The Collaborative Practices of "Learning to Love You More"

According to the website, "Learning to Love You More is both a web site and series of non-web presentations comprised of work made by the general public in response to assignments given by artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher". The work is not only a collaboration between two artists (July and Fletcher), but encompasses work made by the public at large.

Internet collaborations like "Learning to Love You More", "offer themselves not as finite works which prescribe specific repetition along given structural coordinates but as 'open' works, which are brought to their conclusion by the performer at the same time as he experiences them on an aesthetic plane". (Eco, P.21) Because Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher's project is so infinitely collaborative, it is constantly changing shape. Other 'open works", like "Man With the Movie Camera Re-Make" and "The World's First Collaborative Sentence", can never be complete works of art. Because of this, the experience of art is derived from both the progression of forms these websites take on and from the individual experience of the work.

Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher's web project is also indicative of Brian Holmes' "oppositional device". Because July and Fletcher rely on public participation for "Learning to Love You More", they reverse the "coercive structures" of traditional art practices of how art 'ought to be'. By giving people a platform to creatively express themselves, they challenge the idea of a single "artistic identity", thereby 'stimulating anxiety' within, what Holmes calls, the "extensive institutional programmes" of the art circuit. (Lind, P.16) "Learning to Love You More" is an "oppositional device" in that is cuts through "the wave-pattern" and opens up "the possibility for moments of public speech". (Holmes, P.41) The power of publicly viewed creative expression is returned to the public themselves.

(The above picture taken by Susy of Hamburg, Germany for July/Fletcher Assignment #39: Take a Picture of Your Parents Kissing.)