Friday July 17: Facilitating New Experiences: The Audience as Artist

Readings:

1.	Byran-Wilson, Julia. "A Modest Collective: Many People Doing Simple Things Well." Learning to Love You More. Ed. Harrell & July Fletcher, Miranda. London: Prestel, 2007. 144-46.

Initial response: A modest collective is a discipline which enforces people to push themselves, think deeply and take themselves seriously. In the Fletcher and Miranda July's project Learning to Love You More(LTLYM), Fletcher and July take people who come from all over the world to make a lots of different video clips, photographs and conversations with different background people. There are a lot of different kinds of art works in the LTLYM project. They think many people doing simple things well. People can make a very special and shocked photographs by a professional camera or cellphone camera. People just make art works which they like in their mind. Fletcher and July do not care about apparatus which participants use. They just give people different kind of assignments with their directives-simple but exacting instruction meant to be followed as closely as possible. Like Joseph Beuys's famous exhortation that" everyone is artist". However, If everyone is an artist, then they make art which can be terrifyingly vague or undefined. So Artists encourage people to make some specific objects, such as taking a picture of smilling and pictures including faces and backgrounds. we can say making some specific objects is a general idea or common idea of the project. However, it is very essential for a project to be completed perfectly. Although videos in the LTLYM project are talking about people's life or social issues and everythings, they are very different with YouTube's free-form videos. Each LTLYM report begins as a contribution to a collective effort. It is also built in a kind of discipline and restraint.

INITIAL RESPONSE #2 Keitha Tetreault: