Top 10 of the Blog 2008 (8)

"Art Every Wednesday (24)" - October 22, 2008

I love PostSecret. (www.postsecret.com)

I think there’s something a little voyeuristic about it, but also, gosh. They are so incredibly frail and achingly personal and courageous. I read these, and it’s the same sigh of relief I get when one of my friends — who I always suspected was a thousand times more put together than I am — comes to me and says, “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

There’s satisfaction in that. Mostly because I stop feeling alone (I never really know what I’m doing).

PostSecret started with Frank Warren, this small business owner in Maryland who loves art, especially the mysterious, subversive, changing-definitions-of-what-art-is kind (he’s a fan of Dadaism, the art movement connected to art prankster Marcel Duchamp, also check out this article about Warren’s earlier, personal foray into anonymous art). He put his home mailing address on a stack of postcards in 2004 and asked people to just send him a secret anonymously — the only rules were that it has to be true, and it has to be something you’ve never told anyone. When he did this, he somehow spoke to a longing we have to share the deep parts of ourselves, and also the fear that keeps us from doing it. The postcardsjust started pouring in and now he gets about 1,000 in his mailbox every week. He still sorts through each of them personally, he told me on the phone on Monday (I love my job), and I think there’s something about that accessibility — it’s this one guy reading each one, not a committee or a structure or someone with another agenda — that creates a safe place. Like therapy.

Despite the self-help elements to it — Warren has received messages from people saying PostSecret in some way touched their lives, and even changed it dramatically (people have decided not to kill themselves, or to propose, or to share their secrets with loved ones), and part of the proceeds from the books go to suicide prevention efforts — Warren conceives of this most of all as an art project. “I see myself as a curator,” or “maybe a film editor taking these scenes from people’s lives and weaving them together to convey this cohesive narrative about all of us, told through the secrets we hide from others and ourselves,” he said.

It’s that narrative, I think, intertwined with the art (and some of it is so fantastic, created by people who don’t belong to the cultural/artistic elite of galleries and museums), that draws me in. Many aren’t just secrets in the traditional sense of the word, but they are also ambitions…longings…past memories…jokes. Some have brought me to tears, some are just kind of gross (Warren says in this amazing interview that the most common secret he gets is “I pee in the shower,” thanks for sharing people), others make you laugh. Some are just so mysterious. There’s one on my desk right now that shows the white stone statue of a lion and simply says, “sometimes…I miss God.” Or another, on a close-up of a girl’s brown eye and another’s blue, “I’ve been trying to be you for so long that I forgot what it’s like to be me.” Not surprisingly, it’s the sad ones that grip me. Why is that a secret? I want to ask of the person who misses God. What happened to you that made this feel so heavy you couldn’t share it with friends? Why is it our first instinct to hold in pain? Frank said he gets like one light, happy secret for every heavy one.

The Tribune is asking people to make their own postcards and send them to me (101 North 4th Street) for a story I’m writing for Nov. 9. I hope I get a lot. I hope I feel more connected to and broken for the people in this community; I hope when I walk down Broadway I start looking into others’ eyes and wonder about them, instead of window shopping or sidestepping the ones who slow me down.