works (the highlight of the show), into his later paintings on aluminum (which American audiences know from Dia). Palermo is delightfully relevant to, but different from, both his German peers as well as the American artists he admired.

Maybe Heisterkamp liked “Blinky Palermo” because it’s a jazzy name just like often his paintings and arrangements can be jazzy. Ultimately, Palermo strikes me as wide eyed and into America in the way that Piet Mondrian was in Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-43, interested in relaxing formal concerns in order to pick up the pulse of things, the feeling of surroundings.

This explanation seems just as likely as anything else.