Brooklyn. Since completing her MFA Sculpture at the Slade School of
Fine Art in 2006, Juliana has exhibited her work internationally. Recent group shows
include Newspeak: British Art Now at the Saatchi Gallery, Waived Gallery at Jack Chiles, New York, and
Higher Atlas, Marrakech Biennial 4 in Morocco.
Juliana Cerqueira Leite’s work engages the history of figuration, re-formulating representations of the human body to reflect volition in form. Her practice explores control over matter and the body’s physical translation of will, time and desire. Primarily a sculptor Leite makes use of traditional sculptural processes questioning the relevance of language-based syntax to material reality.
'I don't like to do performances. It isn't just the discomfort of being observed by strangers. It's that art performances often attempt earnestness and to deconstruct the theatrical in meta-acts that unwittingly encourage their audience to believe that others truthfully embody what is in fact projected significance. This reduction of the other is historically a potent justification for violence. The notion that the other can be unwound by our thoughts and felt with our emotions is the preferred delusion of the modern world. As much as, superficially, reality television and social networks enhance our capacity for empathy by simulating the experience of a truth inaccessible in the unmediated encounters of the bus, the street, the bed, they contradictorily also generate an unprecedented objectification and simplification of the other. The other, as presented in these contexts, is a knowable and limited truth. This reductionist landscape is a primer for brutality.
This is a shortcoming of art: it relies on compressing and cropping reality into an image that is received as truth. Is reality holographic? Are its fragments exact replicas of its entirety? The lived experience tells a different story. The social fragmentation and isolation that has accompanied modernity increasingly makes our experience of the other a mediated experience presented as unmediated truth. In this context performance art no longer counteracts the status-quo. The resolution to this interpersonal rawness that we are promised and that the other always fails to give can only take place within a collective delusion. Because the other is an aporia. In order to exist it must remain unresolved'.
'Foil' 2012 (performance)
Jim McCarthy had some questions for Juliana after the perfromance, he wanted her to elaborate on the following four statements from her reading of the above text, her answers follow on each numbered phrase:
(1) It's that art performances often attempt earnestness and to deconstruct the theatrical in meta-acts that unwittingly encourage their audience to believe that others truthfully embody what is in fact projected significance.
'In order to distinguish itself from theater, art performances have often relied on presenting themselves in a different sort of way than, let's say, the usual set up of theater where the actor/actress is impersonating a character. The history of art performance really kicks off with Dada and the post WWI art world, the surrealists, but I guess what I'm mostly talking about is what went on in the 60s and 70s, which really consolidated what most people think of today as performance art. Take for example Marina Abramovic, who's become such a prominent figure 'the grandmother of all performance art' etc. in the media lately. Her whole art practice is based on the fact that when she is performing it is 'HER' that you are looking at, not Marina Abramovic impersonating another character, different for example from looking at a performance by my friend Jennifer Sullivan who when she performs takes on a character and plays with the idea that people expect that character to be her (because that's what people expect from performance art after years of things like Abramovic's work). So what I mean by earnestness is this, presenting yourself in a performance context as none other than yourself. The theatrical meta-act is basically this process, of taking a position that is made possible by our understanding of theater (we wouldn't all know to be quiet and observe the person who is about to perform without having been conditioned by things like theater, there's a suspension of normality that's important in this process and I think this comes mostly from theater) and subverting it by acting in a way that questions the structures of theater. For example, an interactive performance, like Yoko Ono's Cut Piece where the audience went up to her and slowly cut her clothes away, or a Tino Sehgal piece where you don't know someone is a part of the performance until you've become a part of it yourself. I'm making issue with this mechanism of presenting the performer as none other than him/her self because in a performance context you always have a certain expectation of the person who is performing. Questioning the theatrical framing of performance should maybe be substituted with what people like my friend Jennifer is doing, questioning the framing of performance art by art. I think this 'earnest, true' self that is presented in a lot of performance art like Marina Abramovic's is always going to be a false self, because we project a lot of meaning onto someone who stands in front of the room and performs'
(2) This reductionist landscape is a primer for brutality.
'Yeah, so, this is kind of dark. I wanted the performance to be kind of a noir/horror performance. Really dark and serious. If you take the mechanism of believing that a person who is performing, in the context of a performance art work or even theater, is really presenting themselves as what they are as opposed to using the suspension of belief that comes with theater historically, then you're put in the postition where you have to reduce that whole person to what you see and experience of them at that moment, and the rest is all projections and assumptions. You sort of have to do this because you're in a position of witnessing and judging their actions. This mechanism of theater, cinema and performance, believing that someone can be reduced to all you see of them in that brief moment, in some cases all evil (the bad guy) or all good (the hero) has a reductionist effect on our perception of others. It makes the world simpler for the sake of a story, an art work, but that's where it should stop. Unfortunately it doesn't and when this mechanism carries on into real life then we get people like George Bush describing Bin Laden as 'pure evil', the countries that have muslim extremists within them as 'the axis of evil' or whatever other bullshit. That was all basically catering to people who, after watching movies and sitcoms on tv all day expect the news to be just as simple. Performance art, by presenting the artist as him/herself in a way acts like a bridge between this suspension of belief that exists in theater and real life. It blurs the edge. This is a primer for violence because if you look at the true complexity of what motivates most people to act, even some that are destructive, judgement becomes difficult and requires real thought. If you reduce people to a specific portion of time, reduce them how theater reduces the hero to all good, then they become easier to judge quickly, without much thought. Hence the 'nuke Bin Laden' bumper stickers. I once had a guy try to mug me, he said some lude thing to me as I left the tube station and I ignored him so he followed me and stood in front of me and said it again. So I told him really angrily and loudly to leave me alone. At which point he looked super offended and called me a bitch. He then sneakily followed me for several blocks to try and rob me but I saw him and my neighbors came to my rescue. When the police came they knew of this guy and his mode of operation from other cases in the neighborhood. Anyway, the point is, that he needed me to basically act aggressively towards him before robbing me. This is a really common mechanism for thieves. They have to prime themselves with feeling that the person they are about to rob, mug, has done them an injustice. Then they can justify their own violence because they can push this character of 'bitch' 'spoiled brat' or 'rich jerk' onto whomever they are going to attack'.
(3) The social fragmentation and isolation that has accompanied modernity increasingly makes our experience of the other a mediated experience presented as unmediated truth
'What I'm talking about here are things like reality tv and social networking sites and online dating sites. Things that say they are presenting an honest profile or view of a person but are in fact editing and shaping them into something that isn't the whole truth because of course it can't be. For example in Facebook you are either 'single' or 'in a relationship', as if there was no middle ground 'kinda seeing someone' or 'in the middle of a break-up'. Or on dating sites you're given multiple choice questions to describe your personality, you can't create your own custom answers or else the computers can't deal with the data and 'match' you to suitable mates. But the belief that the result of this survey is a true reflection of who you are is essential to the belief that the dating site works right? Like the belief that reality tv is showing real people being themselves is essential to reality tv. But of course they're both lies. The suspension of belief has transferred over to reality, see? And we become the characters'.
(4)
The resolution to this interpersonal rawness that we are promised and that the other always fails to give can only take place within a collective delusion. Because the other is an aporia. In order to exist it must remain unresolved'.
'This scenario where we've become characters in reality that's fake as opposed to real viewers of a play or movie where the characters aren't real is a collective delusion. I think we've spent a lot of time in the past century thinking that if we can just figure each other out and explain ourselves in increasingly earnest detail we'll be able to avoid violence of the sort that generated world wars. But in fact what we get when we film people day and night like in reality tv isn't a truth that we can empathize with but something new that ties reality in with the fake. And this prompts the question of why these people arent just being themselves? Why is it that these programs make people act this fake way? Why is it that the person we present ourselves as on Facebook isn't a reflection of the whole truth? I think it has to do with being observed, it's the panopticon effect, people observed act differently. So the truth maybe can only exist in the dark where it can't be explained. The aporia is this unresolvable real or unreal paradox'.
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