Bacchus Astride a Barrel, after Rubens, from the series Pictures of Junk

This work was part of Looking 101, a 2024 exhibition that supported Northwestern University’s undergraduate curriculum with an emphasis on first-year students.The following text was made available in the exhibition via cell phone camera (QR code) and booklet

This photograph is part of a series of works titled Pictures of Junk in which photographer Vik Muñiz recreates celebrated works of art with miscellaneous items from a junkyard. To create these, Muñiz projected an image of the work on the floor of a large warehouse at a forty-five- degree angle. While standing on a scaffold, he then directed a team of art students to arrange the objects. The resulting image reproduces Bacchus (1638–40), an oil painting by Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) (right). Rubens presents the ancient Roman god Bacchus as a rotund young man seated on a barrel amidst other mythological figures: a satyr, a nymph, and two winged infants— representations of Eros, god of love and desire. Lying under Bacchus’s foot, one of his sacred animals, a tiger, eats grapes off a vine. In ancient Roman culture, Bacchus represented agriculture, wine, and fertility and was often associated with revelry and inebriation. Muñiz points to these themes by including several wine barrels and bottles, as well as other alcohol-related paraphernalia like aluminum cans and crates, amidst the found materials that form the composition. The visual language of Rubens and the Baroque period (ca. 1600–1750) is today generally associated with excess.