miranda july
Once upon a time, I tried to do an introduction to video art for the advanced video class of a suburban public high school. Since most high school students tend to mimic what they see on tv or in mainstream movies when they make their own videos, I really wanted to show them examples of artists trying to challenge the conventional language of moving images. We watched clips from work by Bill Viola, Maya Deren, Su Friederich, Gary Hill, Sadie Benning. In the end, though, I think it was Miranda July who perplexed them the most.
I suspect she's got this crazy idea that we are all artists and maybe that there's something meaningful to be gained from the creative process, even for those of us who won't ever have our creations shown in museums. She's got me inspired.
Long before I'd ever seen any of her work, I only knew Miranda July as the genius behind Joanie 4 Jackie (a.k.a. Big Miss Movieola), a grassroots distribution network for video chain letters made by grrls. If you send her a video you've made, she'll send you back a tape with 10 lady-made movies on it, including your own. I remember hearing that the idea for video chain letters came to her when she was first starting out as a videomaker, like many of us, eager to share her work and hungry to see work by others like her.
"It felt like there weren't that many of us out there," she explains in an interview with Andy Steiner for Utne Reader. "But I knew there were, somewhere." To promote the chain letter idea, she made a pamphlet and passed it out to people she met in clubs. But it took her a year to collect her first ten tapes. "So I wrote to Sassy trying to target the kind of people who might most need something like this. Once I got in the teen magazines, I started getting hundreds and hundreds of letters."
Miranda July is no longer a fledgling videomaker. Her work is shown in museums, colleges, and universities all over the world. Of course, she not only makes movies, but is also a performance artist, creates multi-media and sound installations, and has recorded several performance albums.
My favorite project by Miranda July is her latest one:
Learning to Love You More.
"Learning to Love You More is both a web site and series of non-web presentations comprised of work made by the general public in response to assignments given by artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher and various guests. Like a recipe, meditation practice, or familiar song, the prescriptive nature of these assignments liberates you from creativity and allows you focus on what you are feeling and experiencing."
Though her own work has taken her in new directions, Joanie 4 Jackie is still going strong."This project is important to me," she says. "We're out there supporting each other and making movies and getting the word out. Ultimately that's what I'm all about, and it's so satisfying."
Miranda July has been a long time resident of Portland, Oregon. She recently moved to Los Angeles to work on her first feature length narrative film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, which you should watch immediately.
You can email her at mjuly@joanie4jackie.com.
And visit her website: www.mirandajuly.com
