In the Blog
something for me and you and everyone we know
Lots of people I know fell in love with artist Miranda July last year when her first feature film, Me And You And Everyone We Know, was released. What fewer people know about, but everyone should, is her website Learning To Love You More, an interactive extravaganza where visitors (that’s us) can pick “assignments” and post the results on the site. The assignments range from artistic (“draw a scene from a movie that made you cry”) to autobiographical (“give advice to yourself in the past”) to community-oriented (“make a neighborhood field recording”) to just plain funny (“lipsynch to shy neighbor’s Garth Brooks cover”) but all of them encourage visitors to cultivate curiousity in ordinary things, to take what we think of as mundane and turn it into art. Even if you’re not up for making something for the site, you can spend hours browsing other people’s contributions (and for Sleater-Kinney fans, look for Carrie Brownstein’s video of herself dancing around a kitchen).
What I really love is that, while some people who have posted their results obviously have artistic training, most people who contribute don’t, so what you get is an incredibly fresh, unpretentious collection of bits and pieces of strangers’ lives. Also wonderful is July’s enthusiasm for the project - she ends the instructions for one assignment (“make a poster of shadows”) with the sentence “my god this is going to be beautiful”. LTLYM never fails to get me excited and inspired about the creative possibilities of everyday life. But, in the words of the immortal LeVar Burton, you don’t have to take my word for it! Get out there and make something, tiger!
