Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Using Art to Tell Our Secrets










"PostSecret" is the 2004 brainchild of Frank Warren, a document delivery service owner and part-time artist whose best-known previous project involved leaving enigmatic visual messages in bottles in a lake near his Germantown home. Calling himself "PostSecret's" "founder and curator," Warren has hit upon something much more powerful for his latest art project, whose rules are elegant in their simplicity: Share a secret with him, by postcard, as long as it is both true and something never told to anyone before. (Naturally, there's no way to verify either of these things, but why would anyone lie when it's all anonymous?)

Not all secrets revealed in "PostSecret," a Washington Project for the Arts/Corcoran presentation of anonymous, confessional postcards, are of the stop-the-presses variety.

"I gave my vegetarian sister a meal with beef," reads one missive, glued in cut-out magazine type like a ransom letter.

"I think Little Richard is creepy as hell," reads another. Hey, join the club, pal.

Others throb with ancient, undulled heartache, like this one, which raises as many questions as it answers: "I annually attempt suicide on December 12, because it's the anniversary of when Child Services didn't take me away." Washington Post 12/23/2005

Click here to visit his website: PostSecret

I read through a bit of the book at B&N. I have to warn you, the website is addictive.

-DN

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Wow what an interesting site. Any secrets of yours? I find it interesting that one would post such a thing, but would it make you feel better about yourself, or what? Unsure and it gives me a part fasination, part horror, part appreciation to the human existence. Good stuff D.
JNix