Miranda July: New Society at Fondazione Prada

Given the extent and duration of Miranda July's fame among the planet's hip cognoscenti, it is surprising that the first gallery exhibition dedicated to the protean, media-straddling American artist did not open until a couple of weeks after she turned 50 in February 2024. The location was not in her native USA — born in Vermont as Miranda Grossinger, she was raised in the academic/intellectual/bohemian California enclave of Berkeley — but in Milan, at the Osservatorio gallery of Fondazione Prada.

A stimulating if decidedly uneven immersion into July's whimsically-confrontational self-constructed universe(s), New Society comprised 13 exhibits across two floors (the fifth and sixth floors of the building). It touched upon more than three decades of activity, starting with a flyer advertising her 1992 play The Lifers (written while she was still in high school and later staged at legendary Berkeley venue 924 Gilman Street). Later in the 1990s she staged performances in alternative venues in Pacific Northwest cities, as commemorated in Milan via relics mounted in glass-topped displays.

The title of the exhibition, curated by Mia Locks, who is perhaps best known for co-curating the Whitney Biennial 2017, was taken from that of an idiosyncratically mock-grandiose 2015 project which became the Milan extravaganza's unofficial centrepiece: "a social experiment performed in real time with an audience who accepts July's proposal 'to stay in the theater with me for the rest of your lives and form a new society.'"

One such theatrical performance was looped on a television monitor on the Osservatorio ground floor. Running the length of a typical feature film (87 minutes), it comes across like an extended combination of stand-up routine and TED Talk. Always an engaging performer — a former striptease dancer, she has long known how to maximise the effect of her height, graceful poise, lithe frame, green eyes, flawless pale skin and angular cheekbones — July muses on the problems inherent in existing societies (especially in the United States). In collaboration with her (audibly-adoring) audience, she then tries to devise alternatives of a sort neither excessively hippy-dippy nor unworkably utopian.

At one point July ponders whether the community-cum-country conceptually emerging during the course of the performance should have a national anthem as well as a flag — the latter's design is discussed amid much creative back-and-forth. Perhaps, rather than penning a new inspirational song, an existing ditty could be repurposed... In a flash of wacky inspiration, July proposes one of the hits from the soundtrack of the Disney animation smash Frozen. But then — suddenly remembering the artistically-inclined, doubtless left-liberal-leaning, socially progressive composition of "her" people — she instantly withdraws the suggestion with a self-scolding air: "No, that's corporate! Boo! We don't like that!"

Hearing such a sentiment reproduced in such surroundings provided the most piquant and even provocative moment of my visit to the show. While still very much a "family firm," Prada is also unambiguously big-business, an embodiment of the type of conspicuous capitalist consumption which July's punk-club pals of the late 1990s (and their contemporary equivalents) would instinctively, scornfully reject.

The Osservatorio is located directly above Mario Prada's first luxury-goods shop, which opened in 1913 and is still very much in business. It occupies a prime spot in a prime site: the opulently spectacular Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, an early precursor of the shopping mall, which adjoins the area of La Scala opera house on one flank and Milan's crazily ornate cathedral on the other. Since its opening in 1877, the Galleria has been synonymous with high-end shopping.

Standard admission to New Society cost a reasonable-enough €15 — simply obtaining access to the Osservatorio, which has a terrific view of the architectural and engineering glass-and-steel wonder that is the Galleria (especially its vast central dome), is worth several euros on its own. Multiply the €15 charge number by a factor of 340 and you have the €5,100 price tag asked for an innocuous-looking leather case for glasses ("porta occhiali") on display in the ground-floor Prada shop's window — alongside which the nearby €450 pair of spectacles seemed a veritable snip.

Fondazione Prada, the pet-project of present company-boss Miuccia Prada, is of course very much in the tradition of munificent patronage by which the wealthy have supported art and artists — a practice with a particularly rich history in Italy over the centuries. The intention of Prada in putting on New Society (the 2024 show) was perhaps to rubber-stamp July's status as a visual artist in tandem with her parallel, award-winning career as a filmmaker — she wrote and directed Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), The Future (2011) and Kajillionaire (2020), starring in the first two — and author (the novels The First Bad Man [2015] and All Fours [2024], and two collections of stories).

Not everyone "gets" Miranda July, and some even find her brand of self-centred, quizzical, mock-naive, popular-culture-adjacent drollery decidedly grating. The Milan show was evidently not in the business of winning over such skeptics: there was a definite air of catering to the already-converted, if not actively preaching to them. I happen to have always been quite closely tuned-in to July's mildly askew comic wavelength; like many artists with a genuine sense of humour, she is on uncertain ground when attempting sincerity and seriousness. Quite apt, then, that Fondazione Prada's bijou movie-house, where July's cinematic works were screened during the period of the show, is named “Cinema Godard” — the late French-Swiss master was quite capable  (see Passion, Detective and Rise and Fall of a Little Film Company) of outstripping his quasi-compatriot Jacques Tati in the LOL department.

For me, the highlight of New Society was its slightest but funniest element, one which took the concept of 'lavatory humour' to a pleasingly literal degree. Speakers in the ceilings of the toilets at the back of the exhibition's first floor played a 78-second audio piece titled The Crowd from 2004, in which July adopts the role of a rock star on stage at a massive concert. As the (studio-created) "crowd" hollers its gusty approval, July yelps out a brief, hilarious monologue: "And do you love me?? Even though I am sometimes irritating?? And a little bit selfish??". The Crowd is a brilliant miniature: daft, but flawlessly executed, and actually gaining impact from the way it was wittily integrated into the Osservatorio's existing physical space. Locks' masterstroke was to juxtapose such a clever artwork with rooms dedicated to the most mundane of bodily functions, the intimacy of the latrines in amusing contrast to the vast stadium "setting" of The Crowd.

This was the only part of New Society which approached the level of July's best cinema enterprises, which can be hysterically funny (the way Kajillionaire reveals and explains its main character's name is a stroke of deadpan genius.) I recall literally crying with laughter at several junctures when I saw The Future at the Berlinale in 2010, where the film played to a decidedly mixed critical reception.  For my money it is one of the boldest, most distinctive American narrative films of that decade; the fact that July has made only one feature-length picture since (which had the bad luck to emerge at the same time as the COVID-19 pandemic) is very much contemporary cinema's loss.

Perhaps July finds the time-consuming and collaborative nature of filmmaking less congenial than the relatively solitary sphere of visual arts. But even in the latter arena, she is drawn repeatedly towards collaboration: she thrives on random encounters with individuals unconnected with the art world, whom she then draws into her praxis. The 6th floor at the Osservatorio was given over to such projects — most interestingly, the nine-monitor vertical-format video installation titled F.A.M.I.L.Y. (Falling Apart Meanwhile I Love You), a "world-premiere" at the exhibition documenting very short films which July made with seven strangers she met via Instagram.

July met her collaborator for I'm the President, Baby (2018), Oumarou Idrissa, when he turned up as her Uber driver in Los Angeles. They kept in contact, and when the Victoria & Albert Museum commissioned a piece from her some six years ago, July used data based on his sleeping/waking patterns and mobile phone usage to create an installation involving various sets of curtains, their opening and closing triggered remotely by Idrissa's activity. The Milan show reproduced the original 2018 data with muted and underwhelming results: as can so often be the case with conceptual art, the "story" behind the creation of the piece proved much more interesting than the actual exhibit.

Rather more successful was another fresh collaborative effort on the first floor, and a further example of July's creative use of Instagram to make unlikely connections: Learning to Love You More: Assignment #43. The "assignment" in question, taken from a 2002-2009 internet-based initiative co-created by July and Harrell Fletcher, was "Make an exhibition of the art inside your parents' house" — here taken up by one Miriam Goi. It is a simple enough idea: very ordinary objects, placed in a gallery context, take on extra interest and significance. As July put it with her characteristically disarming winsomeness (the deployment of the exclamation mark here so very MJ): "Art is so familiar that you might not even think of it as art. But it is! And it shaped your vision of reality."

Goi thus became the "curator" for the "artist" Antonella Cei (her mother) — the lady in question having picked up all manner of bric-a-brac (some tacky, some banal) over the years. "I liked that a 'doll' with such a delicate, kind face could make that much noise," commented Cei on a toy rechristened as Wind Up (1990) – a line that could also apply to July herself.

Souvenir Bag (2000), meanwhile, was quite literally that: a seemingly innocuous blue-and-white-patterned plastic carrier-bag, framed by Cei with no idea that it would later spend months hanging on the illustrious walls of Fondazione Prada. In the accompanying caption, Cei notes "My mom bought some souvenirs and that was the bag they came in. She framed it. She can turn anything into art."

The same is obviously also true of Miranda July, especially when it comes to the quotidian aspects of her own (admittedly glamorous and affluent) existence. But not content with turning anything into art, July seems determined to show that she can turn anyone into an artist — or rather, that we all have artistic impulses which are seldom able to find proper manifestation.

The "key" work in New Society was perhaps, on this basis, The Swan Tool (2000), a video-documentation of a theatre piece drawing on July's sometime job working for a company "helping people get into their locked cars." Crucial to this was the eponymous bent-wire instrument, an example of which was presented in a display case alongside the video monitor — a neat metaphor for Miranda July's knack for "unlocking" creativity in others.

The Swan Tool was one of eight exhibits on the Osservatorio's fifth floor, five of which were this type of video documentation recording a live show. Such artworks are by their nature ephemeral; thus the documentations were an approximation, transmitting the basic idea via video recording, with support from various wigs, costumes and minor props. The three exceptions were a ripped-up poster, reconfigured and stuck on the wall where visitors entered the space; The Crowd; and The Amateurist, a 14-minute video short.

July's claims to be taken seriously as a visual artist, then, relied mainly on the contents of the sixth floor: five exhibits, comprising three installations, a collage and a series of prints. While of evident interest in the context of July's overall oeuvre, they amounted to fairly thin soup in comparison with her exceptional achievements in cinema, literature and live performance. The show goes on.