Jac Leirner

Irang the bell, and Jac Leirner buzzed me into the building where her studio is located on the first floor. I went up one flight of stairs under the impression that - though very excited and honoured to have been invited there - it was going to be just another artist’s studio visit; that I was going to look at the work, assess it critically, exchange my findings with the artist and leave. She opened the door with a welcoming smile on her face, and suddenly I saw myself surrounded by Void Bags, Jac’s most recent work, which covered every inch of every wall of the room.

Hundreds of bags of the most varied shapes and colours, arranged by a graphic scheme, colour scheme, by different types of handles, by the shapes of the holes with which she intervened on them - squared, circular, rectangular; sometimes overlapping schemes of, say, graphics and holes, colour and handles and so forth. All parts taken together created a rhythm of differentiation and sameness that, I remember, made it difficult to grasp for air.

Jac kept asking me questions about her work, about art history and theory in general, in a sort of weird inversion of roles: I was being probed there, not her artwork. Rumbling for words, I tried hard putting thoughts together in pretending I could focus on the conversation, but the fact was that the synchronized void in those bags caused interference in the wavelength of my thinking. For it exposed something in language that was prior to the linguistic and analytic logic, the way in which thought and material corresponded, caused con/fusion between saying and seeing; it made them relate to one another. I needed quiet (I’d gone blind) and I said:

D: Jac, I need to think about all this. I’ll be back again. A couple of weeks later, there we were amidst the void of the bags, when she asked me, flat out:

J: What did you come up with?

D: Your work is repetition and difference.

J: I see. Say that again?

***

Briefly introducing the idea, according to Deleuze, repetition and difference are independent of the concepts of sameness, identity, resemblance, similarity or equivalence, and involve elements (or singularities) that multiply (or reflect) each other.1 They operate outside the paradigm of the one and the continuous, to be thought in terms of a play of mirrors between a concept and the plurality of its references, between the identical and the multiplicity of its repetition.

For instance, when Jac Leirner threads in a chain tens of thousands of banknotes in The One-hundreds (1996), what is given out, at once, is the material accumulation of the object, the metaphor for the arrested circulation in a context of an economic halt, the painstaking perseverance of small personal gestures, which translates the quantifying repetition of the object into a correspondence of reciprocals (between the material, the social, the personal), a play of difference.

Jac’s work is not about representation, it is correspondence. Reciprocating is particularizing each repeating element; each banknote constitutes a differentiating resonance in itself, unfolding intensively, rather than extensively. The place of extensity is that of the quantitative, mechanical repetition, an abstraction of things supposedly similar. The multiple, perfect, rhythmic arrangements that the artist proposes are manifested in bundles of repeating difference: the graffiti applied by anonymous beholders (All the devils from the blue phase, 1995), the tapes used to secure a longer life span to the notes (The One- hundreds, 1987), the signatures employed as an individual ownership to a fleeting monetary value attached to a piece of paper (The One-hundreds (signatures), 1987), and so on. Representation subordinates the concept of difference to the same and the similar (being a negation thereof), and cannot affirm it as divergence, disparateness, disjunction, displacement and variability. In that sense, looking at the work and seeing its corresponding repetition as serialization would confine it to an abstract aesthetic exercise of formalism, when in fact, as Guy Brett has put it, “her work makes such formalism look unnecessarily bounded and narrow, like old etiquette and protocol.”2 It is not a ceaseless accumulation of objects, not Brancusi’s Endless Column, nor Judd’s Untitled bare repetitions. The correspondence of reciprocates, this space in which her work operates, entails an intense relation between the repeated and the repeater, the differentiator and differentiated, between A and B and Back Again.

***

D: Jac, your work is repetition and difference and it lives in the space metaphorized in Warhol’s subtitle to his book, THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again); like that, in brackets.

J: Why in brackets?

***

From A to B refers to the dialogue between Andy and his assistants, whose initials were always B in Warhol’s treatment, despite their real names. The philosophy of Andy Warhol manifests itself throughout the whole book always in correspondence between the author and the constant B (the multiplicity of his interlocutors). It also refers to the mathematical notion that there is an infinite set of rational and irrational numbers between two points (0 and 1, or A and B). The Back Again assures reciprocation, as stated before, a play of difference that keeps circulating back into this bracketed infinity.3 Jac injects her repetitions with such a degree of particularization that the work, no matter how rationally formalized, affects the beholder in his or her own exercise of particularizing it back, extracting reciprocation and, perhaps irrationally, inflicting intensities. It is, moreover and after all, a play of affection.

Adhesive 25 (us) is one element (or singularity) of the ensemble called Adhesives, of 2001. Amongst differentiating qualities of color, design, themes, Jac Leirner qualifies this one as (us). The artist includes an adhesive of her name, which appears three times in the work, above another that says I AM STILL ALIVE, next to yet another of a skull and bones (symbol for death or deadly), which is then placed diagonally above the one that says “protect me from what I want.” The bounded infinity in which Jac’s play of affection and difference takes place is the recreation of our own mortality; the ultimate corresponding reciprocation, a courageous exercise for a state of becoming.

Jac Leirner’s artwork deals with the ambiguity of living: the intelligibility of death, the incessant exercise of making sense out of life since we know it does not make any sense – a “paradoxical dislocation”4 – because death puts a halt to everything. Following Deleuze’s reasoning, “each art has its own imbricated techniques of repetition, the critical and revolutionary potential of which must reach the highest possible degree, to lead us from the dreary repetitions of habit to the profound repetitions of memory, and ultimately to the [symbolic] repetitions of death, through which we make sport of our own mortality.”5 The book (of the one-hundreds) (1987), all the texts compiled from the tens of thousands of banknotes, and edited by Jac Leirner states: “Estava escrito. (...). Tudo caba” (“It was written. (...). Everything ends”).

1 Gilles Deleuze, Repetition and Difference, translated by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)
2 Guy Brett, “A bill of wrongs”, in Jac Leirner: Ad Infinitum. Exhibition Catalogue, org. Ligia Canongia (Rio de Janeiro: Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, 2002); p. 211 – 212.
3 “Space is all one space and thought is all one thought, but my mind divides its space into spaces into spaces and thoughts into thoughts into thoughts.” Andy Warhol. THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (New York: A Harvest Book, 1975) p. 143
4 Simone de Beauvoir, Por uma moral da ambigüidade, trad. Marcelo Jacques de Moraes (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 2005) p. 68
5 Deleuze, p. 209

Profile :

Jac Leirner was born in São Paulo in 1961. She studied at the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado in São Paulo, where she obtained her MFA. In 1991 she was a Visiting Fellow at University College in Oxford, and resident artist at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. She has had numerous solo and group shows in four different continents. She participated in the 1983 and 1989 São Paulo Biennials, the 1990 Venice Biennial, and in Aperto 90 that same year. Her work was included in Documenta IX, Kassel, 1992. She represented Brazil in the 1997 Venice Biennial. Her work is represented in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Canada; Cisneros Collection, Caracas, Venezuela; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, among many other national and international institutions, as well as in important private collections all over the world. A vast bibliography has been published about her work, which includes authors such as Guy Brett, Paulo Herkenhoff, Bruce Ferguson and Ariel Jiménez.