Miranda July Wants To Forward You An Email From Lena Dunham
You should probably let her do that.
Miranda July has always done things a little differently. Her art is multi-generic — performance, writing, sculptures, monologues, films — but it always relies on the involvement of strangers, and always revels in left-field whimsy.
Miranda July’s sculpture garden, 2010’s Eleven Heavy Things
In 2002, July launched Learning To Love You More with Harrell Fletcher, a global crowd-sourced art project where she would assign tasks to whoever wanted to complete them; the submissions were compiled online, and in a book. Her multimedia art project, Things We Don’t Understand and Are Definitely Not Going To Talk About, again encouraged audience contributions; the results formed the basis for her second film, The Future (2011).
Pillowcases designed by Miranda July for Melbourne’s Third Drawer Down
The Future was her follow up to 2005’s Camera d’Or winning Me And You And Everyone We Know, and featured a talking cat and the warping of time. Ahead of its release, you could subscribe to a mailing list oracle from which, twice a week, July would send a few sentences predicting what your day would be like. (“You’ve spent far too much time holding things together that don’t belong together,” she told me once. “Today they come undone and you let them. Good luck.”)
She’s playing with mailing lists again next month, and it’s even more fun this time. Sign up to We Think Alone, and you’ll receive “compendiums” of emails that the artist’s friends have found in their outbox. They’re not boring old friends like your friends (sorry), but Miranda July-level friends including Girls’ Lena Dunham, NBA’s all-time leading scorer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, actress Kirsten Dunst, Israeli writer Etgar Keret, photographer Catherine Opie, and more. The emails were never meant to be read by July. And they were certainly never meant to be read by you.
“I’m always trying to get my friends to forward me emails they’ve sent to other people — to their mom, their boyfriend, their agent — the more mundane the better,” she explains. “How they comport themselves in email is so intimate, almost obscene — a glimpse of them from their own point of view.”
Each Monday, starting from July 11, you’ll receive a compilation of ten emails collated to a theme. They’ll continue rolling in until November 11, or until you unsubscribe — because emails, you know?
–
And while we’re here…