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.

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 unname­able 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.