Jac Leirner: Subtítulo Lorem Ipsum
Jac Leirner first showed works from her series Os Cem in 1987 at Petite Galerie in Rio de Janeiro. In 1980s Brazil, rampant inflation led to the absolute devaluation of the national currency, with paper costing more than the face value on each note. “Money was devalued in an instant. It was a shocking situation in which they took from us, the people, the very notion of value”. Leirner began storing Cruzeiro bills in her desk drawer, compiling these virtually worthless paper rectangles that, after meticulous intellectual and manual labor, would become the building blocks of a landmark work of art. Os Cem was crucial to the artist’s simultaneous recognition both in Brazil and abroad.
In the series, the artist arranges bills in a range of formal configurations, from three-dimensional wheels and winding columns to flat geometries reminiscent of constructivist spatial organization. While composing each work, Leirner encountered a wealth of small-scale graffiti on the faces of bills: love poems, obscenities and warnings to the anonymous citizen all became scriptural material to be manipulated by the artist.
Jac Leirner, Os cem (roda)/The Hundred (Wheel), 1985-1987.
SF MoMA – San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
“Solving the formal aspect was a challenge,” the artist remarks to Adele Nelson, “I had to transform a certain number of scribbled bills into something visually interesting. The charade was sometimes very hard to solve. The quantities did not agree with my wish to lend them specific forms. At the end of the process, I had 12 pieces, each with a unique formal solution.” These accumulation tactics and spatial construction render the abstract logic of hyperinflation not only visible but literal; the Cruzeiro banknotes’ value and denominations are hidden, while the transition from an economic to an artistic circuit of exchange highlights their objectual appearance in lieu of financial indexes.
“It was no accident that I called the series “Os Cem”. In Portuguese, the phonetic resemblance and distinct spellings of the word remit to two different meanings: with an “s” – sem – the word means “the dispossessed” (literally, “those who have not”), with a “c” – cem – it indicates the numeral 100. Thus, Os Cem evokes both meanings: the number as much as the idea of those without. It is a little paradox, reduced to a word with twofold meaning,” says Leirner. The highly influential art historian, critic and curator Guy Brett maintained a close relationship with Leirner throughout his life and wrote about Os Cem on several occasions and organized the whole of the artist’s production up to 1990 in the show Transcontinental: Nine Latin-American Artists at Ikon Gallery in the UK.
Jac Leirner, Todos os Cem/All the One Hundreds, 1998.
Artist’s collection.
Installation view, Transcontinental: Nine Latin American Artists, 1990.
Courtesy Ikon, Birmingham, UK.
“At first I thought that Jac Leirner’s work was sculpture. I lifted one of her bands off the floor. The form, the occupation of space, the plasticity. But no: this work was made of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of banknotes, threaded together in a long chain. They had an indescribable color, they had been much handled, and they were very dirty. The object became immensely heavy, lifeless, a parable of inertia… This work ridiculed sculptural formalism and, nevertheless, its power as a sign, as a revelation of a social and human reality, was inseparable from its sculptural mass. The enlightening shock was achieved (…) by the simple accumulation and gathering, in a single place, of things normally dispersed in time and space,” writes Brett in 1989.
Works from the Os Cem series are included in prestigious public collections, namely the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, Tate Modern and the SF–MoMA.
Installation view, Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century,
Jun 6–Sep 7, 1993, MoMA, New York, USA.
Installation view, Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century,
Jun 6–Sep 7, 1993, MoMA, New York, USA.
Jac Leirner, Todos os Cem/All the One Hundreds, 1998.
Artist’s collection.
Jac Leirner, Os cem (roda)/The Hundred (Wheel), 1985-1987.
SF MoMA – San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Installation view, Transcontinental: Nine Latin American Artists, 1990.
Courtesy Ikon, Birmingham, UK.
