I have strong feelings about the word “appropriation.” It conjures negative associations for me, like anonymity, deceit, or lack of agency. My interests as a critical writer have often revolved around tracing the origin of a cultural object or activity, and I entered “Altered: Appropriation & Photography” at Edwynn Houk both curious and apprehensive. I wondered how the four artists in the exhibition — Sebastiaan Bremer, Lalla Essaydi, Robert Heinecken and Vik Muniz — might expand the conversation around creating visual meaning in an image-saturated world. When we see something, we put ourselves — our perspective, our knowledge, cultural index — in it. How might drawing our attention to the altering change how we make meaning of what we see?

Photography destabilizes the presumed “authority” of perspective in Western painting. Paintings tend to make the story of the image clear, providing nearly all of the cues for meaning making. Photographs often leave something out. In a candid snapshot, for example, we only see a portion of the scene, such as smiling revelers posing in front of a parade float, while the beer cans at their feet have been cropped out of view. Photographs emphasize the detail, giving a viewer more autonomy in constructing the image narrative. When we look at photographs, we often have to fill in the blanks. Bremer, Essaydi and Muniz frequently borrow images from the past, but how does re-casting historical images situate them in the present? What story can the image tell us now?

Bremer’s “Eye” series (2012) re-makes quotidian portraits into haunting abstractions by enlarging a detail — in this case, one of the eyes of famous art historical figures, including Arp, Ernst and Giacometti, among others. The meticulously painted-over surfaces transform the images from portrait photographs to hybrids that blur the boundaries between painting and photography.

Titian’s painting Tityus (1548-49), which serves as source material for Muniz’s Prometheo, After Titian (2005), visualizes the myth of Ticius, who was murdered by Apollo and Diana for the rape of their mother, condemned to the underworld where buzzards would feast on his liver for eternity. Muniz creates a tongue-in-cheek response with a play on words in his updated version. In Greek mythology, Prometheo is a Titan and trickster figure, credited with defying the gods to create man from clay. Using a collection of junk consumer goods like old car and engine parts, broken electronics, bottle caps and crushed soda cans, Muniz’s “titan” serves as a reminder that in the quest for material knowledge or wealth, man should be careful to avoid the ills of excess.

Although visually affecting, Essaydi’s photos from the “Les Femmes du Maroc” series (2008) leave me wanting. Her images imitate women in Orientalist paintings from the 18^th and 19^th centuries, drawing inspiration from works like Delecroix’s Women of Algiers (1834) and Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque (1814). The Middle Eastern women were often presented as generic and eroticized, since social constraints prohibited artists from sketching women in person.

In the series, Essaydi’s women are draped in white and their flesh is covered with henna tattoos of faux-Arabic calligraphy — calligraphy in the Arab world is viewed as an art form for men and henna tattooing one for women, performed by women, often in harems or women’s spaces in the home. Essaydi’s use of the faux-writing suggests a level of access and familiarity that would likely be denied to men, and Westerners as well, since calligraphy is an art form closely tied to religious practice.

The backgrounds — also inscribed with sepia-colored writing — along with the women don’t create a convincing disruption to the Orientalist imagery from which she borrows. What does it mean to isolate these women as only (generic) Arab or create faux-text that signifies an (anonymous) Other? Doesn’t Essaydi’s continual use of anonymity keep the woman locked in a universal Arab identity, one symbol that is easily swapped out for another and a trope she aims to avoid?

Heinecken, whose retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art continues through September 7, is unlike the other artists in the exhibition. He culled source material exclusively from the popular culture of the time, such as magazine advertisements and television. His juxtapositions and re-mixes examining notions of masculinity and femininity, sex and sexuality, highlight the ways that society trains us to interpret visual information, making his criticism all the more unsettling.

In Recto/Verso (1989), a portfolio of 12 Cibachrome photograms, Heinecken provocatively contrasts various images of women. In one scene, a Chanel advertisement for red nail polish and lipstick sits on top of a photo of a model wearing an elegant black cocktail dress. A jagged, blood-red smear of the lipstick slashes across her neck and pools of polish dribble dots like blood-spatter on her face. Heinecken’s images make us uncomfortable not only because he is a man commenting on the ways women are portrayed in popular culture, but also because his pairings make it plain just how twisted some of our ideas about beauty, personal agency and desire are.

Photography underscores the ways in which a viewer can shape, construct and reconstruct reality: nearly any story becomes possible by mixing up the visual clues. In “Altered” appropriation breaks out of its shadowy shell — at least in my mind — and changes into a useful tool for re-making and questioning meaning in the visual world.

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Vik Muniz cuts a sympathetic figure as the star of Lucy Walker’s documentary film, Waste Land, which screened in New York last fall at the Angelika Film Center and will be available on video this coming spring.  His playful artistry has garnered him wealth and fame, and led him to the pursuits of the virtuous rich: philanthropy and social change.  Rather than simply writing a check, Muniz has embarked on a high-wire project of social reform through the transformative power of art.

Walker’s film charts the production of Muniz’s latest series, “Pictures of Garbage.”A consummate draughtsman, Muniz is known for re-creating images recognizable from art history (Warhol’s Marilyns, past masters’ Greek myths) using unlikely materials such as dirt, diamonds, chocolate syrup, and plastic toys, with a photograph of the completed image always the end result.  On this occasion, Muniz employed garbage pickers from the Jardim Gramacho landfill in Brazil to help him create large portraits of themselves out of refuse collected from the site and return the proceeds from the sale of the resulting artworks to the workers’ cooperative. The artist’s jovial demeanor and idealism carry him through the film like a benevolent ringmaster, under circumstances where a man with more self-doubt or heightened situational awareness might crumble under the moral ramifications of his stated vision;“to change the lives of a group of people [using] the same material that they deal with every day.”

The film follows a group of catadores (pickers) who pluck recyclable materials from the dump, reselling it to eke out a living.  In Brazil catadores are among the most socially marginalized; coming from backgrounds where the only other options are the drug trade or prostitution, they have chosen trash. Though they take pride in their work and are quick to describe its environmental merits, it is unsanitary, unsavory, and deeply unpleasant. 7,000 tons of garbage arrive at Jardim Gramacho daily from Rio de Janeiro and surrounding areas. The stench is unbearable. At night there are fires, completing the illusion that this place is hell on earth. Though catadores can earn double the minimum daily wage, the hazards are extreme. Injuries from the garbage trucks are common, as is finding headless corpses among the trash (casualties of the drug and gang wars nearby). Suelem, who has worked at the landfill since childhood, tells a harrowing story of finding a dead baby. Then, there are the leprosy outbreaks. A worker named Isis states it simply: “There is no future here.”

The camera captures the squalor beautifully, and the catadores are quirky and quotable, easily lending themselves to the stereotype of the honest yet simple laborer popularized in the 19th century by Courbet, Van Gogh and many others. It is in this vein that Muniz casts the catadores – as in Picasso’s Woman Ironing and Millet’s The Sower.

Early in the film, Muniz asks his studio manager Fabio whether it will be difficult to collaborate with the catadores, fearing they might be criminals and drug addicts. “It would be much harder to think that we are not able to change the life of these people,” Fabio responds.  The unconscious hubris of this statement rankles in the background of the film.

The heavy responsibility inherent in changing lives becomes clear to Muniz and Fabio as the project approaches completion. Fabio articulates this concern saying, “They totally forgot about Gramacho. They don’t want to go back. At the beginning I had the impression, and I think now that this is wrong, that they were happy there.” As the portraits are finished, photographed, and dismantled we begin to see the catadores dissolving in tears as the realization dawns that they must now return to the landfill – their temporary employment at Muniz’s studio at an end. Isis weeps as her portrait is completed, confessing that she implored Fabio to give her a job at the studio, so she wouldn’t have to return to the dump. The catadores thank Muniz over and over.

Tiaõ, the handsome and charismatic union leader, watches as his portrait (fittingly styled after David’s The Death of Marat) is sold at Phillips auction house in London. Surrounded by contemporary art built upon ironies that have no place in his life, he is overwhelmed and breaks down, knowing the proceeds ($64,097) will fund the pickers’ co-op he founded.

Since the film premiered, several of the catadores have found work outside the landfill, and the proceeds from the sale of the artworks have paid for numerous benefits for the workers’ co-op: a new truck, computers, a business training program. Those who modeled for portraits and helped to construct them each received their own photograph as well as monetary compensation. Some returned to Jardim Gramacho, begging the question posed by Muniz’s wife Janaina, “If you shake them up…show them life can be different….what can they do with that afterwards?” The dilemma is as complicated as the workers’ reality. Muniz takes responsibility, saying he hopes they come up with a plan to get out of Gramacho, and that it is hard for him to imagine doing much damage to these people to whom so much has been done already. It is that uncharacteristic lapse of imagination on the artist’s part that gives the film its uneasy subtext: there is altruism, but is there also inadvertent exploitation?

Unrated. English and Portuguese with English subtitles. Available March 29, 2011 from iTunes, amazon.com, and newvideo.com. Waste Land will be broadcast on PBS in April 2011 – check local listings. www.wastelandmovie.com

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Before seeing this show, I’d been giving a great deal of thought to one of the art verbs I hate most: “curating.” How can it be done better? And what does it really mean, anyway? Generally, I’ve thought it best to leave artsy participles (like, say, “painting”) to the truly creative people – artists – who deserve them.

That said, MoMA’s current show, “Rebus,” was probably the best “curated” show in town. For one thing, it’s conceived and spearheaded by an artist, Brazilian conceptual trickster, Vik Muniz. It made me re-think the current trend of curator-as-artist; it made me see MoMA’s amazing collection in new ways (yes, that old cliché). Plus, it even made me laugh out loud.

“Rebus” is the latest manifestation of a MoMA series called “Artist’s Choice” – an  ongoing exhibition series in which the Powers That Be at MoMA give an individual artist free rein to do as they wish with the museum’s permanent collection. (Everything – even  the major playlist items – seems up for grabs.) In past years, Elizabeth Murray, Chuck Close, and Scott Burton took turns to good result. But this version, for 2008-2009 seems particularly freeing. Muniz’s own artwork is fueled by phenomenological tricks, playing as it does with the visual expectations of a typical art-going audience; and indeed, that’s just what gives “Rebus” its frisson: objects are not as they (first) appear.

Thanks to Muniz, some of the crustier things in MoMA’s coffers came alive. For instance, Doris Ullman’s photogravure of a negro chain gang at work (circa 1929) does formal, as well as social-comment duty when we view it, as we do here, next to a prison window sculpture by Robert Gober.  Gober’s vertical bars nicely echo the stripes on Ullman’s poor prisoners’ garb, even while continuing the prison theme. Meanwhile, to the right of Ullman is Marcel Duchamp’sIn Advance of the Broken Arm (original, 1915). How cool is it to feel that now-iconic shovel relinquish its Readymade status for a moment, while in our mind’s eye, we can’t help but imagine how heavy a shovel might be, laden with dirt (like in that photo); how unpleasant it would to be to have to wield it, under a watchman’s eye, against one’s will. For black men, back in Ullman’s Depression Era, did racism feel like a huge, inescapable fact? A big, American “ready-made”?

Muniz gave us lighter fare nearby when he exhibited Erno Rubick’s famous invention –Rubik’s Cube – next to Alberto Giacometti’s Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object) (1934).  To the right of Giacometti’s sculpture is nothing more or less than an empty paper bag on a plinth. First, you imagine Giacometti’s figure holding Rubik’s Cube (a truly fun moment). But then, you wonder just what you’re supposed to think of the “void” inside that bag. Did some museum employee forget to throw away their lunch bag? Hardly. Throughout “Rebus,” Muniz delights in hauling little wonders out of MoMA’s Design collection – in this case Flat-Bottomed Brown Paper Grocery Bag (1883) by Charles Stillwell – and make us realize just how much we take them for granted. Seeing something as ubiquitous as a paper bag, showcased on a sculptural plinth in a place as fancy as MoMA is strange. So darned strange, in fact, it’s enough to give you an existential shiver. That bag isn’t empty at all. It’s the bag itself that’s Giacometti’s “Invisible Object.”

Other moments of fun-mixed-with-formal-rigor abound. A superb black and white photograph from 1979 by Zeke Berman, of yet another void. Reflections in a shop window by Eugene Atget echoed by the likes of Roy Lichtenstein and Martin Kippenberger. And my favorite, the one object in the whole show I missed: a standard EXIT sign (designed by Interloop Architecture).

Coming as it did at the tail end of the show, and hung high – as any real EXIT sign would – it was understandable that I might miss it. Yet, I couldn’t quite forgive myself. So attuned did Muniz make my senses to the art, he actually made me forget myself – not to mention my mistrust of the act of “curating.” Instead, like that EXIT sign, Muniz, the curator, was hiding in plain view the whole time – (escape) artist that he is.

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I would venture to guess that your average person regards photography as the instant capture of reality simply because real places and things are often photographed, and because the resulting image is documentary in nature. But the document is not necessarily real. Once the picture is taken, time moves on, thereby making what was real the past and the now-the real real-something else entirely. Thus, photography can be described not as the capture of reality, but rather, as an abstraction of time and place. What may have been real now only exists on paper in the swirl of chemicals and fixatives that hold it in place.

What then of the photographic image that is in itself abstract? What if the abstract real (as I have just defined it) is really abstract? Does our focus (no pun intended) shift from the recognizable, indexical form, to composition, tone, line and the intent of the artist? More than likely. But what if the photographer gives us both? What if the artist presents a real, recognizable form in an abstract presentation? The results are much more complex than in abstract painting because the eye is conditioned to read photographs by their surface, to take it for what it is, and therefore not question more than what the eye can see.

These are the questions and assumptions I had in mind as I wandered through “Abstraction in Photography” at the Von Lintel Gallery. Using the works of sixteen artists, the show was subtly divided into three sections deemed as “general paths to abstraction.” The front gallery was dedicated to photographs that captured recognizable subject matter in an unusual way. A good example is Andres Serrano’s Bloodscape V (1989). The slick, plastic red surface is actually a Cibachrome image of a pool of blood, taken close up so that it is abstracted into not only a rich study of line, but also a heavy viscous wave of damned if I know what.

The middle gallery is given over to non-objective abstract photographs that derive their imagery from a non-recognizable subject. Roland Fischer’s Lucas Ave. L. A. (2002) from far away looks like small gray and black squares generously spaced in series across a large white surface. Grays fade into strips of black at the bottom of each rectangle, the rectangles dot the surface in a grid. Up close, the pattern starts to make more sense, and it is obvious that this is a wall somewhere. The high-key white of the wall surface contrasts sharply with the shadows of the rectangular holes, giving the image a sunny feel. The serial pattern of the squares conjures up notions of the digital, blinking cursors on a computer screen. This brings it into the present, but combined with the twelve-part Sean Scully piece Art Horizon III (2002) on the adjacent wall, Fischer’s work calls to mind the seriality and cleanliness of minimalist abstraction.

In the final gallery, we are offered works that eliminate the use of the camera altogether. Winfred Evers dominates here with Master Altar and Moving Still, both from 1998. These gelatin silver prints have gelatinous, biomorphic shapes created by merely manipulating the surface of the paper. Like jello that has been wiggled, the images move by their own sinuousness, their black and white shadows creating contrasts that evoke the architecture of roller coasters. Very classy, and very fun.

Vik Muniz’s After Yves Klein (From Pictures of Color) by far outpaces all the other images in its double capacity to capture both the abstract real and real abstraction. For that reason, I will dwell on this remarkable image in some depth.

By way of Klein, Muniz calls authenticity to task and in different ways projects a very mindful artificiality with a slight twinge of dishonesty. This Cibachrome image of little blue Pantone squares is in reference to Klein’s own ultramarine blue-I.K. B. or International Klein Blue. Klein used the blue to connote the boundlessness of space and the spirituality space evoked. The blue’s powdery texture (created with the use of a special binder) expanded its optical qualities. Klein painted his monochromatic blue canvases with a roller-just as one would apply your run-of-the-mill house paint-a nod to the commodity culture burgeoning the 1950s and its repetitive nature, which in turn, became a reference to both authorial presence (the hand of the artist) and the commercial nature of that which could be readily reproduced.

By using the medium of photography, Muniz draws attention to its optical qualities, namely, the idea that what is represented in a photograph is also an optical illusion-what you see is not real, although it appears so. Is it really monochromatic? The squares all look to be of the same hue, but if one reads the actual names of the colors, it is obvious that they are not identical. Reflex Blue U is not the same as Blue 072 U. Again we’re dealing with an optical illusion: the abstraction (or refraction) of light as it bounces off the surface of the squares, their perceived color actually a mixture of the colors Muniz lays out for us at the bottom of the image: Process Cyan U, Process Magenta U, Process Yellow U, etc.

Muniz’s photograph can also be interpreted as a play on Klein’s Yves Peintures an illustrated booklet from 1954 wherein the plates were not photographs of paintings, but sheets of commercially inked paper. In his homage to Klein, Muniz gives us a photographic reproduction of commercially inked sheets (again their repetition emphasizing their function as a commodity). Muniz’s presentation twice removes the viewer from the real thing. It is the abstract real (blue photographed) in an real abstraction (a photograph of a reproduction of blue).

Muniz’s image illustrates concisely what the exhibition as a whole was designed to prove: it documents the fact that distance between reality and abstraction is in fact, very minute.

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