Who likes Miranda July?

I think there may have been some topics on her back when Me and You and Everyone We Know came out, but she recently released a book of short fiction, No One Belongs Here More Than You, which I'm really digging right now.

I love that even though she works in so many different mediums - performance art, film, fiction, music - her particular, unique sensibility always comes through clearly. The stories in No One Belongs catch you with quirky bits of eccentric humor, but in the end none of them lack for real, vulnerable human emotion.

Oh god me.. I'm a freak for her.

She's so forceful about her importance in society. Every one of her films and "art pieces" is so insipidly arrogant; she's thrusting into your face what she considers to be her contribution to society, which would be overlooked despite that she rubs it in your nose. Modern art has been pumped full of such artificial meaning, that really it lacks meaning altogether. Other people, not the artist, judge the artist's work. Or that's how it used to work, before performance art made it possible for the artist herself to determine the importance of her work, and thus her own, to society. My favorite quote about her: "Miranda July is the type of person who would make you pay $24 to see her perform, which would consist of her sitting in the middle of a room eating ice cream for three hours." Which isn't far from the truth.

Miranda July is the type of person who, if you met her at a party, and she did something "quirky," you'd spend the next two hours purposefully trying to avoid. And yet, in her films, her deranged idiocy (such as sticking nylons on her ears) is somehow embraced as genuine human emotion instead of overwrought, arrogant art simply substituted for it. Yet she asserts her importance, and who are we to argue? She sets it up so that those who do like what she does are so rabid about it, that if someone points out the (not-so-subtle) flaws, they are immediately demonized by those who cling to it so forcefully.



Then there's her filmmaking, which follows the Generic Hipster/Indie Film Guidelines:

A) you must have a male who has just undergone a catastrophy in his life
Examples:
Robert Downey Jr in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Greg Kinnear in Little Miss Sunshine
Steve Carell in Little Miss Sunshine
John Hawkes in Me And You And Everyone We Know
Orlando Bloom in Elizabethtown
Zach Braff in Garden State
B) you must have a Quirky Female
C) Catastrophe Male must meet Quirky Female and most likely fall in love with her
D) Quirky Female must do Quirky Things to substitute for her substantial lack of character development
Examples:
Natalie Portman in Garden State
Miranda July in Me And You And Everyone We Know
Abigail Breslin in Little Miss Sunshine
Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown
Kirsten Dunst (among others) in The Virgin Suicides
E) you must have a Wise Elder, to dictate terms of endearment to Catastrophe Male
Examples:
Ian Holm in Garden State
Alan Arkin in Little Miss Sunshine
Hector Elias in Me And You And Everyone We Know
James Woods in The Virgin Suicides
F) through Quirky Female, Catastrophe Male finds his way in life.
G) generally, all of this is done to a hip indie soundtrack that will be irrelevant in less than a year.

I didn't know that about performance artists! I may have to rethink my own conclusions about her as an artist.

Sorry...I didn't mean to demonize, you just then.

What, specifically, in or about her work gives you the impression that she has an inflated sense of its importance?

I mean, I get that being overly portentous is a danger, but I just don't get that from her. I just think she takes herself and what she does seriously. I don't quite agree that most art (perhaps most performance art) these days insists on its significance. So many artists/filmmakers impart such a layer of irony to their work that ANY sense of seriousness is dullled by that safety valve of "Oh, ha ha, it's all just for ironic fun, I'm not really serious about these characters"; there's nothing risked because every attempt at genuine emotion hedges its bet with a blanket of sardonicism.

That's one of the reasons I do like Miranda July. She's serious about her art, and she doesn't build a safety valve into it. You may feel she goes past that and crosses over to pomposity, but I don't get that impression.

Hmm...I've always gotten the impression that she doesn't take herself too seriously, and that she can be sort of "tongue-in-cheek" at times. I don't know, she's always come off as really unassuming to me. *shrugs*

I'm pretty fond of her, so I'll be checking out the book. Thanks, Rafi.