Auto-body - Julie Perini

Julie Perini
October 14, 2003
PERSONA FICTA: TRANSFORMATIONS response
"Hello, my name is Julie Perini"
credits: Julie Perini, executor
Description:

"Hello, my name is Julie Perini" is an interactive, collaborative endeavor between the artist and an audience. This piece was performed on Tuesday, September 30, 2003 for the University at Buffalo's Art Practicing the Body class.

I began the presentation by setting a blue metal box down on the table at the front of the room and explaining to audience members that they would each be receiving a envelope (these envelopes were yellow and kept closed with a piece of purple electrical tape). I told participants that inside these envelopes were a photograph and a form that they each needed to fill out. These forms contained the following text:

Hello, my name is Julie Perini. Here is a photograph of me when I was about _____ years old and living in__________. At this time, I was preoccupied with__________. At this moment I was feeling ___________. (room to elaborate)

Questions to keep in mind: Did JP know the camera was taking a photo? Is JP smiling or not? Is JP with other people? Are they touching? Is JP in costume? Is it difficult to locate the photograph in a geographic setting?

Please feel free to invent locations or emotions if these are not readily apparent from the photograph. The important thing is to become Julie Perini for one moment, really think about what it must have been like to be the person in the photograph at that particular point in time. Then relax and enjoy the experience of becoming Julie Perini. Julie Perini is a good person to be; you may want to become her again soon.

Thank you for participating!

At the end everyone gathered at the front of the room and "performed" the pieces they'd written out on their forms. After every participant had performed, we chatted for a few minutes about the project and sat back down.

Discuss the strengths and/or shortcomings of the final project:

The strengths of this project include its simplicity, its whimsical nature, its disruptive quality (surprising audience members with gifts of envelopes, the random method by which the snapshots were distributed) and its interactive component.

One shortcoming of this project is that it might not be as powerful performed on a audience a second time. After the initial concept, idea, and performance are revealed, repeat interactions with the piece may not yield or generate any new knowledge for the participants.

Also, I believe I did not deliver the presentation as confidently as I could; at the end I asked the participants it they had any ideas for how to strengthen the project; I shouldn't have done that, I should have left it as is.

What role did process play in the unfolding of the idea(s) into the finished work?:

The role of process in this piece was crucial. Indeed, the entire piece is about process, rather than any sort of construction of an art object that required my authorial decision-making to realize it. And it's about the process of the audience engaging directly with the piece and performing in the piece. As I stated after the initial presentation, it took a long time for me to arrive at this piece; I'd never done anything like it before. I had assumed I would produce a video piece or some video or photographic stills. I played with the idea of making myself into a star athlete, or an exotic/erotic alien from another planet, or a flasher, but these seemed to me to be too much about ficta and not enough about persona. And they seemed boring. And they would only be done to satisfy the parameters of the assignment.

So I kept thinking and wandering around Buffalo and staring at walls and gazing off into space at coffee shops until two things hit me: 1. I had a whole room full of people I could "use" for the realization of the project and 2. I didn't even need to produce an art object, I didn't need to use media. What liberation! Things moved around in my head much easier after that. Since I'd recently moved, I'd also recently gone through a box of photographs, reminiscing with myself about all of those good old days and not-so-good old days. These photos were still on my mind, so I started to think that perhaps I could use them somehow, as they represent my "persona" as it has "transformed" over the years. "But where's the ficta?" I thought.

I'd also recently attended a Game Night at a friend's house, so this idea of gaming was still on my mind. I thought I could make the photographs into a game for the class to play. Eventually I thought it through and ended up abandoning the game idea and instead employing the "mad lib" format outlined above. In this way, I engaged participants by asking them to fictionalize my personal history, handing creative control over to them, and making myself into an audience member for their performances.

Describe your project's conceptual origins in "Persona Ficta: Transformations":

This project represents a conceptual shift in my art-making. This is a shift away from projects that employ ideas that represent concepts that explore my own personal identity towards projects that instead explore the identities of others. This project is as much about an artist surrendering her creative control over to her audience as it is about exploring notions of identity construction/formation within our visual culture. It is about the artist instigating creativity in her audience while also drawing attention to this banal object, the personal snapshot, as a source of inspiration and an object for contemplation. This project seeks to illuminate who "I" am and how arbitrary and in some ways meaningless these sorts of statements about personal identity can be. By (for the most part) not revealing to participants if their performances were "correct" or "incorrect" I leave ambiguous and open-ended what the "truth" of these personal documents is, thereby raising questions about the value of this sort of "truth" in photographic representation.

Any other points:

This text was distributed to participants upon the completion of the project:

Hello, my name is Julie Perini
By Julie Perini
Notes on the project

"Hello, my name is Julie Perini" explores notions of identity construction, collective memory, and photographic representation. The photographs used for the project all contain visual information about the places, cultural institutions, and people that have influenced the development of the Julie Perini that you see before you today. By asking strangers from the audience to perform Julie Perini at a particular moment in time, I am challenging the audience to examine how it is that photographs communicate identity information, to recall the significance of the role of the snapshot in their own lives, and to consider how informal personal documentation has shaped their own history. Do snapshots provide evidence of particular characteristics for an individual? Are snapshots misleading? At which points in time do we grab cameras to preserve moments? What is the role of ritual in our lives and development? How does our memory incorporate photographic representation? How do photographs communicate other sensory information? And most important, who is Julie Perini and how are we to find out from these photographs?