Can you take us back to the moment the idea for “Live, Laugh, Lube” first came to you?
Mieke Marple: “Live, Laugh, Lube” first came to me when I was working with comedian Melinda Hill as a social media coach. I reached a breaking point with social media and felt like I either needed to change my relationship to it or sign off it forever. One of Melinda’s assignments was to collaborate with others on social media content. She’s had some posts go viral with this strategy—including a video about cheaters made with comedian Laura Clery posted on Valentine’s Day. However, that collaborative content strategy is not very common for visual artists in the art world. The only way I could complete Melinda’s assignment was if I took it really seriously and turned it into a proper art project.
All images courtesy of the artist.
Image courtesy of Liz Bretz.
From Breaking Point to Art Project
How did the “exquisite corpse” format feel like the right vehicle for exploring social media culture?
Mieke Marple: The “exquisite corpse” format was an intuitive decision. I wanted to give the comedians the parameters for the words (1–3 words, each word no longer than 5 letters), without influencing their ultimate word choice. Similarly, I never asked for input from the comedians when choosing the painting imagery or composition. Ditto with the video explanations they sent me, and with the final videos I edited. That said, now that I’ve completed this first round of collaborations, I intend to ask all the comedians for feedback about how the process could be better, to produce funnier paintings and videos for the next round. So the exquisite corpse format might evolve into something else in the future.
Making art with people whom I have the loosest social connection with is the opposite of meaningless. It’s intimate and magical.
How do you choose which comedians and clowns you work with?
Mieke Marple: I choose the comedians but I also don’t choose them. I selected the initial comedians and clowns—they were just ones I was already friends with: Melinda Hill, Dan Greaney, Claire Woolner. The other comedians and clowns I’ve worked with are ones Dan, Claire, and Melinda have recommended, or those recommended by the recommendations. This recommendation scheme is built into the DNA of the “Live, Laugh, Lube” and feels like the project’s biggest critique of social media. It’s next to meaningless to be “friends” with someone recommended by a social media algorithm. But making art with people whom I have the loosest social connection with is the opposite of meaningless. It’s intimate and magical.
How did your time as an art dealer shape how you think about audience, distribution, and visibility now?
Mieke Marple: An artist friend and I recently discussed the importance of leaning into the aspect of our artistic process that most embarrasses us. For me, it is the fact that I’m gifting so many of my paintings. I worried that this gesture meant I didn’t value my art. I feared good galleries—who like to tightly control an artist’s market—wouldn’t want to work with me. I panicked at the thought that participating comedians would turn around and sell my paintings at auction the second my prices went up, and that my paintings wouldn’t perform well, resulting in a public stain on my art market record forever. All this internal fearmongering came from my time as an art dealer. And I wasn’t delusional. I’d seen artist careers crater after bad auction results and mismanaged artwork sales. Before beginning “Live, Laugh, Lube”, I considered other ways to compensate the comedians for their efforts—like a percent of the painting if it sold. But it felt too complicated and not generous enough, so I stuck to gifting paintings even though I had some reservations and shame around it.
When the only real stakeholders in an artist’s market are the super wealthy, the art often gets reduced to a luxury asset instead of a cultural phenomenon.
However, the more I talk about this aspect of the project with other people, the more I realize that it’s an incredibly important part of “Live, Laugh, Lube”. One of the reasons I quit being an art dealer was because I felt like a shop girl selling luxury goods to the 1% of the 1%. When the only real stakeholders in an artist’s market are the super wealthy, the art often gets reduced to a luxury asset instead of a cultural phenomenon. I’m not against art collectors owning my work, but making sure some of those owners are comedians feels like a way of protecting the artwork’s cultural status. Long story short, I realized I’m not devaluing my work by gifting it to comedians and clowns; rather I’m highly valuing the role of comedy in our lives as well as the people who make comedy possible.
Rethinking Value and Visibility
How has your own relationship to social media evolved since you started the project?
Mieke Marple: I don’t like social media any more than I did before, but I have learned to be more tolerant of my discomfort. It helps talking about my feelings with others who share them, and by having strong social media boundaries. I’ve also taken it upon myself to learn more about social media. I read “The Anxious Generation” by social scientist Jon Haidt, which revealed how anxiety and depression rates of kids who went through puberty between 2011–16 (i.e. the first generation to go through puberty with social media) are much worse than any prior generation. Haidt calls these years the “great rewiring” because the inner and outer lives of young people were taken over by a new technology without guardrails. And now it’s very likely—as evidenced by a recent study performed by Kristina Lerman, a Professor of Informatics at the Indiana University, and Minh Duc Chu, PhD student in Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California—that the same thing is happening with emotionally intelligent (AI) chatbots. So I’m using this project to think more broadly about the pitfalls of nascent, mass-adopted social technologies and how to protect myself—and my young daughter–from them.
Living With the Algorithm
Do you see “Live, Laugh, Lube” as having a natural endpoint, or could it genuinely go on indefinitely?
Mieke Marple: Well, one end point could be my death. But probably I’ll stop when it stops being fun, or relevant, which will probably be well before that.
Working with comedians has loosened me up and made me want to be more funny.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of the project so far?
Mieke Marple: The most rewarding aspect of this project is how working with comedians has loosened me up and made me want to be more funny. I recently published a humor piece, my first ever, with McSweeney’s: an Open Letter to Marge Simpson about motherhood and its misunderstood hilarity. I also wrote an essay in the voice of Cookie Monster about PBS funding getting cut and submitted it to the New Yorker. It didn’t get picked up, but just the fact that I wrote something so out there felt like a breakthrough. I’m also considering taking clowning classes, and other things along those lines. A few months into this project, I asked my friend and longtime Simpson writer Dan Greaney what was funny about me. He said it was my intensity. It never occurred to me that intensity was funny, let alone my intensity since it can sometimes feel like a weight around my neck, but, I guess, I’m exploring what it looks like to make people laugh with my batshit earnest intensity.
Installation image.
Follow Mieke Marple on Instagram.
Featured image: Mieke Marple, Never Press Send, 2024, collab with Dan Greaney.