jan mclaughlin

Valentine’s Day 2000 saw the start of the World’s Longest Open Love Letter (WLOLL). Among several objects hung around the streets of Williamsburg—on signposts, bulletin boards, or any other suitable surface—was a canvas bag. To the bottom was attached a band-aid box and dishwashing gloves. Across the top was written: “Authority doesn’t make you tremble. Intimacy does, but you do it anyway.”

“I choose to put my art on the street as part of a conscious effort on my part to let go of control; to make myself realize it can’t be done alone,” said Jan McLaughlin, the artist. “I learned to accept that whatever happened to the art was as it should be. It was a zen exercise to make myself more aware—and more accepting—of the chaotic nature of nature.”

The idea also was to make something inside people move, just that little bit. She remembers one day watching a woman with a stroller come near a street project, and after staring, hesitantly reach out to touch it before pulling her hand back. “It was that gesture that got me. I made something inside her move and want to touch—want to connect—with what I made. I made her move.”

Art should be about changing things. “It has to resonate with myself first, but its role ultimately is to ‘shake them up.’ WLOLL is a collaboration: between myself and the people on the street and even the people who interact with it on the Internet. I want people to examine their beliefs about love and intimacy as well.”

The canvas bag is the only one of the multiple projects hung that she was able to recollect. And she only found it because she happened to spot it in a nearby trash can.

The WLOLL still continues on today, two years later, but might be nearing its end.

“I’ve given everything I have. I’m loving as much as and as well as I ever have,” she said. This is what the quest was about: to understand what is love.

Which leads us to her alter ego, the princess-at-large.

“I wanted to be bigger than myself. It freed me up to do things I normally wouldn’t have. I used fairy tales as my basis for her actions. I became chaste. I made challenges to myself, made myself keep promises as part of my quest.”

Her quest has ended in her believing love is about duty and responsibility to herself and everyone around her. Every day she feels she gets better at love, even though she thinks it is impossible to every become perfect at it. The WLOLL (which when said as an acronym becomes a homonym for “wall”; which subconsciously has her encountering and overcoming an obstacle) makes her practice loving each day—giving freely of herself and letting what happens happen. This practice is in preparation (hopefully) for her end goal of finding that one person, her knight errant.

So, this was all about finding someone? “This was my own personal advertising campaign. It was about interacting with other people to understand myself better—find myself—but also to find my knight-errant.”

Which brings us to the trilogy she has been working on. The first part was her novel, The Sex Project. The WLOLL is the second part. The third? “Expressing love with one person. I want to be met in the third part.”

Epilogue

On the walls of her studio hang some of the rejects that never made it onto the street. She keeps them as examples of what she created because the ones that did make it to the street never returned. Except for the canvas bag. “Fairy tales are about believing in magic and one’s self. They’re a leap of faith.”