Miranda July: F.A.M.I.L.Y

At fifty years old, Miranda July has evolved into a multifaceted artist working across various mediums, including writing, acting, sculpture, filmmaking, and lately, she has taken a particular interest in dance. Interestingly, July is the cousin of Skylar Brandt, a principal dancer with the American Ballet Theater. In a conversation with Cindy Sherman, July revealed, “I would occasionally get up and dance in my office, partly because it got uncomfortable sitting in a chair for four years […] I would sometimes post the dance on Instagram, which eventually created this dancer persona that I was not totally comfortable with, honestly.” This sparked the idea for her project F.A.M.I.L.Y, an acronym for Falling Apart Meanwhile I Love You, inspired by July’s evolving perspectives on marriage and family relationships. “I hope the yearning I felt when I was dancing alone comes through too. I often thought of yearning as one of my materials. Each new technology promises a new kind of intimacy that might somehow break through and make us feel not alone,” July explains.

The release of the iPhone’s cutout tool function further inspired July to form a research group via Instagram. She explored bringing people into a common digital space, creating collages of their movements. Thousands of participants shared intimate material, with July prompting them with challenges like “Make confusing, less human shapes with your body” and “Please challenge me, physically and in terms of intimacy.” The result was a series of surreal performances that explored intimacy and boundaries through a novel physical language. The imperfections of the cutout tool and the morphing of bodies, along with ghostly sheet blobs, contributed to a unique digital canvas. “The roughness of the cutout tool kept some things out of my control, which also confused my sense of authorship. Sometimes, when I was trying to present a butt, the tool spat out an empty hole instead, and there was nothing I could do about it, which was exciting and kind of moving to me,” July explained.

Miranda July’s film career spans from 1995 to the present, starring in two of the films driven by a DIY ethos and a desire to empower women in filmmaking. She was influenced by the riot grrrl movement and helped form an underground network of women filmmakers. She was inspired by her friend Johanna Fateman, who later formed the band Le Tigre. However, July acknowledges, “That focus ended by the time I moved to Portland in 1995. Making films is really hard. My process with these videos has been sort of the opposite of making a feature film. It is so private and underground,” she concludes.

Her exploration of human relationships and connections through social media–a medium characterised by physical isolation and a lack of conventional human interaction–creates a fascinating clash of concepts. By turning the process into a playful exchange, July allows the participants to take control of the final result.It is interesting that she uses concepts such as ‘longing’ and ‘yearning’ to connect, making them central to the idea of not feeling alone even while working in solitude. “At times, the process can feel a bit reckless or risky even though it is completely consensual and safe. I made many images and videos over the course of the year with the research group, and there was a wild, highly sexualised moment early on where I had collaged images of the group members earring or sucking each other. I had actually forgotten how sexual it was at the start! I guess I had to pass through that phase in the process to get to the actual work, to something more personal. Do I really want to fuck strangers? No, but if I could be painlessly swallowed whole by another being…”

This is not the first time July has explored human affection through technology. From 2002 to 2009, her project Learning To Love You More featured seventy creative online assignments, resulting in over eight thousand submissions. Another notable work is Eleven Heavy Things, a group of outdoor fibreglass sculptures first exhibited at the 2009 Venice Biennale. This installation invites viewers to interact with the pieces by stepping onto or underneath them and sticking their faces or limbs into specific holes, creating a profound photo stand-in experience reminiscent of an amusement park. Both works, like F.A.M.I.L.Y., empower the audience to interact and contribute to the final result, making the experience playful and participatory. “She welcomes other people’s desires and actions within it [...] while the artist clearly likes to be in control, she is also experimenting with sharing that power and control, often in a playful way, and she gets lots of people to willingly engage, creating a fun and unintimidated art experience that allows people from all kinds of backgrounds to feel something meaningful,” explains curator Mia Locks.

The exhibition is realised in conjunction with her first solo museum exhibition, Miranda July: New Society, on view at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada in Milan until October 28, 2024. In addition to F.A.M.I.L.Y., the Milan exhibition spans three decades of July’s career, from the early 1990s until today, including short films, performances, and installation works. This project serves as a jumping-off point to consider ideas related to July’s earlier performative and collaborative works.