Commentary on Miranda July & Harrell Fletcher’s Learning to Love You More, RISD, 2009
Distances are great
Contact becomes more and more intimate. – Bert Kommerij from Flick Radio
Learningtoloveyoumore.com invites anyone who visits the website to complete assignments created by the artist Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher. Started in 2002, learningtoloveyoumore.com began as a web-based project. Later, it evolved into a series of exhibitions and a book documenting the participants’ responses.
The site is a collaborative project based on responses to each assignment from ordinary individuals. The assignments’ themes range from the emotional therapy (#63 make an encouraging banner) to the meaningless (#41 document your bald spot). But all of the attempts to draw pubic participants have one thing in common: they suggest that the artist is commenting on the web’s epistemology.
Learningtoloveyoumore.com embodies the spirit of “informal media” that has exploded in the past two decades. The popularity of blogs pushed this type of media forward and expanded its prevalence in society. Blogs allow people to self-publish, giving anyone the right to make their personal reflections available to the public. As Nick Gall describes, “blogging is the voice of a person…it’s a new form of conversation and a new form of community.” 2 As a result more self-confessional and ordinary daily events are being mused over.
Similar to blog postings, the responses to each assignment organize the extraordinary archive of ordinary and often mundane experiences of life into a collective collage. Assignment #63 charges people to create encouraging banners with a phrase that they might repeat to themselves as self-affirmation. As part of the exercise, the artist instructs people to display the banner, take a picture of it and send it to the artist who later posts the picture on the site. Banners with statements like “everything is not broken” and “everybody loves you” are archived on the site. These mimic the personal comments people write in blog entries. 3
The site also invokes the web’s ability to democratize information and challenge formal hierarchies. Exchanging information without the need for an institutional “seal of approval” from the mainstream media has empowered social networks where amateurs and experts coexist, interact and inspire each other.
Assignment # 8 imitates the institutionalized practice of exhibitions by asking the participants to curate an artists’ retrospective in a public place. The assignment entails Xeroxing images created by an artist of your choice and displaying the collection in a public space. The photocopies, which should be black and white, must come from books and magazines that show the artist’s work. The self-made exhibit also must include a curatorial statement based on personal opinion. By giving people an opportunity to display homemade retrospectives on fences and bulletin boards Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher want to make art accessible to everyone, instead of only in the institutionalized spaces of galleries and museums.
The curatorial task in assignment # 8 emulates how information is gathered and accessed on the web. It comments on what the web knows, how it knows it, and the authenticity of sources. A search engine does not answer a query logically. Search engines cull data through a system that ranks sites by counting how many links it has to similar words in the query. 4
Search engines find and disseminate information based on the newness or freshness of the data. Links and page views allow search engines to gauge how to rank results. Original authorship and authenticity do not factor into this vetting process. Instead, a search engine places the most copied, manipulated and reprocessed information at the top of its search result list.
The actual source of the information is often buried or untraceable unless the majority of web users decide to refer and link back to it regularly. In the same way, Assignment #8 asks participants to make photocopies of pictures, which themselves are copies of original artworks. With each photocopy, the artwork migrates further away from its original source—just like information on the Internet. The photocopied reproductions allow the artwork to reach a wider and more diverse audience but sacrifice uniqueness in the process.
The assignment critiques a system that relies on circulation of images and redistribution of the images from their original source.
Miranda July and Harrell Fetcher employ the language that characterizes the web’s “informal media.” This type of web culture is used to rally participation and create a space that takes the private into the public.
Learningtoloveyoumore.com creates a unifying experience through playing on the nature of web culture. It takes participants outside of the insular involvement of using a computer through assignment-based activities involving the real everyday world.
Similar to the project based Situationalist of creating situations to restore authenticity in life, the purpose of the assignments in learningtoloveyoumore.com forms a community that uses a new forum (the web) of unification to experience everyday life free from alienation.
In their manifesto the Situationalists describe, “our society of spectacle is a nightmare with alienation, consumerism as opium, lack of authenticity. So what really is the situation? It’s the realization of a better game, which more exactly is provoked by the human presence.” 5
LearningtoLoveyoumore.com resembles a game in which there are players and assignment makers. LearningtoLoveyoumore.com is both a movement and a development in modernity, captured by Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher when they state:
“The best art and writing is almost like an assignment; it is so vibrant that you feel compelled to make something in response. Suddenly it is clear what you have to do. For a brief moment it seems wonderfully easy to live and love and create breathtaking things.” 6
1. Geert Lovink, “Nihilism and the News: Blogging as a Mental Condition,” open 2007: 176.
2. David & Burstein, Dan Kline, blog!, ed. Arne J. De Keijzer and Paul Berger (New York: CDS Books, 2005).
3. Miranda & Harrell Fletcher July, Learning to Love You More, 2002, Creative Capital, November 2008 <www.learningtoloveyoumore.com>. van, Willem Weelden, “Wading in the Info Sea,” Open 2007: 176.
4. van, Willem Weelden, “Wading in the Info Sea,” Open 2007: 176.
5. Situationalists, “Situationalists Manifesto,” 17 May 1960, infopool, November 2008 <http://www.infopool.org.uk/6003.html>.
6. Miranda & Harrell Fletcher July, Learning to Love You More, 2002, Creative Capital, November 2008 <www.learningtoloveyoumore.com>
