{"id":5629,"title":"Discovery: Miranda July Renaissance Riot Grrrl","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/discovery-miranda-july-renaissance-riot-grrrl","version":"24e63e095b013bb55ae3b6f94f0309dd8557a47d5e3e3c81049b6a818bc3629b","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.4428462+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Chris Chang"}],"authorKeys":["Chang, Chris"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"Film Comment","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"July/August 2000","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC1089","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Discovery: Miranda July Renaissance Riot Grrrl.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/discovery-miranda-july-renaissance-riot-grrrl.","publication":"Chris Chang. Discovery: Miranda July Renaissance Riot Grrrl. Film Comment. July/August 2000.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5629.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC1089","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"},{"label":"Film Comment","url":"https://www.filmlinc.com","relationship":"record body link","contentType":null}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":7451},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":683}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Defining Miranda July is like trying to define a color. When confronted with the scope of her work - multimedia performance, experimental audio, single channel video, fanzines, riot grrrl film and video distribution, and now perhaps, following a cameo as a nurse with a bruised eye in Jesus\u0027 Son, acting -- the head spins. And that\u0027s part of the plan. The 26-year-old Portland, Oregon-based artist is fascinated with systems, codes, and the fallacy of the normal perpetrated by things like education and IQ tests. (She also digs human relationships.) She\u0027s at her best when she shows the systems breaking down, mutating, or emptied of the content that gives them meaning. Consider the following real-life example. I approached her for an interview with the idea it wouldn\u0027t be, so to speak, normal. I wanted to turn it into a collaborative extension of her work. At first she agreed but then, appropriately, the process fell apart. She explained how good she was at providing what people wanted. But for my concept there was a problem. It wasn\u0027t personal enough. I received an e-mail with the following annulment: \u0022It would be different if you and I were in love, but since we are not I have no real reason to read your mind and become the part that is missing. I don\u0027t mean this as an insult -- in fact I consider it a high compliment that you would suggest we do what collaborators in art and love do. Whores also do this and that is their right.\u0022 So much for my new art career. July first came to regional attention while still in high school in Berkeley, when she produced a play based on a pen-pal relationship with an inmate in the California prison system. She moved to Portland and became enmeshed in the riot grrrl scene - a locus of DIY music and art. Out of this energized breeding ground arose the Big Miss Moviola project, an ingenious and self-perpetuating \u0022video chain letter.\u0022 Women filmmakers submit a short film that is then added to a compilation tape containing ten other participants. The tape is then returned to the contributor. By August of this year there will be upwards of 100 films in circulation. The idea for Moviola came from July\u0027s perception that the world is filled with inspirational movies that can\u0027t be seen. And she pushes it further -- she\u0027s also inspired by films that haven\u0027t been made. July, not too surprisingly, claims all her writing comes from the subconscious. The Amateurist (98) and Nest of Tens (00) are July\u0027s most intriguing videos. The titles are as slippery as the content. An amateurist, explains July, \u0022is someone who makes amateurs.\u0022 The video features two characters, both played by the director, in a split-personality relationship that triangulates exploitive experimentation, symbiosis, and co-dependent pathology. The first woman discusses what she observes on a television monitor. The screen displays a seemingly mute and perhaps mentally disturbed woman captured by a surveillance camera, who sends and receives signals that the Watcher interprets for the audience. Apparently she is good at what she does. She\u0027s been watching \u0022nine to twelve hours a day for the last four and a half years.\u0022 And although the coded communication has the semblance of meaning within the world of the video, it remains opaque to an outsider. Touching the screen, tracing the outline of the Amateur\u0027s legs, the Watcher remarks, \u0022Always the eleven, pretty basic.\u0022 The Watcher is reading the Amateur\u0027s body, analyzing her movements for numbers. I asked July about the relation between numbers and biology. \u0022The Watcher has systems for life and her body that allow her to function, just as you and I have systems: jobs, eating and sleeping schedules. These things feel arbitrary to me sometimes, as though they exist only to be maintained and self-enforced. I think I might be hyper-aware of this because I have barely ever had a job, and yet I am disciplined. I rigorously invent and enforce my own job/reality, but I\u0027m constantly aware that these systems are all made up, certainly my own are, and therefore all the rest are. This includes systems that rely on numbers.\u0022 Arbitrary systems hold the world together and when you remove reality-based content you can arrive at, for example, the eerie emotional formalism of The Amateurist. \u0022I just took out the middle, left the person, the numbers, the importance of a system,\u0022 says July. If you read that carefully you\u0027ll notice that the Watcher and the Amateur have merged. \u0022Are there ever two number ones? No, there\u0027s only one number one and that\u0027s us as a group,\u0022 says Miranda July, playing the part of a corporate suit in Nest of Tens. This 27-minute video is her most ambitious to date. It weaves together four scenarios, which include the machinations of a sexually dysfunctional family, a developmentally disabled performance artist lecturing an audience on phobias, and a young boy\u0027s surreal experimentation on a naked infant. The latter provides one of the more startling sequences: the boy places the infant on her back on the living room table, and, using cotton balls, Q-Tips, liquid soap, and bubble gum, performs, for lack of better words, a cleansing ritual. Cut to a bedroom interior. The baby is now lying on a bed. The boy scribbles a series of ones and zeros on a piece of paper. It resembles binary code. He tears the paper in half and affixes the pieces to the arms of the chair he sits in. His fingers punch away at the numbers as if they were the controls of a video game. His face turns sinister as heavy metal guitar riffs flood the soundtrack. The infant twitches in distress. After watching that, and the other three sequences in which seemingly everyday people go about acting completely normal while demonstrating distinct abnormality, one gets the sense that these things go on all the time. Patterns of behavior are systems, July would call them arbitrary, but upon closer examination that same arbitrariness opens up worlds of possibility. That\u0027s where artistic freedom comes from. The title Nest of Tens bothered me. I assumed it referred to the numerical scribbling of the boy, but binary code only appears in a sequence of zeros and ones, so technically the video should have been titled Nest of Zeros and Ones. Which is a lot less cryptic. \u0022I suck at math and calendars,\u0022 says July. \u0022But I also assumed that the ones and zeros were the nest of tens. To be honest I didn\u0027t really think of the zeros and ones as binary code, although I did think of them as numbers that become actual sliders and buttons. A nest is a safe place you make for yourself out of things you find, even if some of those things are already in use by other sectors of society, like tens.\u0022 Which brings up a crucial point. Miranda July is an artist not only obsessed with systems, numbers, and estranged behavior. At the core of her treatment of these issues is a belief in salvation through art. I think she expressed it to me best when I asked her about a song on one of the three CDs she\u0027s released in which a diseased Uma Thurman is cured by the realization that she is in a movie. \u0022This song,\u0022 says July, \u0022has something to do with real and unreal people and real and unreal physical pain and how the movies - or art - could make someone so unreal they didn\u0027t have to suffer.\u0022 Imagine that. Miranda July\u0027s Nest of Tens will be featured at the Walter Reade theater\u0027s New York Video Festival July 21--27, 2000. Reprinted by permission of Film Comment.","offset":0,"nextOffset":null,"totalCharacters":7451,"complete":true},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}