[open the box] Jac Leirner

The contemporary world is a world of accumulations. The journey, shifting in space, is one of the major vehicles for accumulation (of images, memories, visiting cards, souvenirs, useless items).

Jac Leirner is a Brazilian artist who has been working since the eighties on the irrationality of accumulation, holding exhibitions in which the filed accumulation of objects by categories gives way to new sculptural objects that appear to be taken from an imitation of minimal works.

Some of Leirner’s works have a clear critical intention, whether in relation to the world of art and its fetishised system of the circulation of objects or in relation to a wider social context. One of her most famous works is entitled Os cem (1987) and consists of a series of sculptures made with endless bundles of 100 Cruzeiro notes, at the time worthless due to Brazilian hyperinflation.

This logic of the conversion of the meaning of an object into an endless series is also present in the set of works with the overall title Corpus delicti, which includes the work belonging to the Colecção da Caixa Geral de Depósitos. All of the sculptures are made of objects lifted from airplanes, such as glasses, airsickness bags, or, in this case, flight pillows and blankets.

So, in the frenzy of travelling which is the greatest condemnation of most contemporary artists in a hysterically globalized world, the slight misdemeanour of stealing that these works show is almost a little provocation disguised as sculpture. Yet its scope possesses a much more distant echo, in the dawning of the Brazilian contemporary condition and in the avant-gardes that were set up in Brazil from the late fifties on.

It is from this possibility of a connection between art and life, headed by Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape, that Leirner makes her work, accumulating the remains of daily life and organizing an ironic inventory that unlike its historic references appears to be art because it delinquently takes its shapes from it.

Biography
Jac Leirner was born in 1961, in São Paulo, where she lives and works. She graduated in Visual Arts at the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (São Paulo), where she was also a teacher. She collaborated with the University of Oxford and with the Ryjksakademie van beeldende kunsten (Amsterdam). She was a resident artist at the Museum of Modern Art (Oxford, 1991) and the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, 1991). In 2001 she received a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (New York). She has shown her work in exhibitions in several countries, with special note being her solo exhibitions at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (2001) and at the Miami Art Museum (2003), as well as group shows at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian Institution (Washington DC, 1992), Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2000) and The National Museum of Art (Osaka, 2001). She participated in the São Paulo Biennial (1983 and 1989), the Kassel Documenta (1992) and the Venice Biennial (1990 and 1997).She is rep- resented in the major Brazilian museums and the Museum of Modern Art (New York), among others.

Bibliography
Cruz, Amada, Directions/Jac Leirner (cat.), Washington DC, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, 1992-1993.
Herkenhoff, Paulo, e Caldas, Waltercio, Jac Leirner e a densidade da história da arte no Brasil. Representação brasileira, 47.a Bienal de Veneza, São Paulo, Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 1997.