Returning home from holiday in 2012, I wrote a poem about the Vik Muniz exhibition I’d seen a couple of weeks earlier at CAC Malaga. I posted a video of Muniz’s art with a reading of my poem. Then I realised I hadn’t taken the opportunity to put the words of my poem on the website. So I’ve done that here…
FOR YOUR PLEASURE
Windows on unexplored worlds
Appear before me in whitespace
Which dot
Which pixel
Was the first germ?
Did he mean the first impression to be the spur?
Or was the idea itself the progenitor?
Out of peanut butter and jelly
Swirls Mona Lisa’s oh-so-familiar smile
But is she licking her lips?
My taste buds pucker
To synapse these flavonoids
She smiles across the room
At a Mercator view
Of a world generated
Out of the detritus of hardware
Dumped in a headlong rush
For speedier personal computation
See a mirror image
Of stars and stripes meld
In green flower and broccoli head
Then fade and droop in a moment
As the split season falls
This beautiful girl
All pouting lips and glitter tears
Encased in an amber of
Cheap China plastic toys
Cries out for familial love
For God’s Sake
Just make some human contact
Frankenstein and the Count
Etched metal bolt and cowlick
Smirk in the incredible edible richness
Of salty black pearls
An installation in identical photo frames
Captures 28 unique unidentifiable objects
Each one created
One by one
From its own white plasticine ball
From elasticity
The removal of cut diamonds in a frame
Reveals reproductions of iconic Hollywood pouts
High cheekbones and brows
Adopt luxury parallelograms
And here
The artist directs from the ground
A sky writer executing on clear blue canvas
A cartoon cloud
To be a toy for thermals
This disparate band of the disowned
Who work the dump
Resolve into view out of tin cans shoes and tires
As though shaken and swirled by kaleidescope
Come out into the glare heat and stink
But care not
For the rooms in those explored worlds
Were recorded in your mind
And can be retrieved at will
For your pleasure