Miranda July is the kind of artist who can be everywhere at once. She's a writer, filmmaker and visual artist--and she wants you to be one, too. Her 2007 book, Learning to love you more, in collaboration with Harrell Fletcher, takes the best posts from their blog of the same name, which gave people assignments which helped them to know--and, I suppose, love--those closest to them and themselves more.
July and Harrell created the blog project in 2002. On it were posted a series of “Assignments,” which were prescriptive projects to undertake in order to get to know oneself and one’s loved ones better by exploring random topics in a variety of artistic mediums. With assignments that placed each person and each person's people squarely in the larger universe, the blog’s subtitle seems like it could have been Learning to love you more: and trying to help you see where you fit in and how you can still love in this crazy, messed up world. But I digress.
If people took an assignment's mission, they would follow the instructions on how to and in what format to submit whatever assignment they had chosen. The blog spanned all types of artistic creation, from musical recordings to film clips, short stories to imagined dialogues, photographs to drawings.
Learning to love you more (the blog) spawned a huge following of people from all over world, as well as a ton of exhibitions in art museums like New York City’s The Whitney Museum and the Seattle Art Museum. Now, like the types of genre-bending and boundary crossing that participants were creating on the website, the blog had crossed over into a real-time, physical exhibit, in addition to and in collaboration with its online media presence.
Naturally to follow was something that you could feel and touch, a book. Learning to love you more detailed fewer of the assignments--while the blog had more than seventy assignments, the book barely touches 25. But because of the smaller number of assignments the book makes it easier to compare the differences, and surprisingly common similiarities, between participants’ lives.
One such common similarity is Assignment #39 “Take a Picture of Your Parents Kissing.” No matter where the photographs come from, the book’s parents begin to look the same. A man and a woman, both with a little skin sagging from underneath their jaws and from their underarms, kissing the same kiss they have for years and years. It’s sweet, but a little strange—I can’t help but wonder how many times during childhood (and adulthood) the photographers turned away from their parents’ embrace or how often the parents find occasion to kiss when the camera isn't around.
Sometimes, the assignments highlight the awkwardness of day-to-day interactions by heightening the strangeness and awkwardness of the moment. Assignment #30, “Take a Picture of Two Strangers Holding Hands,” is funny, depicting two people holding hands literally at arms-length. The series offers a strange and unusual reprieve to typical photographs with lovers too entwined with each other to let go of their partner's hand even for the length of a photo. Facial expressions range from uncomfortable laughter to complete stoicism and for some of them, I wonder how the photographer encouraged these two strangers to hold hands long enough for him or her to snap the photo.
In addition, July and Harrell’s book is an excellent example of anonymous collaboration. For Assignment #12, participants are instructed to Get a Temporary Tattoo of Morgan Rozacky’s neighbors. Morgan Rozacky completed Assignment #2, “Make a Field Recording of Your Neighbors,” taking hazy shots of people in her neighborhood. We never see Rozacky herself, but we do see her neighbors—mostly elderly, eccentric, Florida folk--but her photographs are certainly memorable with their weird, only-in-Florida quality.
July and Harrell certainly thought so, asking participants to recreate these recreations of Rozacky’s neighbors. The temporary tattoos are almost all poorly drawn—Sharpie pen on backs and arms, but seem oddly fitting for the strange neighbors on Rozacky’s block. Somehow, Rozacky and all the contributors to Assignment #12 collaborate to immortalize these common people. That’s what’s so amazing about the blog and the book, seeing collaboration and similarities between people who live cities and even countries apart.
July’s interest in collaborative projects is nothing new. Starting out in Portland, Oregon, July created a project called Joanie4Jackie. July solicited female filmmakers and then compiled their work onto a video cassette. She sold the tapes to those interested in purchasing them, but also used a chain-letter format to include the people involved with the project. She screened this early work at film festivals.
The blog shut down in 2009, but in 2010 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquired it and plans to keep it open as an online archive. Despite its inactivity, many people are still doing the assignments and preserving them for posterity on their own versions of the Learning to love you more blog. Perhaps this is a fitting end—or beginning—for a blog and book like Harrell’s and July’s: they put something out into the world and viewers can take it and run with it any way they’d like.
Sources and further reading:
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