The old man and the V(W)–Jonathan Munk
In the comic section of The New Yorker, a grandfather tells his grandson a story about the time he spent an hour watching a V. W. in front of his neighbor’s home. He recalls that it was "much more than just black and white," but instead "a shiny metallic thing." He remembers thinking that it looked like "something from another planet"–perhaps even something to be feared. In hindsight, the old man asserts he knows better now, but admits that "[i]t's hard to know what anything looks like when you don't know what anything is. I've always been looking at things with my eyes wide open, and I still don't know what anything is."
The V. W. the old man recalls in The New Yorker is just another example of the "something from the past" that puzzles readers who see Mr. Munk's work as a kind of anti-defamiliarization strategy, one that tries to disarm what we expect by putting it front and center like a familiar object. In Mr. Munk's recent work, however, the familiar appears to be something other than "something from another planet," or other than the simple products of a compositional strategy. The "shiny metallic thing" that puzzles the old man in The New Yorker is just another thing, and perhaps not a particularly special one at that.
The title of this painting, though, is The old man and the V(W). Munk himself has explained his interest in this object as a kind of visual "defamiliarization." In an interview with Christopher Phillips, Munk explains:
I was thinking about defamiliarization strategies . . . I like the idea of making things unfamiliar. Some of my favorite books do that – like Lolita or Pale Fire. This is a postcard . . . but I’ve turned it into an abstract painting, which was a kind of re-framing for me. And I’d painted portraits out of postcards before, so this seemed like a logical extension of that idea. (Phillips)
The portrait presents an old man facing away from the viewer, looking at something off-panel and returning the viewers' gaze in a way that Michael Taussig might describe as "the look of looking." The story that Mr. Munk tells us in this painting is not as simple as it might at first seem, however. It has more to do with what the old man is looking at than it does with who he is, and it has more to do with how we look at things.
"Defamiliarization" seems to be a strategy that Mr. Munk employs especially when thinking about photography, or painting: as like a modernist novel, the "something from the past" that can be seen in these objects is always an off-screen thing. The title of this painting may suggest as much, but in fact Munk's interest in this photographic image does not originate in the photograph itself. Instead, this painting focuses on a photograph that is too similar for its own good: an image of two people struck by lightning on a beach. The photograph is one of Munk's favorites, and he talks about painting this particular image with the same combination of enthusiasm and frustration that he has throughout his career, "I had this idea to paint this photograph which I loved," but "I couldn’t get it right."
The only difference between what we see in the painting and what we see in the photograph is that the man in front of us seems to be looking at something else rather than directly at the camera. Still, there is something strange about him. He seems to be staring at a black box on his shoulder, perhaps like something you would wear if you were about to go swimming but not for long. The people on the beach seem to be frozen in this position, just as their faces seem to be frozen in a sign of grief, not shock.
The old man and his granddaughter are looking at a much different photograph, though. Wrinkled and folded as it is, it is unmistakably a photograph of a young man standing next to the camera and looking directly into it–a very ordinary young man with some kind of object that he carries casually like he might carry a bag or something on his shoulder. This is an image not from "another planet," but from the world we live in today.
It is curious that we see this particular photograph, though–why this photograph is so similar to the one in the painting and yet different from its surface suggests that this difference is significant. Munk clearly enjoys unsettling us by putting something familiar in an unfamiliar place, but it seems that something other than defamiliarization happens when a photographic image appears not just on the surface of a painting but also on the surface of a photograph.
The old man and his granddaughter, however, seem pretty comfortable looking at their two photographs. In fact, it seems like more than one person is looking at them: there are more than two people peering at these two photographs. One of them seems to be a boy, and one is probably even a girl. We can see this photograph clearly in the upper left hand corner of the painting, which might suggest that there are more than two people looking at these images. It also suggests that the old man and his granddaughter are not just looking at them, but looking at us, as if we were somehow involved in what happens to be happening on their screen. Perhaps they are asking us for help or advice about what to do about something–whatever it is that has made everything seem so strange.
But why are they looking at those photographs? Both of those images look like photographs themselves: they could easily appear on another postcard or on Facebook or Flickr. What does it mean, then, that not just a photograph of a photo but an actual photo is the object that has made this world so strange? Why is it important to Mr. Munk to depict this particular image? What do the people who give us postcards and leave them at bus stations have to do with what Mr. Munk has to say about photography?
Maybe it's because both of those images are photography and yet neither of them are. They are both photographs and yet they are somehow not: they look strangely like photographs but they aren't. Perhaps, though, Mr. Munk is not interested in making photographs and photographs that are not photographs–he's more interested in making us think about what we see when we look at pictures of people standing around on a beach at sunset.
The old man and his granddaughter might be asking us for help, but maybe they don't need any from us; they already have everything they need–not just the photograph on their wall but also this painting of an image that exists somewhere beyond our own screen. But maybe what they don't have is more important than what they do have: a photographic image like the one that is reflected in this painting, revealing both the world itself and a story that can be told about it.
Conclusion
This is one of those great paintings that students of art and literature are always talking about and always reading about. It was included in the 2009 Mount Royal College Art Exhibition, the 2010 OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education) Art Exhibition, and the 2010 St. Mary's University Gallery. In 2012 it was nominated for a Governor General's Award for Visual Arts in Heritage Category; in 2014 it won a Governor General's Award for Visual Arts in Heritage Category called "The Magic Doors" when they were introduced to new additions to their collection at the National Gallery of Canada.