Draft email to Marina

Hi Josh,

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Dear Marina,

It is very exciting how your essay uses ‘The Employee’ as a framework to extend a discourse around conceptual art beyond Buchloh through to Sandoval’s contemporary formulation of the limitations of neoliberal work culture as it has infiltrated culture. I think you have precisely identified a very pressing dynamic at the heart of what Josh’s project is analyzing, both deepening my understanding of his practice and broadening the scope of discourse around conceptual / performance / critical art practices today. Thank you for the ambition your text brings to this catalogue!

I would like to use this initial correspondence to suggest a few places where the essay could find a clarifying structure to bolster your excellent argument in its second draft. There is a thickness to this text that is exhilarating but also daunting and, not wanting to request a didactic approach to your deft conceptual weaving, there are one or two elements that could be disambiguated at the very top of the essay to allow the reader a more concrete grasp. 

First, the term “disintermediation” would benefit from an earlier and more robust definition: how does it function in economic systems, how are you extending the use of this term into of the relationships between “capital and life”, and exactly how does ‘The Employee’ propose an analysis of this extension? I can see where these questions are answered throughout your text, and your argument is inspired and convincing, but upon first reading I found it difficult to follow you. Could your beginning discussion of conceptual art be refined in order to make room for us to get to disintermediation faster, with greater detail and connective tissue to the artwork?

Second, Josh and I were both very interested in your position that “performance is the hinge between labour and capital” particularly in what you call the recasting “loop” between “artistic production and administrative reproduction.” Your argument really gets exhilarating in when you assert that “the element of performativity shared by artistic work and contemporary wage labour […] should give way to the question of the performance of assets,” and hits on the crux of the whole essay with the statement “the ‘performance’ in an artwork titled ‘The Employee’ furnishes a prism for looking at a work performance.” This orientation of your argument around performance is one of the great strengths of the essay ­– that ‘The Employee’ is not just artwork and documentation, but both production and performance. Introducing this lens earlier and tying it through more explicitly would lend a great deal of clarity and precision. 

I hope that these more general notes can help us move the text forward with ease and collaboration. I’m anxious to begin our editorial relationship carefully, given we have not met each other and I am coming into this publication at a middle stage in its development. Please let me know how you prefer to work – I am open to continuing over email, phone calls or video chat. As you prefer!

As a final note, Josh asked me to share with you his first-person account of the project, which may provide you with some additional resources as you revisit the text.

With warm wishes,

Lauren