Mieke Marple: What immediately came up were questions of legacy and how our respective projects at times arts centre and Live Laugh Lube reconsider the value of legacy.
Francesca Sonara: Yeah… You have kids, you work to build a career, you try to put something meaningful out in the world, and so much of what has been signaled to us from older generations is you're doing this for legacy. I started to think what if I make things that matter to me … [but] I'm doing it for now … I'm doing it for what I signal and transmit to my children now — not after I'm gone. It just seems like … a misuse of time, resources, and energy. If we're so worried about building legacy, are we worrying enough about what we're creating now?
Mieke Marple: I love that. [...] Now that I'm 40, I'm learning what matters is not my accomplishments. It's my relationships with other people. On my deathbed, I know that I will not be thinking about a single accomplishment that I did.
Francesca Sonara: No, you'll be thinking about your kids, your friends, your parents.
Mieke Marple: So with times, how do you address this focus on the legacy of the present moment?
Francesca Sonara: times is a three-year project, planned obsolescent… I think this idea of giving to something … fleeting that [funders] don't have the opportunity to take for granted can be really powerful. My hope is that it gives other potential people on the sidelines who worry that they don't have a big enough idea or a big enough pot of money to support the arts to think, "Maybe I can't support it for all time, but what can I do in here, right now?"
Mieke Marple: I was so curious if this three-year planned obsolescence made it harder to raise money.
Francesca Sonara: I mean, honestly, fundraising in this climate is difficult … But in general people are keen on the idea of an organization announcing its sunset date [...] I always think about technological industry business models' growth-at-all-cost has really infected all other industries even when that ideology doesn't belong there.
Mieke Marple: Yeah. Having been an art dealer, so much art is sold with this speculative promise that it'll always go up. But the truth is most of it, if it goes up, comes right back down and never goes back up [...] Still the whole industry is invested in this illusion. With Live Laugh Lube, this idea of giving my paintings to clowns and comedians in exchange for their collaboration was such a radical idea for my old art dealer brain that I was immediately scared by it.
Francesca Sonara: Scared because you felt like it was devaluing your art on an economic level?
Mieke Marple: My art dealer brain was like … no art dealer on earth is going to want to work with you when: I'm not giving away the paintings — I'm using this gift economy and not the market economy with comedians. And no respectable art dealer is going to want to work with an artist who's doing that.
Francesca Sonara: Maybe the economic value deteriorates but the social value skyrockets.
Mieke Marple: It's true. Money is not our most precious resource. Time is our most precious resource.
Francesca Sonara: Absolutely.
Mieke Marple: And how we spend our time and who we spend it with.
Francesca Sonara: And it doesn't have to foreclose the idea that an artist should also be paid for their labor.
Mieke Marple: No. Yeah.
Francesca Sonara: I want to talk a little bit about specifically your work with clowns and comedians [...]. You've come to feel that the clown culture and the comedian culture typifies the zeitgeist of our moment.
Mieke Marple: Clowning is so much about audience interaction albeit usually through a kind of absurdity … The world has gotten so absurd, mostly in very dark ways, but I'm also starting to see a backlash against namely technology, which has caused so much alienation and radicalization [...] so clowning captures the darkness of the moment and the hope of our moment at the same time because audience interaction is really about present-moment human connection.
Francesca Sonara: I do think there's this really interesting tension in Live Laugh Lube, about how it resists … but also sort of embraces the aesthetic of social media. So you are both embracing the tools that are available to us even as you criticize the function. But it's not an overt criticism, right?
Mieke Marple: I mean, my latest videos all start with the line, "Social media sucks." But then I'm still on it, so I think the contradiction is inherent and obvious: if it sucks so much, why am I still on it? [...] But yeah, I do have a love-hate tension with social media and I think that's reflected in the project.
Francesca Sonara: Same. Definitely. I think about it in terms of how our generation has a lack of third spaces. And, of course, given where we are in capitalism's deterioration, that means that all these entrepreneurs have come in with memberships to wellness spaces or cafes where you can just be but, of course, the transaction is already there. So, it's not a true civic third space … And I just got thinking, we can make as many new kinds of spaces as we want — they won't function as a third space for as long as we have our phones with us, right?
Mieke Marple: Yeah.
Francesca Sonara: The space can't be built or reclaimed until maybe we put our phones down.
Mieke Marple: Yeah. Let me ask you … how has times surprised you since you've started?
Francesca Sonara: I think one of the main intentions was how do we create a bulwark against this onslaught of negative information around the arts community, which is that the market is tanking, everything is closing, the next generation doesn't care about culture like this. I still have a memory of when New York was a place for alternative spaces. I think both Summer and I just wanted to do something that made it feel like it was possible to continue in that way even for a short amount of time, even in a more modest way. It wasn't conceptualized as we're going to be the next Artists Space or we're going to be the next anything. We're here. And is that enough to keep the fuel in the engine? I don't know the answer … I think what surprised me is that I don't need the answer to still feel motivated to do it … What about you?
Mieke Marple: A lot of people have asked me when does Live Laugh Lube end? And my answer has always been when it stops being interesting to me. [...] But I've also recently realized it might end when everyone turns against social media. I think that public opinion about the platforms is starting to shift and then, with AI, there's this proliferation of not-thoughtful, not-personal content that's spamming social media that I think is making it easier for people to leave or disengage.
Francesca Sonara: It's crazy to even imagine that could be possible.
Mieke Marple: Yeah, we're so in it. I think the ship has just started to turn … But collapses can happen very fast. It's hard for us to see beyond the moment we're in. But I think it's possible within a few years that some of these platforms — maybe it'll take longer globally for them to become irrelevant — but I think it could happen sooner than we all think … And something will appear in the wake. I just don't know what that's going to look like.
Francesca Sonara: Yeah. Maybe it'll just be people going to clown shows. Maybe we just start reclaiming third spaces by putting our phones down.
Mieke Marple: That would be amazing. That would literally save humanity.