| Some of the things I make are obviously built for audience interaction—Eleven Heavy Things, the sculptures for the Venice Biennale, are objects that literally have holes for people to fit their bodies into and pose with. |  |
Miranda July
Some of the things I make are obviously built for audience interaction—Eleven Heavy Things, the sculptures for the Venice Biennale, are objects that literally have holes for people to fit their bodies into and pose with. Similarly, my Web site Learning To Love You More (with Harrell Fletcher) gives assignments to the public. During my last performance, Things We Don’t Understand and Definitely Are Not Going To Talk About, I cast audience members, costumed them, and directed them in the show. But the work itself, none of it, is about participation—it’s always about other things.
Living gnaws at me; the treachery of having to go forward into fear without knowing anything for sure, the bizarre redemption that faith brings, even momentary faith, and the sliding down mess of the days themselves. These things are unbearable to me unless I can articulate them through writing or making a movie or a performance or a sculpture or a Web site—I actually don’t care how; I only care that I can really do it. And by do it, I mean do it well enough that other people know what I mean. Not intellectually, but that they know.
This connection is the missing part of whatever I am making. When I’m writing a book or making a movie, I never actually think of it as a book or movie, each time I think I’m working in a brand new form, something that doesn’t even have a name. I’m always disappointed in the end by how finite the work is, but the audience changes that. They turn it back into an unnamable thing, and sometimes it feels like I don’t even have authorship, that the finished work is just the feeling between us, which I can’t lay claim to and can’t control.
So when I make work that is overtly audience participatory (and much of it isn’t) I am often trying to literalize this idea, this hope. For example, going back to the sculptures I made for Venice, I tried very hard to make objects that people would want to pose with, because I knew that if people posed, they would take pictures of each other posing. And in taking the picture they finish the work—their picture, not the sculptures, is the work. When they look back at their snapshots from their vacation in Venice, perhaps they’ll notice that they revealed themselves. Or, I would also be pleased if they felt they really had something, if that picture felt like a little piece of art to them, rather than a picture of a piece of art.
