(°1961, Sao Paulo, Brazil)
In certain circles you are handed a business card before you start a conversation with someone. The small, slickly designed slip of paper tells us who we are dealing with, what position they occupy on the social ladder and with what degree of respect we have to approach them. In addition to being a practical instrument, they are above all silent witnesses to the processes and codes of social hierarchy. Stickers do in public what business cards bring about between individuals. Whether it be teenagers’ schoolbags, the rear windows of cars, telephone boxes or crates containing works of art: stickers give identity and/or show identification. Stickers carry a meaning and create value. They are a certificate of credibility. For many people they may be their true identity card. Think of exhibition labels for instance. How many visitors do not first look at the information on the label and only then at the work of art itself? As if the value and meaning are not an acquired intrinsic given but rather coded and attributed. The social dynamic and desire for one or other form of status this indicates is most pregnantly visible in that type of paper that passes through most of our hands every day: money. Virtually everything that has a value is expressed or translated in terms of money. The insured value of the works by the Brazilian artist Jac Leirner is expressed as a monetary value. It is no coincidence that this artist has done a series of works using hundred-cruzeiro notes, the Brazilian monetary unit until 1994. Hundred-cruzeiro notes were collected according to the type of inscription (small drawings, inscriptions, scribbles, graffiti) and then formed into geometric planes and other patterns. Money as the value and means of exchange becomes a formal support for the traces of anonymous dreams and desires.
However, Jac Leirner is not concerned with the sociological membrane that surrounds all these paper valuables. It is not her intention to express social criticism. She collects and accumulates. She collects stickers, business cards, plastic bags from museums and galleries, labels, envelopes and postal packets. She creates and gives a place to these representations by which means institutes and individuals seek a place for themselves. For certain periods of time, short or long, Leirner goes collecting and extracts what she collects from its social surroundings. These banal objects are stripped of their status and social function and are then shown as works of art in a socially neutralised form. What used to form part of a social typology is now grafted onto a personal artistic vision and an art history context. Logos and slogans on stickers are often part of a marketing strategy aiming for visibility and pragmatism. In Jac Leirner’s hands each one of these mass-produced nomadic objects becomes a unique item with a permanently articulated point of view. Leirner transfers the signs from a system of social codes to an artistically-coded environment. This is appropriation as a process of sliding values.
In labels, stickers, business cards, ashtrays and cutlery from aircraft, Jac Leirner found a material in our everyday manners. A material that is used to make series, modules and patterns. Series and modules are familiar as a sculptural method in the idiom of minimalist and postminimalist form. However, in Jac Leirner’s work each structure is impregnated by its differences. Each museum bag or sticker bears its own traces of use, has its own colours, form and typography. As befits a good collector, Leirner brings the various elements together in accordance with subjectively generated laws. The Adesivos series, for instance, comprises groups of stickers stuck on Perspex or glass. The word between brackets in the titles of this series is the basic qualitative principle of each ‘set’: adesivo 21 (aviso), adesivo 23 (celebra_ao), adesivo 27 (blanck), adesivo 18 (amarelo), adesivo 26 (hard core), adesivo 22 (pares de quadrados), etc. Colour, form, target group, destination, function - these are all parameters that lead Leirner to her ‘adhesive paintings’. When incorporated into a formal arrangement, each individual object finds its place in a double role: as part of a newly-created whole, and as a reminder of its socially strategic origins and circulation. Unity in diversity.
Adesivo 4 (cuidado arte), cautious art, clearly shows Jac Leirner’s quiet guerilla warfare and irony. It is not unlikely that the museum that has a transport crate for this work itself sticks labels on it such as ‘fragile’, ‘vorsicht kunst’ and ‘breekbaar’. The aspect of Leirner’s work that actually is fragile is her obsessive undermining of social strategies and the codes of the art world. She deliberately denies the social and functional relief of the objects: a museum bag, more importantly than being a bag, is a material with specific colours and measurements. Or perhaps we can put it the other way round: the adesivo series, more importantly than being a work of art, is an arrangement of appeals for identity and social strategies. Or how Jac Leirner tries to connect art and life.
Philippe Van Cauteren,
Hamburg, 2003
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2003
35 x 128 x 3,5 cm
Stickers, plexi, red level
2003
38,5 x 190 x 3 cm
Stickers, plexi, red level
2003
15,5 x 130,5 x 3,5 cm
Stickers, plexi, red level