Jana Leo in conversation with Áine Phillips
New York City 26-5-07

BIOGRAPHY:
Born in Madrid in 1965, Jana Leo won a Pollock-Krasner Foundation's grant in 2003 and in 2005 a Botin’s grant for residency in the ISP in New York. Among her shows: “AS A MALL I REALLY LIKE MOMA” (paper airplanes were flown into the atrium of MoMA), THE INTRUDER, at the ICP First Photography and Video Triennial and A. at Reina Sofia in Madrid. She received Masters in Aesthetics (1992) Ph.D. in Philosophy (2004) from UAM and Master in Architecture at Princeton (2000). Assistant Professor at Cooper Union since 2000, she is leaving now to concentrate on her art.
Jana Leo uses the strategy of displacement and infiltrates art elements into legal, sexual or architectural contexts. Her art is public because it is intended to have a projection in a public arena, but it is not “public art” commonly understood as an art project in a public space.

CONVERSATION:
Áine - Why did you begin working with autobiography?

Jana - A precedent was working as a life model for painters and photographers to pay my way through university. I liked it although it was boring, I had time to see and to think, and I began to see the potential in making work from my body; this was when I got in touch with art because I had no background in art and I was studying philosophy.

Jana - As a life model, I saw many more possibilities than the actual images the artist's created, especially with photography. I wanted to be on the other side of the camera. My first works were about self-portraiture, the many faces and identities you can have. I began showing the best of myself, shortly I went straight to sexuality and pain and its' ambiguity. I wanted to show that something can be terrible and at the same time attractive, I was showing the dark of the light side of life.

Áine - When did you start making live performance?

Jana - I went through photography first, performing for the camera. The first public, live work in a gallery was a 'Peep Show' called Private Cabin. The gallery was a large apartment in central Madrid, close to the prostitute area and I created a 'sex room' that was different from the regular peep show because it also exposed the “guy”. The camera recorded the client, watching the peep show girl who was me, a first camera recorded my actions and the client, and a second camera recorded the response of the individual viewers. When people entered the gallery they could choose between being spectators or first hand participants going into the peep show by paying 3 euros. The participants entered into the “peep-show” one at a time and relayed the footage back to the public gallery space.

Áine - Did people react to you as they would at a conventional sex show?

Jana - I think some of the people, artists and curators didn’t because they were not peep show users and they do not know what to do. Some of the “clients” were ordinary public, a percentage of them actually regulars to peep show; those enjoy being exposed to the camera, some complained I was not a good show girl, other come back to bring their girlfriend alone and create their own excitement spot, they masturbated looking at my show at the same time their girl is looking at them looking at me; all very polite and well dressed, and all very real and sexual.
In any case, it was reciprocally a looking not touching as it was a peep show.

Áine - You set up an art situation which is about the contemplation of ideas, but you also set up a real life situation where there was a real sexual transaction on some level.

Jana - Yes, especially when the viewers didn't know me and were unfamiliar with art. When they knew me, they didn't know what to do!
The individual viewers paid in, received a ticket and could stay 3 minutes only. One day a guy came in and returned to pay every 3 minutes and he was masturbating. Some days I felt it was ridiculous, what am I doing here…I did it for 7 days. At the end of the week, I used the recorded video footage and made a video piece to install on the chair I had performed on (for the duration of the exhibition).

Áine - What outcome or consequence was there for you as an artist and woman, from doing this piece?

Jana - It was very important to me, the function of performance was clear: firstly not only to bring some to the gallery but to actually change its appearance, mechanics, role and architecture; secondly it stated that my performance is not just there to show the public but it requires the public, there is interaction and it has to be intimate. Thirdly it was recognized that this performance was a setting for very intense encounters with people – encounters that go straight to the point without mediation. I always hated mediation in my life; I always want to go to the heart of a relationship or situation. This performance was recognition of the need to create encounters that are unexpected, real encounters between people in a real way. My performances are real and at the same time they are fiction, not only in the sense that they have been fabricated but in the sense that they are fantastic, they make a fantasy true.

Áine - There is a similarity to the work you made for Xes Show, we did together in Collective:Unconscious Space, here in NY in 2003.

Jana - The piece was called 'Looking not Touching, Touching not Looking' it was in two parts. The first part involved me dancing on a table before the audience, masturbating under a long skirt with my chest naked. A camera attached to my leg relayed the footage onto a large screen behind me. The second part involved me taking individual members of the audience behind a dark curtain where they were given the camera to record my naked body using 'night vision' while I am blindfolded. The audience watch what goes on from the auditorium.

Áine - There was a direct touching of your body in this work.

Jana - Yes, but there was no embarrassment for the viewer (the one with the camera, in the dark with me) because they could not watch me or my reactions. I had reduced the situation to the simplest and most direct terms. To set the parameters for something, to create rules, I made it easy to happen, appear as a game. When in a game one wants to play or perhaps to win but usually doesn’t question the rules. Rules, usually understood as traces of repression can offer the liberation one seeks for, by providing a structure.

Áine - I can see connections between the pieces you have made in terms of refining down the elements of a social and sexual situation, distilling the encounter to a core experience. What about your current piece dealing with Rape?

Jana - Rape, New York. The piece is autobiographical, the rape was something I went through, something of great significance to me. I introduced art into the criminal justice and legal system, I mean I did for real.

Áine - For what purpose?

Jana - My strength was my own weakness; I was out of place, wrong neighbourhood and wrong building. I was in the process of prosecuting the man who raped me and the landlord who did not secure the building and allowed it to happen. I had to follow this rule: the out of place.
I decided on strategies to introduce art processes into the legal process. For example, as a court statement from the assaulted, I read a statement in court but it is written in a personal and poetic way – I speak a language from performance in a gallery not the usual language of court rooms. I introduced art photographs as exhibit in the civil case, such the portrait of me before the rape and the portrait after.

Áine - So it is an intertwining of art processes and legal processes and methods?

Jana - Yes. In the negligence case, against my landlord the main proof was the photographs of my face before and after the rape. I was trying to prove that the impact the rape had on my life was to the extent of changing my appearance, affective documents. They documented the change in the perception of myself and in consequence the change in my portrait. I was different person, this could be easily seen by looking at the pictures before and after the rape. I used them as exhibits, in a civil claim. These pictures may as well go into an art gallery.
Another example is the way that the medical records were presented, those were treated as photography is treated in art, enlarged. I enlarged the medical photographs of my cervix and vagina. In this case the art process was the enlargement, the scale also the re-contextualisation of these images. The image carries different meaning because of the change of context. The Judge didn't allow the images at first, but my Lawyer protested and they were admitted as evidence. The images are very powerful.
I took pictures of the building where I was living and where I was raped. As an artist I know how to make emotional, psychological images, not only documentary pictures. I want to say that the space had changed for me from secure and intimate to threatening.
I am now collecting all the evidence and documents to make a book. In this work I want to show not only the autobiography of the rape but most important to show how the process of art can interfere with the criminal justice system. The book makes public that I used art to change legal procedures

Áine - It is also a political work for people who have been raped.

Jana - And very risky because I was facing people who may not believe me when I read my declaration in court. They may think I'm crazy. For all women who have been raped, this is a common feeling because the evidence is subjective unless there are witnesses.

I think this is a political work not only for those who have been raped, but for any one who has to deal with the court system, it appears as something very obscure, and it is a source of stress and frustration, and I think this is mainly because the process is so complicated and formal that is not easy to grasp.

Áine - How do we take our own personal experience and make it relevant to others? I am thinking of the idea 'from the personal to the political'. The work has to go beyond your own self experience, the subjective exploration of your own life so others can relate to the work. In this work for example, the relation to the political would be the social context where sexual violence is common and violence is embedded in the act of sex.

Jana - Also that sex with violence is interesting and possibly desirable when it is under control.

Áine - Notions of power are inextricably bound up with sexuality, but if it is exploitative of another human being a limit is crossed and it moves into oppression and suffering not pleasure and exchange.
So how did you actually attempt to make a change in the legal system through your use of art processes in this case/piece?

Jana - It happened at the reading of my statement. I have not seen the rapist until the day in court and he is looking down when I read. In the statement I ask for his sentence to be reduced.

Áine - Why did you ask that?

Jana - It is complex. One of the reasons is fear, he is making public my identity so I can be attacked by anybody he knows. Another reason is that he used no more violence than was necessary to get what he wanted and I thought that was important and I thought - what is better a long or a short sentence? I am trying to show which is worse to be raped or to be scared of being killed. If we pose long sentences do we encourage others to kill after the rape, because a rapist may as well kill if he faces a long sentence. In my statement I try to establish the complexities as the situation was also a prototype – he was 19, I was 35, he was black, and I am white and educated. There is a political dimension around the issue of power to begin with. But this power was equalised through the court situation where I am empowered again, which felt good.

Áine - You could take power in the process through making an art work from it. Was there a therapeutic effect in terms of taking a violent and negative experience and making it positive through art?

Jana - Yes on an intellectual level I have more confidence but on another level no. I used to be able to sleep without waking at every small thing. On a basic animal level – my mechanisms to the outside world and my fear of changes in the environment – making art does not help that.

Áine - I feel the same in my own work. I can take a difficult or traumatic personal experience, or something that has been difficult to live through and I can make a piece of art from it. This empowers and transforms the original experience from a destructive to creative and I become transformed also. But I still feel the pain of betrayal or the anguish of the event. Perhaps the thing that changes is the will to transcend and one's agency in the world. It is inevitable that we experience pain, it is unavoidable but instead of being the object of pain you can become the subject that directs the course of events subsequently.

Jana - Artists have an inverted colorific function, they transform the darkness of the experiences around them into something less dark, because it is processed and one can learn from it.

Áine - I had the same conversation with another artist in NY – when something bad happens, I think I will be able to use this in my work! I think artists in any creative form feel this – the usefulness of a real and strong experience. It can become subject matter or content that carries powerful resonance for other people. In your case, you have with integrity, revealed and opened out this event of being raped and I can find a resonance, parallels in my own life even though I have never been raped.

Jana - It is not really about expression, it is not a relief, it is almost that it is the only thing you can do – it is very efficient. I don't believe in 'expression' to make you feel better. Art out of life is an investment, you get more out from what you put in. There are emotional consequences to making art from life experience.

Áine - In my work I have seen the emotional consequences, it is related to the level of examination involved in using real experience – to make art you must pay it attention and that is helpful in understanding, accepting experience on an emotional level as well as being the conceptual process of making it into art.
The process is an entering into the event, the memory and it is a need.
In terms of the problematics of making autobiographical work, it implicates many others. My next question is how do you deal with this?
For example, my mother has told me she does not want me to make work about our family, growing up. As a result of this request (trying to find a way around it) I have come up with a method of cloaking the narrative. I imagine it clearly and then re-present it, mediated through a form such as non linear, non specific poetic narrative. I put a membrane between the actual thing that happened and the performance of it. Is this similar to what you did in the Rape piece? Did you have to go to the core of the actual rape to speak the truth of it with absolute clarity, for the court proceedings but also for the emotional and aesthetic impact of the writing as art?

Jana - Yes, one of the things that interest's me is the power of language. I believe in it. When you are in a relationship and the other says something painful, it is like a cutting of your skin. This piece is dealing also with power of language in legal and court procedures and I think I have used both ways to maximum effect. I believe in language, not because I think it is linked to truth or action necessarily but because it can be. Certain words are very potent. Here are examples of the text from the Rape piece:

"Unexpectedly, a strange presence crossed the space and penetrated it violently. An intruder, he has a gun. His steps go through my space, my retreat, my intimacy. This space is not familiar to me anymore, it is being raped.
He made his way through my body. I look at the ceiling while I am being raped in the bed where I used to make love with the person I was attached to. I empty out, blank, nothing before, nothing after. Time stops and my memories vanish"
This is not legal language, it is poetic, but I change emphasis and go on:
"I have a social responsibility to present charges against the rapist in order to protect other women from being assaulted, but my responsibility does not end there. I had to think about the possible outcome of presenting charges for me or for other women. I tried to think about what happened as if I were a third party, uninvolved."
The language goes back and forth between two different styles of writing. I spent weeks writing that page going back and forth between one language and another because if the text is fully poetic, it does not have legal effect and the listener has only so much concentration for poetry.

Áine - Poetry works on the level of feeling – in your case you want one language to go to the heart and one to the head, so the listener can reflect back on the emotion you have aroused in them.

Jana - In this writing, it goes back and forth between the heart and the head.

Áine - What are the implications for others in your autobiographical performance? How do you find ways around that. For example, the writer Anaïs Nin who wrote explicit erotic stories and personal journals from her own life and love affairs, secured all her diaries in a NY vault until after her death.

Jana - In my work I have taken on board implications for the future, I looked for the potential problems I might have, in my statement I tried to mediate that. I created a one to one dialogue but put it in a public situation.

Áine - A feature of your work is to make intimate connections with strangers, perhaps this is a strategy to get around the problem of implicating others in your work? If you involve strangers in the work, they come to you knowing the limits and ramifications of involvement from the beginning.

Jana - Yes, a stranger is someone you are not going to know more so you don't have responsibility for the future. But it is something more simple, the idea of the present, being in the present. Encounters with strangers have this intensity because the conversation or action between you is either going to happen or it isn't.
I did a show in 1999 in Madrid about my relationship with a boyfriend. I showed intimate photographs of him, movies where we were fucking and diaries detailing the relationship but he didn't want me to do this show. He was upset and asked me not to do it, I said yes it is true, I don't have the right to do it, it is your intimacy but I did it anyway. He accepted but eventually we did break up.

Áine - In your work you do not use a form or format repeatedly, each piece is different from the last. Is this a conscious decision?

Jana - When working with the events of a life, each thing is different so I use a different approach each time. But I do commonly work with photography and performance. When I am working on a project idea, a system or process to put across that idea shows itself to be appropriate. When the conditions change, the ideas change you can either change the elements or reinvent the system. I tend to change the system because adjusting the elements will not always make the best work. The problem is that it is a slow process, because every time the object changes the process changes too.

Áine - In your work, you want to go to the heart of what relationship means. In my work I have a huge desire to communicate. When I found the form of performance fully, it was a relief because I had found a way to communicate directly with an intention to make new forms of relationship happen. How do you understand the need to make work about relationships in your work?

Jana - It is about communication but I realise that human beings reproduce, they relate, they die, so relations, more than relationships, are something you need to be alive. Also social settings are very constraining for me and performance is a way to create other relations on my own terms, under new conditions.

Áine - How do you think about the uses and control of your image in performance? In my work I have always felt the inadequacy of my body, its' limitations. In performance I can do new things with my body and have others see me in expanded and exceptional ways. In Harness, for example, I am strapped into this traction with my body positioned and presented in a way that it never would be in ordinary life. Relating to others in this physical presentation allows and gives me permission to say and do new things, to make new forms of self available.

We have a huge fascination for ourselves, a reaffirmation related to power, control and self confidence. I am totally aware of the self image I produce, but I am not always able to control it. In the "touching not looking, looking not touching" performance I made for xeShow at Collective:Unconscious here in 2003, I danced on a table, half naked, masturbating with a camera filming the movements of my hand under the skirt which was then projected onto a screen behind me, my image was very fragile not desirable the way I had expected.
I knew I wanted to avoid an image of conventional sexiness but I was not aware of making this fragile bird like image of myself simultaneous with the power of these two fingers, enlarged to cover the whole room.