Each week thousands of people send their secrets to Frank Warren, hoping that he'll broadcast them to the world. These people seek connection, release and validation through the posting of their secrets on his Web site. Each week, Warren chooses only twenty secrets to show.
As the leader of the grassroots secret-sending movement dubbed PostSecret, Warren himself has become a kind of folk hero. The self-proclaimed "most trusted man in America," he gives talks and book signings across the country. Last Sunday, he came to Baltimore's Visionary Art Museum for a PostSecret presentation and exhibit.
The exhibit was in the museum's gift shop, Sideshow. Secrets were posted at eye level on the walls, and sat in spinning book racks. The exhibit line stretched almost a block, from the entrance desk at the front of the museum to the end of the store. People stood in groups of two or three, giggling and passing extra cards through their ranks.
Visitors milled around outside too, clutching clean copies of a PostSecret book or two. Some gathered in the large barn behind the museum to watch a slide show of Warren's favorites. The crowd numbered about 200 people at any given moment. It was predominantly young and female, though there was a smattering of middle-aged women and quite a few hand-holding couples. All were hushed and vaguely reverential.
At a few minutes past noon, Warren entered the barn to give a speech about the PostSecret movement, its origins and his own. Only about half of the listeners had chairs, though no one fought for the few seats that were left. Everyone seemed to be on their best behavior.
Warren spent about an hour talking about PostSecret, giving details on the project but not many on himself. He represented himself as a kind of cipher, as a conduit for the in-progress art piece that is PostSecret.
A few years ago, Warren, a small business owner, was going through a difficult period in his life. He turned to art to work through his feelings, and ended up entering Artomatic, an annual D.C.-area show targeted towards amateurs and art world outsiders.
For his Artomatic project, Warren handed out 300 blank postcards bearing simple instructions: write down a secret that has never been told, remain anonymous and send it straight to his home address in Gaithersburg, Md.
Warren received about 100 of his pre-printed cards back, and at the end of the Artomatic exhibition, he thought that would be the end.
But more postcards kept getting stuffed into his mailbox every day. They came in, scribbled with shopping lists, the secrets squeezed into the corners. They came in, elaborately decorated, keys and suicide notes taped to their fronts. Some of the secrets were scary, or sad or heavy: "I miss the war," read one card.
The most common remains: "I pee in the shower."
As the movement grew in power, Warren set up new forums for the secrets to be displayed and shared. He created the blog PostSecret, which has since become one of the top five blogs in the world. He's put out three PostSecret books: PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives, The Secret Lives of Men and Women: A PostSecret Book, and My Secret: A PostSecret Book, aimed at the young adult crowd. Secrets were even featured in the All-American Rejects' "Dirty Little Secret" video last year. He presents PostSecret and its offshoots as a kind of collaboration between the secret-senders and himself -- by writer and editor.
Warren's view of art as an amateur adventure is in step with that of the Visionary Art Museum itself, which also focuses on art from untrained artists. This is the second year that Warren has chosen to present at his proclaimed "favorite museum in the world." Both the museum and Warren himself sought to present the exhibition of amateur work as a way of forging social connection, and Warren, especially, presented PostSecret as a kind of therapy. He emphasized the cathartic power of confession.
Julie, a 30-something blonde from D.C., left Warren's talk with her face aglow. She'd met Warren a few times, attended his original Artomatic show, and owns all three of the PostSecret books. She described the experience of viewing the secrets as "magical" and "overwhelming," and attended the presentation in the hopes of gaining insight into the PostSecret mission.
Yet Julie's joy was based in the voyeuristic aspect of reading other people's secrets. Even when viewing the secrets in the midst of a crowd, the joy is a lonely, personal one. "Any time you're reading, you're still secluded," she said, shrugging.
PostSecret often seems less about sociability than about isolation. The secrets are anonymous and silent. They hang alone, with a border of empty space between each one and the next. Each secret is presented as a discrete unit. And the readers themselves are usually seeing the secrets in the privacy of their own homes, at their computers, alone in their own rooms. Even the public space of the museum becomes private through the nature of the exhibit.
PostSecret is a method of confession without consequences, and the guilty, angry and repressed of the world reach out to it with open arms. But in a method of confession that promises no consequence, there is also no absolution, and no real support.
Where is the catharsis in Warren stuffing an anonymous secret into a file cabinet drawer? Where does the art project end, and the therapeutic misfire begin?
